The Weight of a Coin

Sincere Mitchell is twenty-five, six-foot-four, and the best hand on the floor of a Baltimore medical-supply warehouse, where he clocks in at five-thirty and fixes machines nobody asked him to fix. He has been the quiet one his whole life. His mother worked nights at Hopkins for fourteen years, sang Sam Cooke off-key, kept a mason jar of dimes on the counter, and told him that a dime on the ground means somebody is watching over you. She died at forty-six. In eighteen years she never once asked him a real question about himself.

Seven years later he bends down for a dime on a sidewalk, and the light swings around, and he is standing in her kitchen with the whiting frying and her voice in the next room.

One dime buys four seconds. Two dimes buy a whole supper. Sincere starts spending, and the doors stop being only hers — a lake with a father who doesn’t need him to talk, a stoop with a brother the world never made, rooms full of people who look at him and ask him things and wait for the answer. Everything he was ever starved for is on the other side of a coin. And every hour he spends over there is an hour stolen from the living people who are, imperfectly and wordlessly, already loving him.