In For A Penny
or
The Man Who Believed In Himself

by James P. Blaylock

Why George Mason decided to take a look into the garage sale he couldn't say, although it might have had something to do with the weather, with the pleasant Saturday morning and the promise of the empty day ahead. He often took walks in his neighborhood, invariably watching the ground for a lucky find. Lost dollar bills were more common than a person would think, and if he went walking early it was a rare day that he didn't at least spot the odd nickel or dime. 
The garage sale sign was tacked to the post of a curb-side mailbox. The name on the box was "Fortunato" and an arrow on the sign pointed toward the open garage door, a looming rectangle of darkness imbued with shadowy promise. Inside it took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but then he saw quickly that it wasn't his kind of sale despite the propitious name on the mailbox. It was all junk, knick-knacks from Pic 'n' Save and the worst kind of book club books and a rack of worn-out old clothes. He had the abrupt inclination to leave—a feeling strangely close to dread—and as he began to turn back toward the street he saw, with a shock that took his breath away, the disembodied head of an old woman hovering in the air in the corner of the garage. 
He stared at it, his mouth open, taking in the bare light bulb in the rafters overhead, and the way the rafter itself cast a shadow across her shoulders, creating the illusion that had so unnerved him. She nodded at him now and smiled obscurely, but her smile and nod seemed to him to be false, the irritating private gesture of someone who had just confirmed a secret knowledge. Next to her sat a TV tray with an open cigar box on it. There were a few coins in the box, no paper money at all. 
Leave, he told himself, but instead he examined the scattering of odds and ends on a rickety card table: a glass tumbler, a Pet Rock with the paint chipped away, a filthy old hair brush, a souvenir letter opener with a wooden handle that had apparently been chewed by a dog, and a few other objects equally depressing. The only object that wasn't sadly pathetic was a coin purse sewn up out of thin leather and with a palm tree painted on it, the purse small enough to fit into his hand. It was the kind of thing a child would buy at a tourist shop at the seashore, and he felt an odd nostalgic attraction to it. The brass clasp clicked apart easily when he tried it, the purse expanding like an open mouth. Inside lay a single penny. 
"How much for the coin purse?" he asked, breaking the silence. But as soon as he said it he realized that he had left home without any money. He hadn't even brought a pocket comb. He started to put the purse down. 
She shrugged. "Tell me what it's worth to you" 
He took another look at it, suddenly picturing himself owning it, carrying his coins in it, maybe a spare house key. The painted palm tree had an enticing desert island look, with a reddish sunset behind it and a streak of blue water. After the space of a few seconds he said, "All I've got is a penny," and he secretly and shamefully let the contents of the purse slide out onto his hand. His face was hot, and he realized that he was blushing because of the lie: he didn't have a penny. The purse had a penny. 
"I'll take a penny," she said flatly. 
He heard a creaking noise just then that sounded like a door opening, and a breath of wind found its way into the garage and kicked up a little dust devil that stirred the clothes on the metal rack before dying out in a ghostly whisper. He had the uncanny feeling that someone had leaned close to him and said something into his ear, but there was no one else in the garage except the woman, Mrs. Fortunato, who watched him frowningly from her chair. 
"I left home without any money," he said in sudden confusion, reaching into his pocket, still hesitating. He drew out his hand and looked at the penny that had already been in it. "You can't take just a penny for this.…" He smiled crookedly at her. The few coins in her cigar box couldn't possibly amount to more than a couple of bucks. At this rate she wouldn't make enough to keep the light bulb burning. Still, garage sale money was usually pin money anyway, and a penny earned is a penny earned, according to the ancient wisdom. 
He realized that the woman was saying something to him: "It's worth what someone gives for it, just like anything else." 
"Well, it's just that a penny is all I've got," he said weakly. 
"I don't despise a penny. There's better things been sold cheaper. And worse things too." 
"I guess that's true," he replied, not bothering to make sense out of this. Wanting merely to leave now—leave and take the purse with him—he gave her the penny, thanked her, and walked out into the morning, which now had most of the promise drained out of it. A memory of childhood flitted into his mind, making him feel even more shameful. Once when he was about ten he had shoplifted some marbles from a dime store and had gotten caught. He felt like that now, except this was worse: this was an old lady and not Woolworth's, and he wasn't a child anymore, and he hadn't gotten caught. 
Perhaps he could find some excuse to go back into the garage sale and put the purse back onto the table without her knowing it, and with another penny in it, too. That's just what he would do—go home, find a penny to put into the purse, and then haul it back down here, good as new. It wouldn't take ten minutes, and it would satisfy his conscience. If he put a quarter into it, it would satisfy his conscience twenty-five times. The idea of it picked his spirits up. 
But of course he could simply turn around right now and take the purse back. That would be the honest thing. He wouldn't even have to come clean, just put the purse back onto the table. Except that the old woman hadn't really liked the look of him; he had seen that much in her face. She would almost certainly think he was up to something, which of course he was. And he had to admit, she had obviously been happy enough to get the penny. She thought she had made a sale. 
So there was nothing wrong with the result of the transaction, he told himself as he continued up the sidewalk. The whole thing was a means and ends puzzle, really, although in this case the means and the ends seemed to be the same thing. Maybe they were always the same thing. Abruptly he wondered what Peggy would say. Probably she would tell him to quit worrying so damned much. You could twist anything around if you worked at it hard enough. For God's sake, he thought, most people don't even pick up a penny when they drop one. It's not worth the effort. 
And right when that thought came to him he spotted a penny on the sidewalk, which perfectly illustrated his point as he walked past it, letting it lie, although on any other morning he would have picked it up. It occurred to him that if he did bend over to pick it up, it could become the penny in the purse, and he could turn around right now and head back down to the garage sale. But he didn't turn back: he took the purse out of his pocket and had another look at it. Out here in the sunlight it looked brighter and newer than it had in the old woman's garage, and he realized how at odds it had been on that table with the rest of the junk, almost as if it had been put there on purpose—a silk purse among a bunch of sows' ears. 
Had he been set up? Was this some sort of penny-ante sting operation? The idea was ludicrous. No one would go to the trouble to set a man up over a penny.… 
He found that he was home again, and he climbed the front steps, crossed the porch, and entered the living room, feeling a grateful relief in the cozy familiarity of the place, a safe haven from his teapot tempest. But now he was at loose ends. Peggy still wasn't home, and he had nothing planned for the day. A half hour ago that had seemed like a good thing. He found his pocket change where he had left it on the kitchen counter, and he put it into the purse, which slid neatly into his pocket, barely making a bulge. He had been making a mountain out of a damned mole hill, he told himself. It wasn't worth another thought, even if someone offered him a penny for it. He laughed out loud at the joke, but his laughter had a hollow echo in the empty house, and he fell silent, wandering back into the living room where he sat down in an easy chair and tried to read a book. But it wasn't any kind of day to be reading—better to get some work done while the sun shone. He went out into the garage and looked around at his tools and at the half-finished wooden lamp that he had been building in his spare time over the last couple of weeks. The lamp's boxy walnut frame looked ugly to him today, and the idea of working on it was infinitely tedious. He went out again, closing the door and aimlessly heading down the driveway just as Peggy turned in off the street. 
"I've had the worst damn morning," he admitted to her, helping her pull grocery bags out of the car, and following her into the house. As Peggy rearranged the refrigerator, finding room for lettuce and broccoli, Mason talked about the purse and the penny. 
"I forgot eggs," she said, interrupting him. "I'll have to go back down to the market." She shut the refrigerator door and leaned back against the counter. 
He stared at her. "Never mind the eggs," he said. "I'll pick them up later. I'm telling you about my morning." 
"Sorry," she said, "but I don't see the big problem." 
"Well, it was that damn penny." 
"You're that worried about a penny?" She grinned at him, pulling a lock of hair away from her face. It fell in front of her eyes again, and she looked up at it, her eyes crossing, and blew at it, letting it fall again. 
He found himself smiling. Peggy had some goofy mannerisms, and he loved her for it. But her thinking wasn't usually goofy, and right now he wanted counsel. "I guess there's no good reason to be worried about it," he said. "It's just been bugging me, like a song in your head that you can't get rid of." 
"Great. If there's no reason to worry, then quit worrying. Case closed." 
"Well … Okay, I am worried. I took the woman's penny. That's the … case." 
"But you say you left the penny with her. You didn't really take the penny?" 
"No, but that means I took the purse." 
"Exactly. But the purse, according to its owner, is only worth a penny. So one way or another the whole issue is over a penny." 
"Yeah, now that you put it that way." 
"Then you've got an Abraham Lincoln complex." 
"I guess so. What the hell are you talking about?" 
"Abraham Lincoln walked ten miles through the snow to return a penny that he borrowed." 
"Why would Abraham Lincoln borrow a penny in the first place? I mean … a penny?" 
"Maybe he needed to buy a coin purse." She smiled at him. "Let me have a look at it." 
He took the purse out of his pocket and handed it to her. 
She gazed at the painting, still grinning. "Wow," she said. "This is really … something. I think she saw you coming." 
"For a penny it's a bargain." 
"Well, for the kind of penny you paid, it's a bargain." 
"That's where you're wrong. That's the hardest penny I ever spent. It's been eating me up for the last hour." 
"Okay. I can settle this. Ask yourself a question: of the various choices open to you, which one's the hardest?" 
"Going back down there and confessing." 
"Then that's what you should do. When it comes to moral issues, the hard choice is always the right one. In this case it's easy. Just bring the woman another penny. Then your conscience can take a rest." 

· · · · · 

No doubt it was good advice, but when he passed Mrs. Fortunato's house, driving his car this time, he was relieved to see that her garage door was shut and the sign was no longer tacked to the mailbox. She had closed up early. He noted the glow of a lamp through the drawn curtains in the front window, and he actually started to pull over to the curb with the idea of knocking on the door. But then, as if drawn back out onto the street by a magnetic force, he headed instead for the county park. 
What he would do was finish his walk in peace. Mrs. Fortunato could wait. As for his conscience, it could wait with her. She owned it right now anyway. 

· · · · · 

He walked uphill at the park toward the trees above the picnic grounds, loafing along with the vague idea that he was still looking for something, something in particular. He had told Peggy that he was going down to the bookstore, which wasn't a lie yet. Maybe he would go to the bookstore. Maybe he would do this, and maybe he would do that. He was living in a land of uncertainties. He must have been susceptible as hell this morning to have gotten so worked up over a damned penny. Somehow it had made him feel very small, that penny had, but he felt considerably larger now, and he had no intention of confronting Mrs. Fortunato. Neither did he have any intention of not confronting her. He had moved into neutral territory, wait-and-see territory. 
The afternoon was empty and quiet, and it seemed to him that there was a strangely suggestive quality on the wind, although what it suggested he couldn't quite say. He cut across toward the deserted baseball diamond to get a drink out of the fountain before heading uphill again, in among a stand of sycamores. There was a pile of fallen leaves twenty feet ahead of him, as if someone had made a half-hearted attempt to rake up, and on impulse he jogged toward it, giving the pile a tremendous kick so that dry leaves flew into the air, the wind carrying them away across the grass. He watched the flying leaves, caught up in the lonesome atmosphere of the deserted park, and when he turned to walk back downhill, his eye was drawn to an immense leaf, dry and curled and looking uncannily like a severed human hand. 
He bent over and picked it up; beneath it lay a twenty-dollar bill, crisp and flat as if newly printed—very like a leaf itself. 
He stood for a moment, filled with both wonder and fear. The bill was utterly incongruous, lying there on the grass, and the idea came into his head that it belonged to Mrs. Fortunato, and that this was some kind of trick or test. He picked it up gingerly—a garden variety twenty and nothing more. "Finders keepers," he muttered, turning it over in his hand. Almost immediately the glow of the found money began to cast the morning in a new light, and he was struck with a new way of seeing things.… 
Perhaps he had been dead wrong about the coin purse incident. Perhaps finding the purse and being given the means to buy it were nothing less than the launching of his lucky day. And this twenty-dollar bill, he saw now, was karma paying him back for a morning's worth of rough usage, balancing the scales, realigning his universe by lining his wallet. Happy with this fresh insight, he hurried toward the car, folding the twenty and slipping it into the coin purse, which, despite its tiny size, had begun to feel like the golden goose. 

· · · · · 

At the bookstore, it didn't take him five minutes of browsing before a volume caught his eye, a heavy old collection of stories by Ambrose Bierce. He had always wanted to read Ambrose Bierce, one of the more mysterious and misanthropic literary figures, who had disappeared into Mexico under uncertain circumstances. He opened the book to a random page and looked at the top paragraph, reading the first full sentence: "One evening the devil put it into my head to be an unspeakable idiot." He slammed the book shut and started to put it back on the shelf, his hand trembling, although it hadn't been trembling a second ago. 
But then he stopped himself. Talk about unspeakable idiots, he was apparently turning into one, reacting to every damned thing as if he had learned nothing at the park. He headed straight for the checkout counter now, where he set the book down, paying for it with the new-found twenty-dollar bill, which covered the price with money to spare. He put the change into the purse and went out into the sunlight, superficially satisfied, but all the time, in the back of his mind, wondering if the book had in fact spoken to him. The idea was preposterous: a message from what?—the good angel? He stopped where he stood and let the book fall open in his hand, giving it a chance to speak to him a second time if it wanted to. 
"You've got my whole attention," he said under his breath, although when he said it he knew it wasn't true. He didn't give a damn, really, for what the book had to say, because no book had anything to say that was half as useful as a twenty-dollar bill. But he pointed with his finger anyway and read the indicated line: "Architecturally and in the point of 'furnishing' the Snakery had a severe simplicity befitting the humble circumstances of its occupants..." and so forth. Nothing. Nonsense. The Snakery! 
He shut the book. What luck demanded was vigilance and a willing mind. Doubt would kill it. He turned his attention instead to the parking lot pavement, watching for something more. The twenty-dollar bill, he told himself, was nothing but a precursor. If there was twenty dollars to be found, then there was forty. It stood to reason. But there was nothing on the ground except the usual litter, and so he got into his car and started for the grocery store two blocks away. He would buy Peggy's eggs, do his good deed for the day, which would take care of any restless angels. 
It was at the edge of the lot, while turning onto the street, that he saw a Coke bottle half hidden by overgrown ivy in a flowerbed. Struck with a sudden compelling hunch, he pulled over and cut the engine, climbing out to take a closer look. It was one of the traditional ten-ounce bottles, the glass laced with the rainbow discoloration of years of sunlight and weather. When he picked it out from among the ivy vines he saw that it was full of silver dimes. 
He stared at it in disbelief, then shook one of the dimes out into his hand. It was an old Liberty dime. Yes, he thought. Real silver! How many in the bottle? A couple of hundred? This wasn't luck; it was something else, something that … something that he couldn't put into words. But he realized one thing for certain: that for the first time since early morning he felt sure of himself; he believed in himself. He was his own man at last, calling his own shots, with faith in his own, his own … 
But his thought evaporated when he spotted a Taco Bell wrapper in the gutter. He hurried to it, unwadding it carefully and looking inside—nothing but cheese shreds and taco sauce. He got into the car and drove toward the grocery store, stopping a half dozen more times to investigate cast away trash, but with no result, and by the time he parked outside Albertson's it seemed to him that every single object that he saw must hide some valuable thing. Project, he told himself, trying to think a treasure into existence. Concentrate, damn it. Nothing happened: there were no hundred dollar bills within the pages of the advertising pamphlet lying in the shopping cart, no gold nuggets rattling around in the empty Dr. Pepper can that he drop-kicked toward the wall of the market. 
But when the can stopped spinning he saw that it lay next to what looked like a small round fishbowl sitting beneath the downspout that drained the roof, and he knew at once, with the certainty of an epiphany, that he had once again struck pay dirt. Breathless with anticipation he hurried toward it, looking around to make sure that no one else had seen it, and he actually got down onto his knees to peer at the bowl: a quart-sized globe with a fluted rim, the glass encrusted with tiny barnacle-like calcifications, as if it had sat for years on the ocean bottom. It was rim-full of water, and within the water, magnified by the curve of the glass, were scores of pearls, nearly invisible against the white-painted concrete of the wall behind them. 

· · · · · 

On the way home his head spun with the problem of Peggy—what a man owed his wife by way of explanation; and it struck him that this was a clear case of what-you-don't-know-won't-hurt-you. He was quite certain of that. Entirely certain. Obviously it wouldn't be fair to Peggy to involve her in the mystery at this point. Something was going on here, he told himself. He would be a creep to include her before he knew what the dangers were. 
It dawned on him that in his excitement he had never gone into Albertson's after the eggs. "Let them eat cake," he said, laughing out loud, then remembering immediately that Marie Antoinette's head had been cut off for expressing that same sentiment. 
When he turned up his own street, he realized that Mrs. Fortunato's house was drawing near on his starboard side, and for a moment he was awash with indecision. The light still shone behind her curtains, and he took his foot off the accelerator and let it hover above the brake for the few seconds that it took him roll past her property and on toward home. 
Of course the idea of stopping was ludicrous now. He saw quite clearly that it had always been ludicrous—more than ludicrous, unwise. And right then all thoughts of Mrs. Fortunato were swept away by something even more worrisome: that the pearls might easily be paste. What he knew about pearls he could put in his hat. 
But then the dimes certainly weren't paste, he thought, as he cut the engine. Or whatever it was they made fake dimes out of—if in fact anyone would go to the trouble of counterfeiting dimes, which would be lunacy. And why, on a fortunate day like this, on the day of all days, would he chance upon paste pearls? He looked at the luminous little orbs in their fishbowl, glowing in the sunshine through the windshield, and his mood brightened again. 
Getting out and easing the car door shut, he slipped the Coke bottle into his pocket, cinching up his belt when the weight of the silver threatened to haul his pants down. He headed silently up the driveway and into the garage, carrying the fish bowl so that it was hidden from sight, just in case Peggy spotted him through the window. Without bothering to turn on the light, he hid the bottle and bowl in a drawer in the bench and then hurried back out, down the driveway again and in through the front door, where he stood listening to the sound of Peggy's sewing machine whirring away upstairs. In the study he shelved Ambrose Bierce and then stood for another minute looking at a history of ancient Egypt, which he opened to the index in order to find the chapter on the life of Cleopatra, who, legend had it, had been famous for dissolving a pearl in red wine and then drinking it in order to make a show of despising riches. 
He found the passage and read it as he walked into the kitchen, where he took a bottle of cabernet from the cupboard, setting it on the counter and then retrieving the corkscrew from its drawer. Excited with the apparently failsafe test, he hastily shoved the corkscrew into the cork, screwing it down hard and fast.... 
"It's early for that, isn't it?" Peggy's voice nearly struck him dead, and he jammed the cork down into the bottle so that wine geysered a foot into the air, splashing back down onto the countertop. 
"It's Saturday," he said lamely, glancing at the clock on the wall. "And it's after four, for God's sake. I just thought I'd call it a day early and relax with a nice glass of wine." 
"Okay. Sure. Why not?" 
"Something's wrong?" He tried to stare her down. "If you're going to start breaking up the bar with an ax, I'll relax with a cup of tea instead." He put the bottle back into the cupboard and shut the door. 
"What a grouch," she said. "Have your glass of wine. I really don't care. But don't be so defensive about it." 
"Now I'm defensive. I hate that ploy. It's one of the five unanswerable allegations." 
"For God's sake, no one's alleging anything! What's wrong with you? 
"With me?" 
For a moment she simply looked at him, but then she grinned, her mood changing on a whim like a storm passing. "This is so goofy," she said. "Listen to us." 
He frowned at her, not willing to be mollified that easily. Peggy's way of instantly getting over things always made him a little angry, because it seemed to him to be another way of winning. But now his mood changed, when into his mind came a small epiphany: that he, in fact, was the big winner—silver, pearls, God knew what else out there waiting for him—and that she had no notion of it. It was his goddamn lucky day, not hers. That thought was followed by a question: whether in the case of a divorce the wife got half of the loot that the husband had stashed in the garage, or whether she got damn-all because she didn't know there was any loot stashed in the garage. 
But he banished the thought from his mind as unworthy, vaguely ashamed of himself for having let it enter in the first place. 
"Are you okay?" she asked. She appeared to be troubled now, her mood having shifted again. "You look kind of wrecked or something." 
"Wrecked?" He glanced into the mirror over the kitchen sink, and what he saw made him blanch. His hair had apparently lost its mind, and looked bushy and standuppish, as did his eyebrows, as if he had been working hard to turn himself into a Halloween devil. His face was pasty, too, his skin grainy and old-looking, his mouth set in a rictus of unidentifiable emotion. He tried to push his hair flat and to compose himself, to relax his face. 
"I guess I am a little tense," he said. Sorry to lose my temper like that." 
"Wait a minute," Peggy said, a look of comprehension coming over her face. "You didn't take that penny back, did you? That's it. You're still suffering from guilt. It's been eating you up all day long." 
"Sure I took it back," he lied, "purse and all. Nothing's eating me up. I feel fine." 
"Okay," she said, giving up. "I'm going back to my sewing. What are the other four, by the way?" 
"The other four what?" 
"The other four unanswerable allegations?" 
"I just made that up." 
"Then answer me this one: you didn't happen to stop by the grocery store did you?" 
"No. I guess I forgot about the eggs. I'll get them, though. Don't even think about going yourself, or else I will be mad." He smiled at her to show he meant it, although he was abruptly conscious of the deception, of the lie within the smile, of the entire fraud, and in that instant he almost blurted it out—the money at the park, the dimes, the pearls, the weird notion that he hadn't returned Mrs. Fortunato's purse because it was … 
… he couldn't say quite what it was. But that alone was troubling, troubling enough, certainly, to warrant against haste. Until he understood things, he told himself as Peggy started up the stairs, he would keep his own counsel. The phrase appealed to him immensely—his own counsel. There was wisdom in it, as there was in all those homely old phrases. Whose counsel would you keep if it weren't your own? 
He realized that Peggy was speaking to him. "What?" he asked. 
"I said give me till six." 
"Sure," he said. "Take your time." 
When she was gone he picked up his book, hauled the wine bottle out of the cupboard, and went out through the back door, closing it softly and ducking into the garage where he turned on the trouble light above the bench. There was no reason to light place up like a carnival; it would merely attract Peggy's attention. He took the bowl of pearls out of the drawer. They were big damned things, some of them the size of his thumbnail. 
Three lucky strikes in one day, by God! Four if you counted the penny. What did they say about that? Once was a fluke, and twice was a hell of a coincidence. But the third time was something more: the third time was the charm—a plot, a pattern, a cold fact, hard and bright as a diamond. Diamonds! The idea transported him. A basket of cut stones would do the trick. He would be happy then. Not that he despised the pearls—not at all—but a handful of diamonds would be another matter entirely. 
Carefully he poured a coffee mug full of wine, read hastily through the passage in the book, and then dropped one of the smaller pearls into the mug. The wine clouded almost at once, as if the pearl were emulsifying. He watched in fascination as the surface of the wine grew turbulent, eddying and roiling for a full thirty seconds before it calmed again and grew translucent, a faint afterimage of the pearl seeming to hover within the depths, like the moon in a night sky. Slowly the wine became transparent, like blood-red Kool-Aid, and he saw that the pearl and its image had vanished utterly. 
"Over the river," he said out loud, and drank the wine in the spirit of Cleopatra. He gagged, nearly retching at the vinegar taste of the tainted wine, and then realized that he was already drunk as a lord, the pearl-enriched elixir having gone straight to his head. Rich as a lord, too, he reflected, steadying himself against the bench. He laughed hilariously at his own wit, muffling his mouth with his hand until he could contain himself. In the ensuing silence he heard an echo of the departed laughter, far removed, but coming so distinctly from behind him that he turned toward the window, where he saw what appeared to be a face peering in at him. 
A hoarse cry strangled out of his throat as he lurched forward, nearly knocking over the pearls. Slowly he turned again to the window: it was apparently his own face that looked back at him—the face he had seen in the kitchen mirror, but even more misshapen and pale and bloated, the old glass no doubt distorting the image. The years of dust lent him a ghostly pallor in the feeble garage light. 
On a whim he picked up the jar of pearls and held it up so that it, too, was reflected in the window pane alongside his own face, which smiled back at him with an unspeakable satisfaction as he nodded his head. "A king's ransom," he said out loud, the words tasting like the pearl-infused wine, and then, as with the laughter moments earlier, he heard the phrase re-uttered in a drawn-out sibilant whisper. His ears savored the sound, and the bowl full of pearls shone with an opalescent light. 
He caught sight of his upraised wristwatch then—nearly five o'clock. In only an hour Peggy would have him in her grasp, and the day wouldn't be his any longer. "I don't mean to be impolite," he said, winking theatrically at the reflected image, "but I'm in something of a hurry." 
"Hurry," the face in the window repeated back to him, and he returned the pearls to the drawer and turned toward the door with a renewed sense of urgency, heading straight out to the sidewalk. 

· · · · · 

He spent the next hour simply wandering, looking into bushes, turning over leaves and scraps of paper, peering into back alley trashcans, his quest taking him into uncharted neighborhoods. Although he was at a fine pitch of expectation, nothing at all spoke to him. There had been something about the dimes and the pearls that had done just that—spoken to him, compelled his attention—but by the end of the hour, when he was forced to turn his steps toward home, the silent world seemed to him to be very nearly empty of hope, and he had to brace himself and manufacture a smile when he entered his house. 

· · · · · 
"Let's get Chinese and stay home," he said to Peggy, the two of them standing in the kitchen. "And maybe a movie." He forced himself to remain still, although he was nearly beside himself with the urgency of getting back outside. "It's been a long day. Last thing I want to do is go out again." 
"Sounds good to me," Peggy said cheerfully. 
He fetched the take-out menu from where they kept it on top of the refrigerator. "Kung pao chicken?" he asked, glancing out the window. It was twilight. In ten more minutes night would fall. In the darkness, he reflected, he would never have seen the dimes in the flowerbed or the pearls either, even if they'd shouted at him. 
"Won ton soup," she said. "And I think broccoli beef. What do you want? Would your rather have orange beef?" 
"Broccoli's fine," he said, already dialing the number of Mr. Lucky's Chinese restaurant, which was a half mile from the house. Even the name of the place was heavy with promise. Twenty minutes before the food was ready, they said to him. Not much time. He gave them his telephone number and hung up. "Half an hour," he told Peggy. "Maybe forty minutes. They're busy." 
"I'll pick it up," Peggy said. She was already holding a sweater now. "I'll grab a movie on the way." 
"No, let me," he said. "You make a better pot of tea than I do. Seriously. I could use some air. Besides, I'll get those eggs while I'm out." He took the sweater from her and hung it over the back of a chair. 
"But you've been running around all day," she told him. "You said you didn't want to go out. And besides, you don't know what movie to get. You'll rent The Godfather again." 
"I promise I won't. It's your pick. Anything you want. I'm easy tonight." 
"Are you?" she asked, wiggling her eyebrows at him. 
"How about something romantic?" He wiggled his eyebrows back. For God's sake hurry up, he thought. 
"Okay," she said. "Somewhere in Time." 
He hesitated, nearly backing off in order to argue with her. He would rather put his head in a clothes press. "Sure," he said. Time was wasting. Minutes might be worth millions. 
"We could get something else. How about … I don't know. Give me some ideas." 
"Nope. I'm on my way. Somewhere in Time it is. It'll for sure be there, anyway." 
He went out the door and made a beeline for the car, checking his watch. When he got to the boulevard he instinctively turned toward the downtown, away from Mr. Lucky's and the video store, following a hunch. The light ahead of him turned yellow, and he stepped on the accelerator, running through it on the red, seeing a car swerve past his rear bumper as a horn blared. A second later he heard what sounded like the heavy metallic crash of the car hitting something solid, and he looked into the rearview mirror in time to see an old junker up over the curb half a block back, the driver already climbing out, apparently unhurt, shaking his fist. Water from a broken hydrant was shooting into the air, falling back down onto the hood of the car. 
He turned down an alley and slowed the car, his mind racing with fear, and briefly he pictured himself going back down to the boulevard to see what had happened, to see if he could help, to trade insurance cards.… 
The picture had no reality in his mind, though. It was spilt milk—or spilt water, he thought, pulling out of the alley onto a residential street, hearing the rising note of a siren from the direction of the fire department. Several blocks farther down he once again followed his hunches and pulled into a parking lot, which was dim in the evening twilight, although a mercury vapor lamp threw a bright glow over two trash bins and illuminated the doors that led into the backs of shops. A half dozen pigeons had congregated on the asphalt and were pecking at fallen crumbs near the bins, their heads darting forward and backward like an evolutionary mistake. 
He pulled into a space and got out, crossing straight to the bins and looking in, letting intuition guide him, barely breathing with anticipation as the pigeons flew away in a rush of beating wings. In the first of the two bins he saw nothing even remotely interesting—some broken pieces of particle board shelving, a wrecked overstuffed chair crammed in sideways, and, visible beneath the chair, a stack of flattened cardboard boxes. 
He leaned in and pulled out the chair cushion, which was torn open and soiled. He punched it a couple of times, feeling for the crinkle of paper money or the clink of coins, then threw it aside, pushed himself farther over the edge, hauled the chair out of the way, and yanked aside some of the cardboard, spotting a paper bag beneath that was stuffed with something. Money? 
Picturing tightly packed hundred-dollar bills, he shoved half his body into the bin to reach it. Why not thousand-dollar bills, he wondered, flailing at the bag, ten thousands. But when he pulled the bag out he found it was full of Styrofoam popcorn, and he hurled it back in angrily, noticing then that there was a line of greasy dirt across his shirt from where he had pressed against the edge of the bin. He cursed as he hurried to the second bin, which looked even less likely than the first, full of restaurant garbage that stank to high heaven. A mop handle thrust up out of the refuse, and he pulled it out to stir things with, moving aside greasy paper wads and dead vegetables and immense coffee filters full of wet grounds. 
The wooden handle clanked against hollow metal, something that must be nearly at the bottom of the bin. The sound of it resonated up his arms, stopping him cold. Full of excitement, he dropped the stick, leaning into the bin and tossing aside trash, trying to expose whatever it was that lay beneath. The trash and garbage cascaded back down, thwarting his efforts, and he was forced simply to pitch it out onto the asphalt of the parking lot, whole handfuls of debris, the reek of old meat and garbage nearly making him weep. 
One of the shop doors opened and a woman stepped out into the glow of the light, looking at the debris on the ground and then at Mason with a mixture of loathing and repulsion. "I've already called the police," she said simply, dusting her hands together in a meaningful gesture. "Scrounging in these trash cans violates the city ordinance. It's right there in plain sight. Right on the side of the bin. And this is littering." She gestured at the ground, which was an ungodly mess. "You can wait for the police or you can damn well get the hell out of here." 
The word 'police' struck him with an intense fear, an image of the car wreck and the shooting hydrant appearing in his mind. He let go of the mop handle and moved away from the bin as the woman disappeared back into the shop, slamming the door behind her. He heard the dead bolt slam home as he took off toward the car. Halfway there he hesitated, his mind a furor of contradictory impulses: surely she was lying about the police.… He nearly turned back, recalling the hollow sound of the mop handle against metal, imagining what might be inside such a box, and he heard on the evening wind the voice of the face in the garage window. "A king's ransom," it whispered. 
But at that moment he heard another siren—a police car?—somewhere off in the night, and he realized that he was dangerously close to disaster. This was no time to take chances. He hurried to the car, sliding in and firing it up, looking longingly back at the trash bin, which glowed with a golden halo. The dashboard clock caught his eye: seven o'clock! He had killed twenty-five minutes. 
In order to avoid the scene of the fire hydrant collision he took back streets as he headed east, silently cursing the woman at the shop. On the boulevard Saturday night traffic slowed him down. He honked the horn at a slowpoke in front of him, then zoomed around, passing the car on the right, braking and swerving back into the lane in order to avoid hitting a car exiting a freeway offramp, then pulling across two lanes and into the video store parking lot to the sound of car horns. When he finally strode into the video store and found the movie, the checkout line was apparently petrified, and he waited impatiently as the minutes ticked past. People glanced at him and glanced away, as if he were on display, and he tried to smooth his hair down and compose himself. His shirt, with it's dark line of greasy dirt, was half untucked, and somehow all of the Dumpster diving had pushed the zipper on his pants halfway down. He arranged himself, scowling openly at a teenager who gawked in his direction. To hell with all of you, he thought, crossing his arms in front of himself to hide his shirt. 
By the time he hurried out the door again he was another fifteen minutes behind, and during the trip to Mr. Lucky's he hit every possible red light, his mind almost unhinged with anger at the people and traffic that conspired against him. He forced himself to breathe regularly and to picture the pearls and silver in the garage, but the thought of them only made him see how pitifully insufficient they were—a treasure for a poor man, the kind of treasure that he would have to budget and conserve. On some not-so-distant day he would find himself like a character out of a French novel, bartering his last pearl, cursing the day that the fates had raised his hopes to such a point and then laughed in his face. The image of Mrs. Fortunato came into his mind, and he was full of hatred for her, for what she had done to him.… 
Suddenly he was aware that he was passing Mr. Lucky, and he cursed out loud again and hung a squealing right hand turn down a street adjacent to the parking lot, where he pulled over to the curb. Get a grip, he told himself, looking at his shaking hands. This was no time to lose his mind. If he could keep his wits about him he still might find his heart's desire, unless, of course, he had left it lying in the trash bin. 
When he entered the restaurant the crowd was as bad as it had been in the video store: half a dozen people at the bar and another dozen waiting for tables. He saw what must be his food on the counter, the carryout boxes packed into a grocery sack with a receipt stapled to the top, and he sidled towards the register, pulling two twenties out of his wallet, waiting while the host seated one party after another. Finally he paid the tab and went out again into the night. He could tell just by holding the bag that the food was cold, which wasn't surprising: he would have been gone nearly an hour by the time he got home. 
As he hurried down the sidewalk he passed the open rear door of the restaurant. He could see into the kitchen, where several white-aproned cooks worked furiously at long chopping blocks. Just outside the open door there was a pile of discarded boxes, and farther on, in a shadowy little recess in a cinderblock wall, was the usual trash bin, full to overflowing. 
Hell, he thought, hesitating there on the sidewalk. It wouldn't take another thirty seconds to peek inside a couple of the boxes. One lucky strike, after all, and virtually everything would be justified, even cold Chinese food. And this was Mr. Lucky's for God's sake.… 
He set his bag on the ground and started picking up and discarding boxes, all of which were empty. But each empty box fueled his resolve, arguably narrowing his search, which at the same time became more apparently futile. His angry mood surged back in like a tide when he picked up the last box from amid the now-scattered cartons. It was full of wadded up newspapers, but by God it was heavy enough to house something more than that. 
He yanked the paper out, his mouth open in anticipation, his heart pounding, only to find that beneath the paper was a litter of cigarette butts and a broken Jim Beam bottle lying in a pool of spilled whisky, which leaked like a faucet through the torn corner of the box and down the front of his shirt and pants. He threw down the box, cursing at it, and tried to wipe himself dry with the wadded newspaper, which smeared his clothes with newsprint and cigarette ash. 
"Shit!" he hollered, pitching the crumpled paper against the wall. He saw that an Asian man was regarding him from the open kitchen doorway. Mason picked up his bag of food and moved back toward the car, getting in and driving away without a backward glance. Five minutes later he was home. He held the bag in front of him when he entered, hoping that Peggy wouldn't spot him until he'd had time to change out of his shirt. But she was right there in the kitchen. He worked his face into the semblance of a smile. 
"What happened?" she asked anxiously. Clearly she was worried. But before he could answer the worry went out of her eyes. She wrinkled up her nose and said, "You smell like a distillery." 
"Can you believe they didn't have the order?" he said, lying through his teeth. "So I while I was waiting I managed to spill liquor on myself. It was a hell of a thing." 
"You were drinking again? Like whisky or something this time?" 
"No, I wasn't drinking. It was just a whim. Anyway, I didn't get to drink any of it. My shirt had the pleasure. And what do you mean, again?" 
"You smell like a wet ashtray, too," she said, ignoring his question. "Good God, what's all that … filth?" She gestured at his shirt. 
"I tried wiping it off with newspaper." 
"That was wise," she said. But when she spoke again her tone had changed. There was worry in her voice again, the anger and irony gone. "You don't look too good," she told him. "You should have your blood pressure checked or something." 
"Okay," he said, "That's a damned good idea." 
"Maybe you better go change." 
"Yeah," he said. "Maybe I should." 
He turned around and headed up the stairs, and when he looked into the glass he scarcely recognized the bloated and ugly face that looked back out at him. Maybe his blood pressure was at some kind of terminal level. Or maybe, and much more likely, the long and demanding day had simply beat him up. He put his head under the faucet and soaked his hair with cold water, rubbing his face with his hands as if to massage it back into its familiar shape. He smiled at himself in the mirror, winking and nodding, but the gesture was merely grotesque, and he toweled himself dry, combed his hair, put on a clean shirt, and went back downstairs, restless with the knowledge that the night was wearing on. 
Peggy had the food on plates and the tea poured, but once again she didn't look happy; she looked like the camel right before the last straw was laid on. "It's cold," she said. 
"Cold?" He tried to look flabbergasted. 
"Room temperature cold." 
"I guess I'm not surprised," Mason said. "It took twenty minutes to get the video because of the crowd. And then, like I said, when I got to Mr. Lucky they'd mislaid the order, and so they had to start over again. The place was packed. It took about a half hour and then they brought me this. Now you're telling me it's cold?" 
She stared at him fixedly now, as if he were the fabulous liar of the world, but he brassed it out: this was no time to change horses. "I bet I know what it was," he said, inspiration striking him like a clapper. "I bet they had it all along but the cashier didn't see it. You know, in the corner of the kitchen or something. And then they gave it to me anyway, when they did see it, instead of throwing it away and cooking it over again. That kind of lying pisses me off, but it's got to be what happened." 
"Yeah, it kind of pisses me off, too," she said, but he wasn't sure what she meant. 
"What do you want to do?" he asked. "I can take it back down there. Just say the word." 
"Let's just try putting it in the microwave. But I'm going to call them up and tell then. I mean, thirty dollars worth of cold food..." 
"I'll do it. They'll remember me." 
"I'm certain they will," she said, and while she put one of the plates into the microwave he dialed the number of the time operator. 
"At the sound of the tone..." the recording said. 
"Yeah, hey, this is George Mason. I was just in there to get a to-go order. That's right, the kung pao chicken and broccoli beef? Well, it's stone cold. We've got a house full of hungry people here and the chicken's like a cesspool or something." He winked at Peggy to show how clever the cesspool remark was, but she didn't respond. He listened to the time again, and then, covering the mouthpiece, he said to her, "You want them to do it again? If you want I'll go back down." Go for it, he thought, sending out the message as hard as he could. 
"Yeah," she said. "The microwave's turning it into leftovers." 
"We're on our way," he said, and hung up the phone. It was 7:38 and thirty seconds. 
"I'll go this time." Peggy told him. 
"No. You do another pot of tea." 
"We don't need another pot of tea." 
"Then get the tape started. This is my screwup. I'll go straight down there and make sure they get it right." 
He couldn't fathom the look on her face this time, but there was no time to worry about that. He had to get the hell out before she wanted to argue. This was another lucky break, but he couldn't expect any more. 

· · · · · 

In the golden lamplight he stood looking at the trash bins again. Someone had cleaned up the litter, probably the old woman from the shop. Serves her right, he thought, finding the mop handle again and prodding around in the trash and garbage, keeping quiet about it. Almost at once the handle thunked against it again, whatever it was, still waiting patiently for him. 
He found the cushion from the stuffed chair in the adjacent bin and laid it onto the trash, then boosted himself into the bin and knelt on the cushion in a vain effort to keep himself clean. He moved debris aside gingerly, but the bin was at least as full as it had been, and time was wasting. Half measures weren't going to cut it. In for a penny, he thought, simply digging down into the refuse until he found it—a box: smooth sides, small hinges and a metal ring in the front. He had to bury his arms up to the shoulder in order to heave it out. It was a bread box, painted white and with red roosters on it. He felt the heavy contents inside shift when he moved it, and there was the clink of metal on metal, like heavy coins. 
Painstakingly careful, he climbed out of the bin and set the box on a wooden crate, getting down onto his knees before it on the dirty asphalt, desperate to look into it, certain beyond doubt that here in this dumpster full of garbage he had found the rainbow's end. In the yellow lamplight, the red-painted roosters might easily have been devils, and the rust that lined the edges of the metal was the ochre color of dried blood. As he reached for the pull on the front of the box, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and there came into his mind the curious notion that he was being watched, as if a silent, staring host had materialized behind him in the parking lot. He slowly turned his head to look, but of course there was no one: the lot was empty and dark, the night silent and waiting. Gingerly, tilting the box back so that nothing should spill, he took hold of the wire ring and raised the hinged front lid. The bread box was full of jewels, stuffed with them. 
Gasping out loud, he slammed the lid shut, stood up, and trod backward, dizzy and stumbling, his heart pounding like a nail press. He had caught only a glimpse of it. Surely he was mistaken! He must have seen a piece of paper with a picture of jewels on it. He knelt before it again, grasped the ring, and raised the lid an inch, peering inside. What he saw wasn't paper. 
He pulled the lid entirely open and took a good look now. Costume jewelry? Surely these couldn't be diamonds and rubies and emeralds. But by God they looked real enough! They didn't have the cheap and gaudy look of costume jewelry. The pendant lying in front had a diamond in it as big as a half dollar, surrounded by green stones that looked prodigiously deep, like transparent, mossy wells. What had he heard about diamonds? He remembered now: they didn't fog up when you blew on them. Glass fogged up. That was one of the simple tests. 
He drew the diamond pendant out of the box and blew gently from deep in his throat. No fog. Still … He shoved it back in, shut the lid of the box, stepped back, and blew on the face of his watch, which fogged instantly, the moisture evaporating slowly in the cool air. Without a backward glance he picked up the box, walked to the car like a man carrying a live bomb, shoved it into the back seat, and without a second thought headed straight for the secrecy of his garage, his head aswirl with kaleidoscopic visions of jewelry. 

· · · · · 

Safe at last, with the door shut behind him, he set the box on the bench and then switched on the trouble light clamped to the peg board on the wall, once again foregoing the overhead light, which would be too bright, too revealing. Licking his lips, he opened the bread box, flabbergasted at what he saw despite his expectations. He'd had only a quick glimpse of it in the parking lot, but now he saw the extent of the treasure, and the immensity of what he saw confounded him. He disentangled the diamond pendant from a gold tiara set with rubies, the tiara incredibly heavy in his hand: easily a pound of gold and gems. There were bracelets that looked like they'd been cast in Atlantis or some other fabled place, and loose cut stones the size of birds eggs. This wasn't fashionable jewelry; it was the kind of thing you found buried on a desert island—pirate jewelry, King Solomon's mine, Aladdin's cave. 
He hefted a necklace of giant sapphires, all of them cunningly faceted, each as blue as a tropical ocean. Beneath it lay a flat, diamond-encrusted broach, thick with intricately woven filigree gold, the diamonds spiraling like a starry nebula disappearing into its own infinite center. The floor of the box was layered with gold coins, heaped with them, old and foreign looking, immense and fabulous. There were ropes of gold chain with arcane links, links that seemed to him to be multiplying through a strange alchemical parthenogenesis even as he watched, and which cascaded out onto the bench top like an autumn harvest out of the mouth of a cornucopia. His hands trembling, he hung chain after chain around his neck, encircling himself with gold, and still there were more chains within the box, shoved back into the dim corners, glittering and winking, coiling and moving like golden serpents. He clasped the sapphire necklace around his neck and then hung the diamond over all, the gold and jewels making such a combined heap that the diamond pressed against his chin. He slipped jeweled bracelets over his wrists and wound chain around his forearms until he was literally bowed beneath its golden weight, and then he cinched up his pants and shoveled coins into his pockets, filling them front and back, stooping over to slide coins into his shoes, caught up in the overwhelming certainty that there was no end to the treasure heaped within the bread box and spilling out of it. If he chose he could bathe in it, swim in it, bury himself beneath it. 
The garage itself was gold with reflected light, light that tinted his flesh so that he himself might have been cast of the metal. Sounds of unspeakable glee escaped his throat, and he heard answering sounds from behind him, from the direction of the window, and he turned with an expectant avidity, anxious to gaze upon the reflected splendor, to see what he had become simply because he had believed in himself, played his own hunches, trusted the fates, cast caution to the winds, put first things first. 
Within the dim glass floated the familiar orb-like face—his own face, hanging like a single pale pearl on an invisible thread, staring back at him, the anxious whispering starting up again like a voice on the wind, punctuated with tinny laughter that sounded like an echo of his own glee bouncing around in a coffee can. He was filled with the overwhelming sense that the whispering voice offered some final bit of secret knowledge, a chance to apprehend something that, if he hesitated, would be forever denied to him. Encumbered by the weight of the treasure, he slogged heavily toward the window, his heart laboring in his chest. For a moment he saw his own distorted face quite clearly in the glass, his neck encircled with gold and jewels, as if his severed head stood atop a small mountain of treasure. But as he stared into his own hollow eyes, they slowly transposed themselves into a single staring patch of darkness that took on the semblance of a cave, and he saw that the darkness within was mysteriously deep, and that there were even deeper shadows within the darkness, and shadows within the shadows. 
He felt himself unmoored from the earth, from the concrete floor of the garage, and he drifted weightlessly forward down that tunnel, drawn on a draught of cool air and following the shadow of the face that receded before him now, appearing and disappearing in the gloom, whispering secrets through a mouth that was a dark and vaguely moving smudge. Around him lay a vast empty space, and on the dead air there sounded the low whispering, sometimes like a voice, sometimes like the suggestion of a wind blowing across the cave mouth far behind him. A pinpoint of radiance glimmered overhead like the pole star, a radiance that held within it an immensely rich promise, a decoction of all the gratification and wonder and riches of creation. Its pale light grew steadily brighter until it illuminated a cathedral-like cavern, the shadows separating out as in a dawn landscape, shapes growing distinct. 
He found himself looking down on a vast subterranean treasure room, a vault apparently limitless in extent. Within it lay open chests of jewels: ropes of pearls, cut stones spilling over the sides, the chests themselves half sunk in gold coins that stretched away in dunes, all of it sparkling in the opalescent radiance of reflected light that jumped and leaped and died away and flared up again like witch fire to reveal further treasures on ever more distant shores of heaped coin. And as he looked down upon the immensity of that place he knew quite clearly what the whispering voice had promised him, what it was he was being offered. And the odd certainty came to him that in a single gulp he might swallow it all, that he might drink it all in, and so gain the world itself just as he had consumed the pearl in wine. 
He was abruptly aware of a knocking sound, and the awareness brought him part way back to his senses. It was the rattling knock of knuckles on glass, insistent and distracting. The cavern with its treasures winked away, and the familiar whispering face hung before him again, blind and idiotic and already evaporating, growing transparent, replaced by another face that for one long moment Mason failed to recognize. And then, with a shock of surprise, he realized that he was looking into a woman's face and that his own drooling mouth was hanging open stupidly. With an effort he focused his eyes and saw that it was Peggy, standing outside the window, looking back in at him, her face a mask of disbelief. He tried to smile at her, but couldn't, and the effort was merely disfiguring. She disappeared, and the garage door opened, the overhead light blinking on in a revealing wash of illumination that was very nearly painful to Mason's eyes, which had grown used to the darkness. 
She didn't look angry, but instead was once again worried and obviously mystified, as if what she saw were beyond her capacity to understand. Mason was instantly infected with the same confusion, and the total clarity that he had felt only moments before, the sharp focus of desire and anticipation and knowledge, evaporated like steam. He looked around himself at the brightly lit garage, its entire demeanor altered now that the shadows were gone, and there came into his mind the realization that he hadn't gone back down for the Chinese food as he had intended, that he had simply forgotten it in his greed and excitement, and he wondered what time it was, how long Peggy had waited for him to return. 
His clothes, he realized, were a cornucopia of stinking filth from his wallowing in the trash bin, and around his neck, to his surprise and horror, hung a collection of yanked-open coat hangers and frayed bits of greasy twine and loops of rusty chain from a swag lamp. Rubber bands and string and ribbon encircled his wrists, and his shoes were stuffed with broken plastic spoons and forks discolored with old food. The gold and jewels that had decorated himself with were gone, metamorphosed into trash. 
"I thought …" he started to say to Peggy, but what he had thought was too ludicrous to express. He wore the evidence of it. The bread box, he thought, turning to the bench, still faintly hopeful. But the breadbox was empty of its riches and contained only a few bits of leftover mouldering trash, the sight of which nauseated him. He sat down in a heap on the cold concrete floor, the rafters and the work bench and window spinning around him, and began to tug at the coat hangers and string, trying to cast off the trash that he had used to ornament himself. He couldn't look at Peggy, although his mind was consumed with the fear that he would hear the door shut behind him, that she would simply walk away and leave him there. 
He realized then that she was bent over him, and that his own efforts to disentangle himself were simply getting in her way. She pulled a scissors down from the pegboard and cut the string and twine as he pulled off his shoes, dumping the debris out onto the floor. He struggled to his feet finally and opened the bench drawer, silently pulling out the Coke bottle, which was half full of cigarette butts. The fishbowl contained a few wet stones lying on a bed of dirt. He set both of them into the open breadbox and started to shut the lid, noticing then that the overhead light glinted on a single penny lying in the back corner of the box. 
For a time he stood staring at it. 
"A penny," he said to Peggy. 
"I see it," she said. "I guess it's your lucky day." 
"Yeah," he said. 
He reached into his pocket and brought out Mrs. Fortunato's coin purse, snapped it open, picked up the penny, and dropped it inside. Then he closed the bread box and shoved it into the garage trash can, putting the lid on after it. 
Together they went out into the night, walking the two blocks to Mrs. Fortunato's house, which was dark and closed up. He laid the purse and its penny on the welcome mat, and the two of them walked home again. 
The End