With her accent, the one word of American slang sounded jarring. Margaret glanced at the dollar bill and pulled it back. It looked like currency from a poorer and uglier country.įrom conversations with the woman on her previous shopping trips, Cassie remembered that her name was Margaret she was thirty years old and she had moved to Boston, with her new husband, from Australia. The dollar bill was both longer and narrower than a coupon, and Cassie didn’t recognize the face on the black-and-white portrait. One day, a woman passed a twenty-dollar bill across the counter. There was a locked box under the counter, a metal cashbox with a picture of Rosie the Riveter taped to its lid. At Glick’s Grocery, which had moved to the same suburb, Cassie worked the register on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, while Mrs. It doesn’t hurt anyone, and the police have better things to do than go after it.”īy the time Cassie turned fifteen, her family had moved to the nearest suburb, and Richard Nixon was President. “Is it really illegal, changing money at Mrs. “He’s an idealist, and I love him for that, but… he doesn’t understand how much things cost.” Some nights, Cassie’s father would take the family out to dinner there. Through the blur of rain over the windshield, Cassie could see the delicatessen on the opposite corner the G&G sign was suspended over the sidewalk, round and vertical like a ketchup bottle. “You’re doing something il-le-gal,” she said, stretching out the last word.Ĭassie raised her eyebrows. Cassie licked vanilla ice cream all around the edge of her sandwich, feeling smug and virtuous and full of sugar. Glick is paying thirty-one.”Ĭassie’s mother drew on her cigarette and exhaled out the half-open window into the drizzle. “The exchange rate at the banks is twenty-seven coupons for a dollar,” Cassie’s mother said, “and Mrs. Cassie’s little brother called coupons “cootie money,” because only women and girls could use them. Each twenty-coupon note showed a picture of Margaret Mitchell, holding a copy of Gone With the Wind. Glick a twenty-dollar bill the older woman had tucked the bill under the counter and handed back a stack of coupons then, her mother had used some of those coupons to pay Mrs. Glick’s? Why not go to the bank?”Ĭassie’s mother had passed Mrs. When the ice cream sandwich was half gone, Cassie asked, “Why did you change Dad’s money at Mrs. The sandwich, the cigarettes, and three bags of groceries had come from Mrs. While Cassie ate an ice-cream sandwich, her mother smoked a cigarette. The two of them sat in a parked car on Blue Hill Avenue, outside Ethel Glick’s grocery store. Johnson was President, and Cassie learned that her mother was a criminal. When Cassie Levine was nine years old, her family lived in the center of Boston, Lyndon B.
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