“It’s not like Grandpa was using them,” he said. Like that settled it. Like Frank being dead made them belong to nobody.

“You never even look at them, Grandma,” he goes. “They just sit there.”

I asked him if he was sorry. There was this long quiet. Then, “I needed the money.” Not sorry. Never once sorry.

That’s the part that finally moved my hand. Not the stealing. The not-sorry.

Friday morning I drove to the station and I filed it. Full name. Tyler James. I wrote it slow so I wouldn’t have to do it twice.

Karen hasn’t spoken to me since. She says I “chose coins over my own blood.” Greg says it’s the best thing anybody ever did for that boy and somebody should’ve done it twenty years ago.

So now the family’s split clean down the middle, and they’re all waiting on me to say which side is right. I honestly don’t know.

But here’s the part nobody agrees on. When the prosecutor called, I told him I’d ask for no jail time. Probation. He’s a kid, and jail makes kids worse, I believe that to my bones.

On one condition. The charge stays on his record. I would not ask them to wipe it clean. Karen begged me to get it erased so it wouldn’t wreck his shot at jobs, and I said no.

“He needs to feel it for a while,” I told her. “Not forever. But a while.”

She called me cruel. Greg called me soft for keeping him out of a cell. I’m apparently both, depending who you ask at the family dinner I’m no longer invited to.

The coins came home. Dale wouldn’t take a dime for holding them, and that made me cry harder than the whole rest of it put together.

They’re back in the cedar chest. All except one. I pulled the Mercury dime out, and it’s in my coat pocket right now. Been there a month.

Tyler owes me the six hundred. He’s paying it back at fifty a week. Comes by on Sundays, leaves the cash on the porch rail, and is gone before I get the door open. We don’t talk. He’s still never said the word sorry.

When he’s done paying, that dime is going to him. I already decided. I haven’t told him. I don’t even know if he’ll understand what it is when he gets it, or that his great-great-grandaddy’s hands touched it in 1961.

I keep rubbing it in my pocket the way Frank used to. Some nights I’m dead sure I did right. Some nights I sit at that table where the report was, and I’m not sure of one single thing.