The Dollar Kids

by Jennifer Richard Jacobson

  After food processors and a warming tray had been purchased . . . after the plumbing was turned on, repaired, and turned on again (a process that took almost two weeks) . . . after the building inspector and the food inspector had given Mum the go-ahead . . . opening day for the Cornish Eatery was set for August 13.

  The entire Grover family would need to work at the shop until Mum had a sense of how many pasties she would need to make each day. If there turned out to be an enormous demand for the meat pies, Mum would try to hire someone in town to help out — hopefully Rena. (The bank had refused Rena the loan for her pet-grooming / clothing store. As Sami told it, the bank manager had said, “Ms. Doshi, if you’re going to establish a successful business, you have to understand people in these parts. None of us would be caught dead putting a coat on our dog or cat — especially during these hard times.”) So now Rena was trying to come up with a new way to make a living.

  Things seemed to be moving along swimmingly by opening day.

  Clem was using the food processors to mix extra pasty dough. Anneth was rolling dough into flats and placing them into the refrigerator to chill. Lowen and Sami, who was often at the shop when her mother was, too, were cutting potatoes and onions for the filling. Dad was cutting the steak and moving cooked pasties from the oven to the warmer. Mum was layering new meat pies: onion, potato, meat; and Rena (being a vegetarian — all the Doshis were) was layering vegetarian pies: onion, potato, carrot, and mushroom. Then both women crimped the edges and popped the pasties into the oven. The whole room smelled of buttery piecrust and roasted onions.

  Sami, as directed, propped open the front door to let some of the heat — and the delicious aroma of the pasties — escape. “Whoa,” she said. “Why is there such a long line at the Busy Bee?”

  Mum, who was adjusting the drink selections in the glass cooler (not that they needed any adjusting), said, “Go check it out, Lowen, and report back.” Lowen finished up writing the definition of pasty on their chalkboard, then slid off his chair and walked out front. Sami followed.

  Just like Sami said, there was a long line of Millvillians outside the Busy Bee. Some, like Mr. Avery and the plumber who had worked on the shop, Lowen recognized. Others he didn’t.

  It didn’t make sense. Sure, there was often a crowd of people early in the morning. The quilters, the Knights, the bird-watchers, the town council, and the poets all chose to have their meetings over breakfast at the Busy Bee. They often popped their heads into Mum’s shop to see how she was progressing, and most seemed excited about the new lunch shop opening soon.

  But the Busy Bee closed at 10:30 a.m. It was nearly 11:00 now.

  Sami pointed to a standing sign next to the long line. It read, THE BUSY BEE NOW SERVES LUNCH. FREE MACARONI AND CHEESE TODAY!

  Lowen quickly turned so no one in line could see his reaction. He ran back into their shop, shut the door behind him, and exploded: “They’re serving lunch now!”

  “And offering free food,” Sami added. “Comfort food.”

  Everyone huddled around Mum, who slowly collapsed into one of the two chairs around the table in front.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Rena said.

  Mum shook her head as if to shake away a bad dream. “Why would Mrs. Corbeau do this?”

  “The scarcity principle,” said Sami.

  Everyone turned to look at her.

  “The what?” asked Anneth.

  “The scarcity principle. It brings out competition. Mrs. Corbeau likely believes that there is a limited number of dollars that can be spent on eating out in this town. She’s afraid that you’ll take money from her. Therefore, she’s going to compete with you directly by offering lunch.”

  Clem looked at Sami.

  “Online psychology class,” she said.

  “Sure,” said Rena bitterly. “They want families to move into Millville so they can make a living, so they can keep their school and their sports teams running, so they can look out their windows and see something prettier than the foreclosed houses. But how do they think this is going to work if they won’t help us make a living, too?”

  “I’ll go next door and talk to them,” Dad said.

  “No, don’t, Weaver. It’s up to me to show them that this little town will be better off if we have two good restaurants.”

  “How are you going to do that?” asked Lowen.

  “I don’t know,” Mum said, getting to her feet. “But the first step is to serve the bloody best pasties we can make!”

  During the first two hours, the other new families popped in to congratulate the Grovers and to celebrate the opening. Even though the Cornish Eatery was technically a take-out shop, and there was only one table in the front, everyone ate their first pasties on the premises, making the opening feel more like a party. Some of the little kids sat right down on the floor.

  The Greys, who thoughtfully brought an extra oscillating fan to counter the rising summer temperatures, raved about the pies. “I’ll have to find a way to sneak out during my lunch break to stock up on these pasty pies,” Mr. Grey said. Mr. Grey was actually Dr. Grey — a veterinarian — and he planned to open a veterinary office in town. When Rena told him about her failed business plan, Dr. Grey suggested she try selling some of her wares in his office.

  Kate Kelling brought the toddlers and Mason. Eden had already started her job as a seaplane pilot, flying fishermen into the more remote lakes. “But I’ll take one of these meat pasties to go,” Kate said, wiping one of the twin’s faces with a napkin. “Eden will love it!” After eating two pasties, Mason convinced Clem to go off with him to play in a pickup soccer game.

  Lowen hoped Clem had noticed all the effort he was putting into watching videos and would invite him — but that didn’t happen.

  That’s OK, thought Lowen. Because the only new family that hadn’t arrived yet was the Muñoz family, and if Luna showed up and Clem wasn’t around, well, that was certainly all right with him.

  Unfortunately that didn’t happen either. Only Mr. Muñoz (who was a freelance journalist) and the other two kids (Mateo and Diego) came in. After Mum told them that pasties are even better reheated the next day, they bought a half dozen to go.

  Despite the unexpected competition from the Busy Bee, opening day was lively, and celebratory, and fun.

  The second day was different.

  The food was prepared, the restaurant was prepped, but then the Grovers waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Mum wiped the counters over and over again. Anneth checked the napkin holders, but they were still quite full. Lowen swept the floor while sweat rolled down his back, despite the stale breeze provided by the fan.

  Only one customer came that afternoon, and that was Dylan. He showed up a half hour before closing and paid for his pasty in nickels. All nickels. Then he sat at the table and scarfed down his pasty, telling Mum that her pie was the best food he’d ever tasted. “And my gram was a good cook,” he added.

  By that time, the embarrassment of having no other customers, of having stood around for so long and watched first concern and then feelings of rejection grow in his mother’s eyes, made Lowen irritable. So did Dylan’s method of payment. Obviously Dylan was using his hard-earned money. His generosity should have made Lowen feel warmly toward him. But it didn’t. If possible, Lowen felt even more wary of this kid.

  On the third day, two Millville girls came by the restaurant. They were the same girls who had stood at the base of the ladder when Anneth had been trapped. Mum tied her apron tighter, thinking that they had come for pasties, but it turned out that they had come to say hi to Anneth and show her their green nail polish.

  “Corrine found it online,” said one.

  Corrine held her hand out to compare the color of her nails to Anneth’s. “Yours is prettier,” she said.

  “I mixed this color myself,” said Anneth.

  “I didn’t know you could do that!” said Corrine.

  “
Yeah, mixing makes some awesome colors. But your color is cool, too.”

  That was the sort of thing that Anneth would say to Megan even if it weren’t true, thought Lowen as he tried to give the impression that he (and the Cornish Eatery) was incredibly busy.

  “It’s OK,” said Corrine, “but you’re the trendsetter.”

  Anneth laughed. And just like that they were admiring Anneth’s DIY headband, and the bow she’d attached to her T-shirt, and then the two girls were pulling Anneth out of the shop and off to Dollar Mart to see if the store carried anything they could use to upstyle their tired wardrobes.

  Mum sighed, and then, noticing Lowen noticing her, put on her hopeful face.

  Unfortunately, hope didn’t help. The only other person to enter the shop that afternoon was Sami, who came to see if Lowen wanted to go to the pool with her.

  The No was out of Lowen’s mouth before Sami could finish her sentence.

  “I insist!” Mum said to Lowen. “It’s summer. You should be outside.”

  Being sought out by Sami made him nervous. He wanted to say, Look, you don’t get it. I’m a lousy friend. No, make that a dangerous friend.

  But it seemed like staying in the empty shop with Mum would only make it worse for her. If he left, she could stop faking cheeriness.

  So, twenty minutes later, he and Sami were standing outside the chain-link fence at the town pool, towels in hand.

  “Sorry, kids,” the lifeguard said as they tried to unlatch the gate. “It’s adult swim right now.”

  Lowen groaned. “It figures that adults would get the hottest time of the day,” he grumbled to Sami as they ambled away.

  She was quiet for a moment. Then her face brightened. “Want to swim in the river?” she asked.

  Lowen wasn’t sure . . . but he was hotter than Hades, and he didn’t want to return to the shop. He nodded.

  As they approached the mill, Sami told him that the company that owned the buildings planned to tear them down. “That will be sad for the people who still think it’s going to make paper again.”

  He thought of asking her why she was so sure that it wouldn’t make paper again, but it was too hot even for talking.

  After finding a hole in the chain-link fence that surrounded the mill buildings and crossing the rusty train tracks that had once led trains to Millville twice a day (according to the video they’d seen), they found a spot where a tiny trail led them through tall grass down to the water.

  There was a bit of foam floating on the river’s surface.

  “Do you think it’s polluted?” asked Sami.

  Lowen watched the flowing water. Perhaps it was just the small waves that caused the foam. He took a tentative step forward.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  Lowen jumped a mile.

  It was Dylan, standing on the incline, a few feet behind them.

  “Dylan! You scared us!” cried Sami. “What are you doing here?”

  “Did you follow us here?” Lowen didn’t even bother to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  “I didn’t know the two of you wanted to be alone.”

  Lowen rolled his eyes. “Do you even have your swimsuit on?”

  “No, but —”

  “Well, I’m going in,” Lowen said. “I can’t stand this heat any longer.”

  “There are eddies,” said Dylan.

  What was an eddy? A fish? An eel? “Are they close to the shore?” Lowen asked.

  “Probably not,” said Dylan.

  “Then it should be fine.” Lowen peeled off his T-shirt, kicked off his flip-flops, and waded into the swollen river. The water was cold, but refreshing, and he tried not to think of all the chemicals the mill might have poured into it in days past. Or eddies, whatever the heck they were.

  Waist high in the water, Lowen called out to Sami, “It feels good! Come on in.” And then he wished he hadn’t said that. For all he knew, he was coaxing her into a dangerous situation. What was it about him, anyway?

  Before Sami could respond, a deep voice shouted, “Get out of the river right now!”

  They looked back up the hill.

  Mr. Avery was hobbling down the path.

  Mr. Avery’s command frightened Lowen, but he struggled to get back to shore as the river’s currents worked against him.

  “What in tarnation do you three think you’re doing down there?” Mr. Avery asked when he reached the shore.

  “It’s so hot, and we . . . I thought it would be OK,” said Lowen as he crawled up onto the bank.

  “Oh, you did, did you? Do you happen to know that Millville taxpayers support a swimming pool just so you kids can cool off on a hot day?”

  “It’s adult swim,” Lowen said.

  Mr. Avery shook his head. “Have you taken the time to learn anything about this town? Have you gone on the website? Learned a little history? Checked out the pool hours to find out the best time for you to swim?”

  He turned to Dylan. “And what about you? You know the risks of swimming in this river. The eddies. The sunken logs.” He shook his head. “You’re more like your father every day. I should have guessed you’d follow these two no-goods.”

  Lowen waited for Dylan to defend himself, to say that he tried to warn them, but he didn’t. Instead he looked down, held in his visible anger.

  Both Lowen and Sami started to come to his defense. “He wasn’t —” But Dylan didn’t wait to be defended. He was already racing back up the hill.

  “Go on,” Mr. Avery said, using his whole arm to signal them back up the hill. “You two get out of here as well.”

  While trudging home — still hot, but now with thighs chafing from his wet bathing suit — Lowen could’ve sworn that someone was following him. Twice he snapped around quickly, but there was no one there. Abe, he thought, which, despite the heat, gave him the shivers.

  Maybe that’s why when he saw Ms. Duffey, the town councillor and librarian, digging a hole in her backyard, he thought, Something died. He didn’t think she had murdered anyone or anything, but he did think perhaps she was digging a grave for a pet. He stopped by a tree to watch her, assuming he was being inconspicuous.

  “If you’re going to stand there and watch, Lowen Grover, you might as well come over here and help me,” she said, startling him.

  He obeyed and climbed over her split-rail fence into her small backyard. “What are you burying?” he asked.

  “Now, what makes you think I’m burying something?”

  Lowen shrugged. “I guess I can’t think of another reason for digging a hole.”

  “Around here we also dig holes for planting, but it’s not planting season.”

  Ms. Duffey handed Lowen the shovel. “Now, if you don’t mind,” she said, “I could use some help burying some regrets.”

  Lowen took the shovel and tried to drive it into the packed ground to make the hole deeper. What kind of regrets can you bury? A torn library book? An unanswered letter?

  He was about to ask, How big are these regrets? when he saw two tanned boys meandering down the road wearing T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. One was bouncing an empty Coke bottle — the liter size — on the back of his neck and shoulders. Whump, whump, whump. The other said something, and the first playfully bopped him until he accidently dropped the bottle, and the two immediately moved into a kicking game that resembled soccer.

  The bottle flew into Ms. Duffey’s yard, nearly hitting the tomatoes growing in a nearby vegetable patch.

  “Hello, Joey Larsen,” said Ms. Duffey as the boy bounded after it.

  “Hi,” he said shyly, but the whole time he was staring at Lowen standing there in his wet swim trunks, digging a hole in the librarian’s back lawn.

  “Have you two met?” asked Ms. Duffey, and when both Lowen and Joey shook their heads, she called the other kid over and introduced the three of them. The second boy’s name was Kyle Jacques.

  “You’ll all be in the same class,” she explained to Lowen. “In fact,”
she said, “the three of you and Dylan Firebrand will make up all the boys in your class. Did you ever think you’d be in a class of eight students, Lowen?”

  Lowen tried to keep the shock from showing on his face. Eight students? Suddenly his dreams of disappearing into the crowd went up in smoke.

  Before Lowen could say anything, Joey spouted, “Nice to meet you,” and he and Kyle raced off.

  So there it was. Lowen had met other Millville boys his own age, and they hadn’t seemed interested in him at all. Nor, Lowen guessed, did they care much for Dylan Firebrand. Seeing the boys jog off together gave Lowen a peculiar pang of loneliness. It was one thing to decide when to hang out with others, another to be ignored.

  He finished digging the hole, said good-bye to Ms. Duffey, and was nearly home before he realized that he’d never found out what she was burying.

  The loneliness he felt after seeing the boys continued right through dinner. Dad had already boarded the bus to return to Flintlock. Clem was full of talk about the high-school soccer preseason that would begin the next day (middle-school practices didn’t happen until September), and Anneth was blabbing on about her new friends and her idea of starting her own YouTube channel, where she would talk about fashion. Apparently, she had wanted to start one in Flintlock but Megan had discouraged her. First of all, you have to be someone who sets trends, Megan had said, not follows them. Secondly, all the best teen fashionistas are connected with fashion designers who send them free stuff.

  “Didn’t you point out that the fashion designers find the girls because they have YouTube channels?” asked Mum.

  “I was going to, but I didn’t think I had a unique perspective,” said Anneth. “But I do now. I’m going to talk about making fashion in a town where there are no department stores — and not even any fabric stores. I’m going to talk about making fashion from nothing.”

  “That’s ambitious!” said Mum. “You might see if there’s an old sewing machine at the antique store. I’m not sure if sewing machines qualify as antiques yet, but that store seems to carry a little bit of everything.”

  “Everything that doesn’t land on our lawn,” Clem said with a glint in his eye.