His Billionaire Family Tested My Poverty, but Their Heir Was Broke novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Nineteen Dollar Eggs

At the Lean Market Laura buys eggs from the real hens and wins the breakfast challenge, then Arthur's hidden card declines in front of everyone and Winifred says Laura is covering for him.

The Lean Market was a barn full of actors selling eggs for nineteen dollars each.

Peter had hired them from a theater company in New Haven and dressed them in straw hats and aprons.

They stood behind crates of apples, talking in a country accent none of them had been born with.

"Each team gets four dollars and one goal," Peter announced, reading from his clipboard. "Breakfast for six. The winning team chooses tonight's seating."

He handed me a paper envelope stamped POOR.

Inside were four dollar bills, so crisp they cut my thumb.

My sister Holly leaned over my shoulder in an Endicott bathrobe.

Her copper hair was flat on one side, and she had been in the house seven hours.

In that time she had been lent a robe, a bath and a second prune.

"This is the best weekend of my life," she whispered. "Everything's free and nobody knows my last name."

"Your phone's in a basket," I said.

"It's like jail with a spa."

The first stall belonged to a man in suspenders.

"Fresh, free-range, ethically poor eggs," he said. "Nineteen dollars."

"For one egg?" I asked.

"It was raised on a very small farm."

I looked at my envelope.

My four dollars would buy me about a fifth of an egg.

Arthur leaned in beside me. "Let me," he said.

"We said nobody pays."

"It's one egg, Laura."

He bent and pulled a plastic card out of his left shoe.

It was a debit card, cracked at one corner, the kind a college student keeps in a drawer.

I hadn't known he'd kept one, and I decided that was between him and his shoe.

He handed it to the man in suspenders, who swiped it on a reader the size of a deck of cards.

The reader said, in a cheerful female voice, "Declined."

It said it loudly, and the barn went quiet.

At the cheese stall, Winifred turned her head slowly.

Peter's pen stopped. Esther's pen did not.

Arthur went the color of the egg cartons.

I took the card out of the vendor's hand and put it in my pocket.

"Tradition says no cards, Arthur," I said, to the rafters. "You're being so brave about this."

"Brave," Esther murmured, writing it down.

Then I went out the back door, because the eggs I wanted were not in that barn.

I could smell them.

Behind the barn, in light rain, a groundskeeper in a canvas cap was mucking out a real chicken coop.

Eleven hens stood around him with their opinions.

"Eggs?" I asked.

"Fifty cents," he said. "Family doesn't buy them. They like the fancy ones."

"I have four dollars."

He wrapped eight eggs in a sheet of newspaper.

Then he pushed my four dollars back into my hand.

"Heat came on in my room last night," he said. "First time since the consultant. Keep it."

I stood there in the rain holding eight eggs and four dollars.

It was the most efficient breakfast in the history of the weekend.

I walked back toward the barn, and eleven hens walked behind me.

My coat pockets were full of granola crumbs, and the hens knew it.

The first hen entered the Lean Market through the open door.

The man in suspenders screamed.

Then the rest came in, and the actors discovered they would rather be in New Haven.

Peter climbed a crate. The cheese seller climbed Peter.

A hen flew straight onto the cheese stall and stood on a wheel of something marked ninety dollars.

Winifred held a forty-six-dollar baguette over her head with both hands while a smaller hen considered her pearls.

"Chased by a chicken," Esther said, writing furiously. "Forty points. That's a record."

"Mother, are you hurt?" Arthur called.

"I am being pecked," Winifred said, "by a peasant."

"She's a hen, Mrs. Endicott," I said. "Just hold still."

The hen lost interest and went after the baguette.

Holly, who had been behind a barrel the whole time, came out holding a stolen apple.

"Laur," she said. "Strays follow you. I should know, I'm one."

The cook lent us the barn's camp stove, and I scrambled eight eggs with two fried onions from her pantry.

Six plates came out with one egg and a third each.

Peter counted twice. Esther awarded the meal six points for austerity and nobody argued.

Winifred ate the whole plate.

"I would like the record to show," she said, "that it was edible."

"It's still good, if that's the record," I said.

She set down her fork and waited until Peter had taken Esther away to look at a hen.

Then she folded her napkin into a perfect square.

"You took that card very quickly, Miss Finch," she said, in a voice only I could hear.

"I'm quick."

"You took it before the machine finished speaking. You knew it would decline."

I opened my mouth, and nothing in it fit.

"You're covering for him," Winifred said. "I should like very much to hear what else you knew."

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