Chapter 1
Eighty-Seven Cents
The morning Willa Hart decided to buy herself breakfast, she counted her money eleven times.
She did it on the walk into town, the coins warm from her fist, clicking against each other in the rhythm of her shoes on the sidewalk. Eighty-seven cents. Two quarters, three dimes, a nickel, two pennies. She had arranged and rearranged them on her dresser the night before, stacked them into a tower, knocked the tower down, and rebuilt it, as if the arithmetic might change if she approached it from a different angle. It did not change. But the sign in the window of the Copper Kettle had said SUNRISE PLATE $2.50 for as long as she could remember, and she had decided, with the absolute certainty available only to a nine-year-old, that eighty-seven cents was close enough to begin a negotiation.
The money had come the honest, slow way. For three weeks she had carried her grandmother's empty bottles to the corner store, where the shopkeeper paid out the nickel deposits without comment. The rest she had found the way poor children have always found money: in the coin returns of the laundromat dryers, in the gutter outside the post office. "Found money," Bea called it, and dropped it in the chipped teacup on Willa's dresser without ever spending a cent of it.
Willow Bend woke up slowly in April. The river fog sat low over Main Street, and the houses with their peeling paint held their breath the way they always did before the day committed itself. Willa's grandmother Bea had left for her shift at the laundromat before dawn, leaving a note on the refrigerator in her careful block letters: OATMEAL ON STOVE. LOVE YOU. Willa had eaten the oatmeal. It had not been enough. Hunger had been sitting in her stomach for two days now like a stone, ever since Bea's hours got cut and the grocery money thinned to almost nothing, and this morning the stone had grown teeth.
She had stood at the refrigerator a long time, reading the note over and over. The oatmeal had been thin, the spoon scraping the bottom of the pot in loud circles. Then she had taken the teacup money, every cent, and put on her coat.
The Copper Kettle sat on the corner of Main and Ferry, a long narrow building with a chrome band around its middle like a belt, and windows that glowed the color of egg yolks from the inside. A bell rang when Willa pushed the door open, bright as a struck coin, and the smell hit her all at once β bacon and coffee and something sweet baking, and underneath it the particular smell of a grill that had been seasoned by ten thousand mornings. Her mouth watered so hard it hurt.
The door handle had been cold enough to sting her palm. Inside, the chalkboard of specials hung crooked over the pass, and for one dizzying second Willa understood that she was somewhere she had never been allowed to be alone, and the courage she'd carried all the way down Main Street wobbled like her coin tower in a draft.
She climbed onto a stool at the counter. Her feet didn't reach the footrest. She set her coins on the counter in a careful tower, the way she had practiced, and waited.
The waiter came over. He was young, twenty-two maybe, with dark hair that fell into his eyes and a name tag that said DANNY. He had the particular tiredness of someone working the breakfast rush alone, and he looked at Willa's coin tower the way you'd look at a math problem you didn't want to solve. He was wiping the counter with a gray rag, and he stopped when he saw her.
"What'll it be, kid?"
"The Sunrise Plate, please," Willa said. She had rehearsed this. She said it clearly, the way her teacher Miss Fenn said you should speak when you wanted to be taken seriously.
Danny glanced at the tower. He counted it without touching it, the way experienced waiters do. "That's eighty-seven cents."
"I know." Willa kept her voice steady. "I was wondering β could I maybe pay the rest later? I live just over on Chestnut. My grandma β"
She had a second offer ready, the real one, the one she'd practiced in the bathroom mirror: she could wash dishes, she could sweep the floor, she was strong for nine. But the words dried up somewhere between her chest and her mouth, because Danny was already shaking his head, and she understood, with the quick instinct of children who are used to no, that offering labor would only make it worse.
"Kid." Danny's voice changed. It got louder, and something in it turned performative, for the benefit of the room. "The Sunrise Plate is two-fifty. You don't have two-fifty."
A trucker at the end of the counter looked up from his newspaper. Two women in a booth stopped talking. Willa felt the whole diner tilt its attention toward her like a plant toward light, and heat climbed up her neck.
"Please," she whispered. "I'm really hungry."
Danny reached past her and took the plate β her plate, the one the cook had already started, the one with two eggs going opaque at the edges and a slice of toast browning β and he lifted it off the pass and carried it back into the kitchen. The smell of it went with him. Willa's hands stayed on the counter where the plate had been, empty, the coins still standing in their tower.
Through the pass, in the steam and the clatter, she caught a flash of movement β a woman in a white apron, older, her hand going still on a spatula, her face turning toward the dining room. Then the kitchen door swung, and the woman was gone behind the steam.
"You don't eat till you pay," Danny said, not unkindly, but loudly enough. "House rules."
Willa stared at the tower of coins. She did not cry. She had learned, somewhere between her mother leaving and her grandmother's cough getting worse, that crying in public made everything harder. She slid off the stool, and her shoes hit the tile with a sound that seemed to echo, and she walked toward the door with the bell waiting above it like a judgment.