Each pan held neat, shining rows of clean pennies, dried with tea towels and stacked in columns of fifty.

Noah wiped a damp coin with a cotton rag.

“We’ve got sixty thousand done, Mom.”

He tugged his left sock with a wet thumb, his little fingers tinted pale green from the copper cleaner.

Lily held a clean penny up to the light and swung her feet under her crate.

“They look like tiny gold suns now.”

I sat on the top step and opened my yellow legal pad.

Ninety-one thousand five hundred pennies came to exactly nine hundred fifteen dollars.