The police report sat half filled out on my kitchen table, and I’d been staring at it for two hours, picking up the pen and putting it back down.

The line that kept stopping me was the one asking for the suspect’s name. Because the suspect was my grandson. Tyler. Nineteen years old.

He took Frank’s coins. Stole them right out of the cedar chest in my bedroom and pawned the whole collection for six hundred dollars. Fifty years my husband spent on those coins. Six hundred bucks.

Frank passed two years ago this March. Heart, in his sleep, which I suppose is the kind way to go, but it sure didn’t feel kind to me. The coins were the one thing of his I couldn’t make myself put away. They lived in the chest at the foot of our bed.

There’s a Mercury dime in there he found in his own daddy’s cash drawer back in 1961. He used to take it out and tell me the story like I hadn’t heard it four hundred times. I always pretended I hadn’t.

So Tuesday, or it might’ve been Wednesday, honestly the days ran together that week, my phone rings and it’s Dale, who runs the pawn shop out on Route 9. Frank used to jaw with him for hours about old coins.

“Brenda,” he says, “a young fella just came in with what looks like Frank’s collection.” He knew. He recognized the little blue folders Frank kept them in.

Then he tells me the catch. He can hold them, but only if there’s a police report on file by Friday. Otherwise the law says he can put them out for sale, and they’re gone. Gone for good.

I drove out there and the second I opened those folders I knew.

The Mercury dime was right where it always sat, top left slot. I about went down on Dale’s floor.

I called my daughter Karen on the way home, and that’s when it got ugly. She already knew. Tyler had told her he “borrowed” them. Borrowed.

“Mama, please don’t do this,” she said. “It’ll follow him forever. He’s nineteen. He made a mistake.” She was crying before I even got a word in.

I told her a mistake is backing into a mailbox. This was him walking into my bedroom, into my chest, and carrying Frank out the door in a grocery bag.

My son Greg came by that night. He stood in my kitchen looking at that report and he didn’t sugarcoat one thing. “Ma, if this was some neighbor kid, you’d have called the cops Tuesday.”

He’s right. I would have. That’s the part that’s been eating me. The only reason I was sitting there frozen was the boy’s last name.

And Tyler? He still hadn’t called. Hadn’t texted. Karen finally got him on the phone and put it on speaker so I could hear, and I wish to God she hadn’t.