piece at a time.
Tomorrow I’d go to Rahway, with the penny in the Lucite cube. Perhaps the child
would take it in his or her chubby hand and look at it curiously. In any case, it would
be out of my life. I thought the only difficult thing to get rid of would be Jimmy
Eagleton’s Farting Cushion—I could hardly tell Mrs. Eagleton I’d brought it home for
the weekend in order to practice using it, could I? But necessity is the mother of
invention, and I was confident that I would eventually think of some halfway
plausible story.
It occurred to me that other things might show up, in time. And I’d be lying if I told
you I found that possibility entirely unpleasant. When it comes to returning things
which people believe have been lost forever, things that have weight, there are
compensations. Even if they’re only little things, like a pair of joke sunglasses or a
steel penny in a Lucite cube…yeah. I’d have to say there are compensations.