Chapter 7: The Tin

Ken Bronze woke at five, the way he had every morning of his life.

He lay in the blue guest room, listening to a house that did not need him to feed anything.

There were no cows to milk.

There was no stove to light.

There was a bed with sheets that smelled faintly of lavender, and a window that looked out over a lawn with its own fountain.

He did not like it.

He liked the sound he'd heard through the wall last night even less, because he could not stop hearing it.

A held breath. A groan, pushed into a pillow. The headboard, once.

Ken stared at the ceiling.

Then he got up and did fifty push-ups on the carpet until his arms shook, and the sound went quiet in his head.

At six he called his grandmother.

She answered on the second ring, as she always did.

"Is it a good house?" she asked.

"It's a very big house."

"That's not what I asked."

"The people are kind." He sat on the edge of the bed. "Too kind. They gave me a room, Grandma. And four thousand dollars a month to teach their son."

"That's a lot of teaching."

"It's a lot of money."

"Is the boy hard to teach?"

Ken thought about Jude on the lake shore, folding his hoodie.

"No," he said. "He's the hardest worker I've met. He just doesn't know it."

There was a pause on the line.

"Then earn it twice," his grandmother said. "Once with the lessons and once with your manners. And don't spend a cent you didn't sweat for."

"I won't."

"I know you won't. Eat something."

He hung up and took out the notebook.

It was a thin green notebook, and on the first page he had written the date and one line: Hours worked.

Under it, in neat columns, he would write every lesson with its start time and stop time.

That way no one could say he had been paid for work he hadn't done.

Beside the notebook sat a flat old shortbread tin, the one his grandmother had used for buttons.

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