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Nobody counts anymore.
I do — six days a week, behind glass, on Convent Avenue.
My window is the last one in Laredo that still takes paper.
There were nine when I started. Now it's me, a coin sorter built in 2029, and a bell that somehow still works.
People bring me dollars, old ones, soft as cloth, some of them older than I am.
They slide them under the glass and I turn them into spend-money — tokens, credits, whatever their wallet will hold.
I keep four cents on the dollar, which is the cap by law. It used to be nine.
Most of my people are old. Some are off the books. And a few are kids testing a story their grandfather told them.
My grandmother would have loved this place.
Cleo kept her money in envelopes and wrote the words on the front in pencil. Rent. Meat. Church. Bus. She never once mixed them up.
Then 2032 came and the rent envelope got thin.
I was seventeen. I remember my mother at the kitchen table with a calculator, doing the same sum over and over, like the answer might change if she stayed patient enough.
Cleo's check dropped by about a fifth.
Congress patched it later… sort of. They patched it the way you patch a roof with a bucket.
Mom says the math was never a secret.
By the 2020s the country paid more to carry its debt than it spent on almost anything else. Everyone could read that. Nobody wanted to say it out loud.
That's the year money stopped being a thing my family trusted and became a thing we watched.
Anyway, the border taught us early.
Laredo has always been two currencies and one economy.
My uncles ran freight, and they knew the spread on the peso better than they knew their own blood pressure.
So when the instant rails came in — both ways, no bank sitting in the middle — this town didn't blink. We'd been waiting since 1994.
Now a truck clears the bridge and the money lands in under two seconds.
Two seconds. My uncle used to wait eleven days and pay $28 for the privilege.
But that part is better, and I won't pretend it isn't.
Mom's pension hits at six in the morning on the first of the month, to the second, every time. No float, no pending, no calling anyone. She can see it before her coffee is done.
But nobody put the rest of it in the brochure.
Money isn't one thing anymore. It's a stack of things that all agree to act like dollars.
My till holds eleven kinds — bank tokens, Treasury tokens, two store coins, a state credit good only for power and water, and a grain of gold in a vault in Zurich, sliced ten thousand ways.
They all say dollar on the front. But they don't all hold.
So I keep a chart taped to the glass showing which ones held last week, and my customers read it like a weather report… which is what it is.
And the gold. God, the gold.
Every central bank on earth spent twenty years quietly buying it, with no speeches and no announcements.
They just bought… and bought… and one day the ledger tipped over.
More of the world's money sitting in metal than in American paper.
My father called that a crank theory, and he lived long enough to read it in a government report.
What I miss is small and dumb.
I miss not knowing.
A paycheck used to show up on Friday and just sit there, a plain number, quiet.
But now every wallet shows me what my money is worth against everything else, fresh every four seconds, all day, forever.
You can turn that off. Nobody turns it off.
Cleo died in 2038, and we found the envelopes in a shoebox under her bed.
Empty, most of them. She'd kept them anyway.
I have one taped inside my window where the customers can't see it, and it says MEAT, in pencil.
Some days I put my four cents in it.
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