Chapter 6: Tea With Prices

Winifred served the tea in cups she told me cost four hundred dollars each.

We sat in the morning room with a fire going, and in the corner, plugged into an extension cord, sat the six-dollar toaster.

She had put it where she could see it from her chair.

"What a brave cardigan," she said, setting down the pot. "Forty dollars?"

"Nineteen," I said. "At a church sale in March."

"How resourceful."

She lifted her cup with two fingers.

"And last night's dress? Sixty?"

"Forty-one eighteen, with the coupon."

"Even the eighteen cents," Winifred said. "How very exact."

"Eighteen cents is eighteen cents."

I had carried the tin of beans in my coat since Friday, and I put it on the tray between us.

"You haven't opened them," Winifred said.

"I was saving them for an emergency," I said.

"It is a gift from the family," Winifred said.

"Then I'd better see what I got," I said.

I took the little can opener off my key ring, set it on the lid and turned it around the rim.

The lid came off with a sigh.

Inside, in a tablespoon of pale tomato water, lay fourteen beans.

I looked at them twice.

"That's two dollars and seventy-one cents a bean," I said.

"They are heritage," Winifred said, with a very straight back.

"Mrs. Endicott, they're ready to be soup."

I tipped the beans into a saucer, because I did not intend to waste them.

She watched me do it, and her mouth made a shape I would have called a smile if it had stayed longer.

"Your mother's house," she said. "Eleven hundred square feet in Scranton. I believe it's worth a hundred and eighteen thousand."

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