Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything (19 page)

I gave him a long look. “It’s stealing, Georgie.”

“It is absolutely
not
stealing. She lost it. I found it. We could’ve just taken it directly to Mr. Whelan and sold it. And if we hadn’t tried so hard to find her, she never would have seen that penny again.
Never!
Look at it this way, Cheesie. Any 1909 will make Mrs. Prott happy.”

“Ms
. Prott. And yeah, assuming she doesn’t know it’s supposed to be an S-VDB. Otherwise, she’ll know
we tried to cheat her.” I paused to think, looking through the front window at Mr. Whelan, looking at the sky, looking at the almost-invisible fishhook scar on my thumb.

Finally I came up with a compromise. “Okay. What we do is not sell anything now. We take both coins. Then we give her the plain one. And then we see if she says anything. If she does, we give her the S-VDB.”

“But—”

“You know I’m right, Georgie.”

Ten minutes later we were back at Ms. Prott’s. I had both coins in my backpack. In a few minutes we’d be going home with only one. Would we be rich or poor?

I picked up the artichoke knocker from the porch and tried to use it, but ended up rapping with my knuckles. Ms. Prott took a long time—no surprise!—to answer the door. She pointed us, with lots of smiles and fluttering hands, to a different room, a dining room.

Ms. Prott had been busy while we were gone. She
had prepared a snack. There were teacups and a plate of cookies on the dining room table. After showing us where to sit, she disappeared in slo-mo, and I looked around the room. Like her parlor, the dining room was full of old, worn-down stuff. The furniture, the rugs, the knickknacks on shelves … everything looked like the junk you see at yard sales. My teacup was chipped.

Georgie interrupted my investigation. “You looking for clues?”

I motioned for him to shush, then whispered, “Nope. Just noticing how poor she is. All this stuff …” I swung my arm around the room. “It’s old and worn-out. Look at my cup.”

Georgie nodded and shrugged at the same time. “How’re you going to do this?”

“If she mentions the S-VDB penny, I’ll just say, ‘Oops! My mistake,’ and give her the other one.”

“Bad idea.” Georgie started blinking his eyes very fast. “You’re a terrible liar, Mr. Blinky-Boy. She’ll know instantly. Better let me do it.”

“What’re you going to say?”

“The same thing. But I’ll do it without flunking an eye lie-detector test.”

We heard Ms. Prott coming, so I hurriedly dug out the two pennies and handed them to Georgie. He looked at them quickly, then stuck one in each front pocket, muttering, “VDB right, no VDB left. VDB right, no VDB left.”

Of course, neither of us needed to hurry because it took a long time for Ms. Prott to come back from the kitchen or somewhere, pushing a rickety cart with a teapot on it. One of the wheels wobbled badly and looked like it was ready to come off.

“We brought your sister’s penny,” Georgie offered.

“Tea and cookies,” she said with four smiles, two hand waves, and several head nods.

The cookies were small, very tasty, and there were a lot of them. But the tea was too hot to drink. That didn’t bother Ms. Prott, though. She sipped it without even noticing that it was, IMO, molten lava. When she put her teacup down, Georgie mentioned the penny again, but maybe she didn’t hear.

“How old are you boys?”

“I’ll be eleven in August,” I said. “Georgie’s already eleven.”

“I told you, didn’t I, that I was ninety-six? I didn’t bake these cookies. Good, aren’t they? I used to bake, but I don’t anymore. I don’t do many things I used to.”

A thought was bubbling up inside me. “Do you live here alone?”

“Oh my, yes. I’ve lived alone since my mother passed away.”

Georgie started to reach into his left pocket, so I poked him and shook my head.

“And how do you do things like get your groceries and stuff?” I sipped my tea and ate my fifth cookie.

“Well, how kind of you to ask. The county has a service, and a very nice man comes around twice a week to deliver right to my back door.”

“What if you need to go to the dentist or something like that?”

“The county sends a car to pick me up. But I rarely go to the dentist. I’m ninety-six years old, and I have all my teeth. I suspect that there aren’t many
my age who can say that!” She grinned. She did have nice teeth.

“And what if something in the house breaks?”

Georgie kicked me under the table and gave me a what’re-you-doing look. I ignored him.

“In that case—and things do break, don’t they?—I call a lady at the county. She finds someone to fix it for me.”

I stood up and said, “Would you excuse me? I left something outside … on my bike … I mean
in
my bike … my bike’s saddlebag thing.” My eyes were blinking a lot. I could tell. I grabbed Georgie and dragged him outside.

“What the heck are you doing?”

“This lady is really poor,” I said.

“So?”

“She has the county buy her food and drive her around and fix her toaster and all that stuff. She’s really poor.”

“So?”

“We cannot give her the bad penny.”

“Oh no, Cheesie! We already decided.”

“That was before we found out how poor she is. She needs the twenty-two hundred dollars.”

Georgie spun around and pretended to bang his head against the side of the house.

“Come on, Georgie—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered to the side of the house. “You’re gonna say, like always, ‘Come on, Georgie, you know I’m right.’ ” He turned toward me, his voice getting louder. “Well, with twenty-two hundred dollars, I could go to camp! I do
not
know you’re right!”

He reached in both pockets, took out the two pennies, and threw them at me.

“You do whatever you want!” Georgie ran to his bike and pedaled away.

I called after him, but he didn’t look back.

I
t’s hard for me to write this chapter, but I’m going to try to put down everything exactly the way it happened, even though … Well, you’ll see.

I watched Georgie get smaller and smaller until he disappeared around the corner, then I picked up the two pennies, sat on the top porch step, and felt terrible. The little kid I used to be wanted to cry, but I didn’t. My chest was shaking like there was a sob trying to come out, but it didn’t. I closed my eyes and hoped that when I opened them, Georgie would be riding back, but he wasn’t.

Georgie is … Georgie was my best friend.

I don’t know how long I sat there before I realized that Ms. Prott was in the doorway, staring at me. I
took one more look down the block to where Georgie had disappeared, then stood up. She held the door open. I walked back in. We moved very slowly toward the parlor.

“Ms. Prott, I brought your penny back.” I held out my hand. Both coins were in my palm. “And I brought another penny, too. This one”—I found the S-VDB and held it out in my right hand—“is the one your sister put in the envelope. It’s very valuable.”

She nodded and took the coin.

“This one”—I held out the no-S-VDB coin in my other hand—“has the same date, but it’s different, and it’s worth much, much less.”

She looked back and forth from the coin in my hand to the one in hers.

My eyes got watery. “They are both as old as your sister, and like your sister said, they’ll never die. You can sell the valuable one and—”

Quit it!
I said to myself, but it was too late. I plopped down on a sofa and felt tears on my cheeks.

Ms. Prott sat down next to me. She didn’t say anything for a very long time. “I’ve been alive almost a
century. I taught high school.
I was a nurse in the war.” She handed me the tissues and touched my hand.
“I’ve ridden on an elephant.
And I’ve flown in a hot-air balloon.
I’m old and frail, but I’m a good listener. Would you like to tell me what’s wrong?”

So I told her everything. My words jumbled out so fast that she had to squint to keep up. But she listened silently. Her many quick movements disappeared. There was no fluttering or head nodding. She didn’t even smile. When I told her about Georgie’s not going to camp and me staying home to be with my best friend, she asked which camp and where it was. And when I told her that at first we were going to keep the S-VDB penny and give her the other one, but that I changed my mind once I realized
that her house and stuff were old and that she needed the money, she smiled a little bit.

I took a deep breath, plunked my head against the back of the sofa, wiped the last wetness out of my eyes, and ended with, “It looks like this will be the worst summer of my life.”

She nodded once, then thought for a long time. Finally she asked, “How did you determine that the Lincoln Head cent was worth twenty-two hundred dollars?”

I had stopped crying. “There’s this coin store on Main Street.”

“That was very clever of you. Did you talk to Mr. Whelan?”

How did she know? I nodded.

“Do your friends call you Ronald?”

“Cheesie,” I said softly. “Everyone calls me Cheesie.”

“Cheesie it is.” She picked up a small book next to a telephone on the table next to her, looked in it, and then dialed a number. “Mr. Whelan? Yes. This is Glenora Jean Prott. Very well, thank you. Yes.” She
looked at me. “I shall be sending a lad, Mr. Ronald Cheesie Mack, down to you with a coin I wish to sell. Give me your best price and credit my account. Yes, he’ll be along shortly.” She hung up the phone and turned to me. “Cheesie, I am a numismatist. Do you know what that means?”