His Billionaire Family Tested My Poverty, but Their Heir Was Broke novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Thirty-Eight Dollar Can
Laura arrives at the Endicotts' Lean Weekend, is handed a $38 tin of beans, turns down a $5,000 exit offer and carries the bin-bound supper to the staff, until Arthur tells her he is truly broke and she says he is doing it right.
The first thing Arthur's mother ever handed me was a can of beans that cost thirty-eight dollars.
She presented it on a silver tray in the front hall, before I had taken off my coat.
The label was cream paper with a hand-drawn goat on it.
The price sticker was still on the lid, in case anyone mistook it for something cheap.
"Welcome to the Lean Weekend, Miss Finch," Winifred Endicott said. "Tonight we eat as ordinary people eat."
I read the sticker twice.
At home, that can would have cost eighty-nine cents and come with a dent.
"Do these ever go on sale?" I asked.
"Hardship does not go on sale," Winifred said.
Behind me, Arthur made a small noise in his throat.
He had been quiet since the gas station.
His card had been declined at the pump, and I had paid forty-one dollars and six cents with a coupon.
He had called it a bank glitch.
In the car I had made him agree to three rules for the weekend.
We answered everything as ourselves.
Nobody paid for anything.
We left together or not at all.
He had agreed too fast, and I had noticed, and I had let it go.
The front hall of the Cottage was bigger than my apartment building.
The Endicotts called the house the Cottage, and it had forty-one rooms.
In the middle of the hall stood a silver bread basket with no bread in it.
"All cards, phones and car keys go in the basket," Winifred said. "Ordinary people do not own the means to escape."
Arthur's cousin stood beside it with a clipboard, sweating through a polo shirt with a tiny whale on the chest.
"It's my first year running the weekend," he told me. "Please don't make it weird."
I put in my debit card, my phone and my Corolla keys.
They landed with a chime, and a man in a gray uniform carried the basket away with both hands.
Arthur's card went in last, and he did not look at me.
A small round woman with white curls drifted out of the dining room in a hand-knit sweater.
The price tag was still on the sleeve. It said six hundred and forty dollars.
She was writing in a green notebook labeled HARDSHIP LEDGER.
"I skipped lunch today," she said to nobody. "Six points."
"Aunt Esther," Arthur said, "you had a macaroon."
"One macaroon," Esther said, "is a fast."
Winifred turned back to me with a smile that had cost somebody money.
"Before the soup, any guest may withdraw. The family will pay five thousand dollars for the inconvenience."
Nobody had warned me about this part.
I looked at Arthur. He shook his head very slightly, which meant take it, and also meant don't.
"Can I take the five thousand and stay for supper?" I asked.
"That is not how withdrawal works," Winifred said.
"Then I'm staying."
His cousin Peter wrote something on his clipboard.
Esther wrote something in her ledger.
Winifred's smile stayed exactly where it was.
The Lean Supper had nine courses, and every plate came with a card listing its price.
The water from the family well was served warm and cost fourteen dollars.
The fourth course was a heel of bread on a slate board, twenty-two dollars.
"Where's the rest of the loaf?" I asked Peter, who was serving.
"Discarded," Peter said. "It's authentic scarcity."
"It's a loaf."
"We aren't allowed to eat the rest. It's, um, a symbol."
Across the table, Winifred ate her bread heel with great suffering.
Arthur ate his in four bites and looked at mine.
I split it and gave him half, under the tablecloth, where the Endicotts' symbols couldn't see.
The ninth course was a single prune at thirty-one dollars.
By then I had counted four people sneaking looks at their plates, and nobody had finished a course.
Afterward the staff cleared the table in silence.
I carried my own plate into the kitchen and found the cook standing over a bin.
Nine courses for six people were sliding into it, in order.
"What's this?" I asked.
"Mrs. Endicott's rule," the cook said. "Nothing from the Lean Supper is reused. It would cheapen the hardship."
The bin held more food than my mother ate in a week of double shifts.
I took a stack of containers off the shelf.
"Then I'm not reusing it," I said. "I'm moving it."
The cook looked at me for a long second and then started laughing so hard she had to hold the counter.
By the time Arthur found me, the staff were eating courses two through eight standing up around the prep table.
The groundskeeper was on his second prune.
"That's still good," I told Arthur, pointing at a roll. "Take it. You're skinny."
He did not take it.
"Laura." His voice was low. "I have to tell you something, and I need you not to treat it like part of the weekend."
"Okay."
"I don't have any money. Not pretend. Three weeks ago my mother froze everything. My card, my job, all of it."
I looked at the rolls, the staff, the bin with the lid still open.
Then I looked at his face, and I thought: that is the best acting I have ever seen from a man who can't act.
I gave him a thumbs-up.
"You're doing it right," I said.
He stared at my thumb for a very long time.
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