“Sadly, no.” Zoe closed her hands around the coins for just a second. “He didn’t find gold, but I think he found something much better.”
Another girl wrinkled her nose. “What was that?”
“He found my great-great-grandmother! And together they started a farm in Twain.”
“Where they found gold?” a redhead quipped.
“No. They never found gold,” Zoe told them.
“Then where did the coins come from?” another girl asked.
“When John was still a young man, he placed a gold coin in this box and he wrote a note.” She pulled out a piece of paper. Of course, the ink on John’s original note had long ago faded and the paper crumbled, but one of John’s descendants had transcribed the note. She didn’t think she needed to tell the girls this. “John wrote: To my children and my children’s children, I leave you this coin as a remembrance of me. May it bless your lives.” Zoe picked out the oldest coin and handed it to Laurel, who held it in the palm of her hand and paraded it past all the girls seated at their desks.
“The really cool thing is,” Zoe continued, “ever since John, all of my ancestors have purchased a gold coin and left it in this box for their children and their children’s children.” She poured the other gold coins into her hand for the girls to see. “These probably aren’t worth a whole lot of money, but they are definitely worth something, and when I think of my ancestors—many of them poor and facing economic hardships, especially during the Great Depression and the world wars—they didn’t spend the coins. Instead, they followed John’s example and kept them safe. They held them sacred.”
Maybesacredwas too strong a word, but it came to her lips and she went with it.
“Who will you give the coins to?” a girl asked.
Zoe opened her mouth, but for a moment, no words came. Finally, “My child, of course.”
“Does that mean you’ll have to have a boy?” a girl asked.
“No,” Zoe said. But it did mean she’d have to have a child, and that was looking as unlikely as John himself personally handing her a coin from the grave. “I’m not a boy and the coins came to me.”
“I bet it does mean you’ll need to have a boyfriend,” another girl quipped.
“Not necessarily,” Zoe hedged. She started to feel warm.
“Maybe they’ll be mine someday,” Laurel said.
“Probably,” Zoe said. “Here, do you want to show the girls the rest of the coins?”
Laurel skipped to the front to gather the other nine coins.
Mrs. Lacombe, a retired history professor, bought her clothes from a local consignment shop. Today, she wore a sailor suit—minus the hat—and she strode around the classroom like she had a deck to swab. “Let’s all give Ms. Hart a big Canterbury thank you.” She clapped her hands and all the girls joined in.
Zoe dipped her head and took her place at the back of the classroom with the other visiting relatives, while Dr. Edwards, an elderly man wearing physicians’ scrubs and carrying a stethoscope, took center stage beside Mrs. Lacombe.
During Dr. Edwards’ talk on his family’s role in medical research, Zoe collected the coins and placed them back into the box. She carefully placed them on the table with all the other items the students had chosen to display. One girl had brought in a picture of her movie mogul grandfather posing beside his Hollywood Star, another had brought in a World War 2 bomber jacket, and someone had brought a handcrafted cuckoo clock. Her box looked humble and shabby amongst the other collectibles. Someday, they’d need a bigger box. Who would make that decision, and what would the world be like then?
She only lived a few hundred miles from where John and Emily had settled in Twain all those years ago, but her life was radically different from theirs. She didn’t depend on a garden or livestock for food, nor did she sew her own clothes But the one thing she’d be sure to do, like John and the others, was to purchase a gold coin and add it to this collection.
It felt wrong to leave the box of coins for display, but she trusted Mrs. Lacombe and knew most of the girls were from extremely wealthy families and wouldn’t be tempted by her collection of gold coins.
#
WHEN ETHAN PICKED UPHannah from Mrs. Hancock’s after school, she glowed with happiness. “Daddy,” she said, rocking onto her toes to hug him. “Today God answered my prayer!”
“He did?” He gave her a tight squeeze and inhaled her fresh scent of apple essence shampoo.
“Don’t you want to know what he gave me?” Hannah asked. “Gaveus!” she corrected herself. “It’s for both of us!”
His gaze met Mrs. Hancock’s over the top of Hannah’s head. Mrs. Hancock, a seventy-something little old lady who dressed in purple or pink jogging suits, liked to take strolls around the park and feed the ducks in the lake, in spite of the “no feeding the birds” signs clearly posted along the shore. She answered with a shrug.
Hannah dug into her backpack and pulled out a handful of coins. “Look!”
The gold glistened in her small palm. They couldn’t be real, could they? “Hannah, where did you find those?” Ethan asked.
