The rule, for eleven years, was that change never got spent. She had started the jar when her daughter was in grade school — quarters mostly, a few Canadian ones. On a Thursday she carried it into the supermarket with both arms, the way people carry something breakable, and tipped the whole thing into the green machine while four shoppers waited behind her.

The machine took twelve percent and printed $283.44. At forty-six she had been hoping, without admitting it, for a thousand. She stood by the bottle return doing arithmetic that would not come out, then walked the receipt to the register and spent every cent of it on groceries — the first money in two years that went where she said it would.