Free Seventeen Against the Dealer by Cynthia Voigt Page B

put his pots down in a spot that worked well once for him. She needed the extra security of some kind of window covering that could be put on and taken off. And she needed tools, but she didn’t know how much to estimate for that. Maybe $250. She’d never bought new tools. She didn’t have any records of how much she had spent on her old tools, over the years, her own tools that she’d—she stopped thinking along that line.
    Dicey compared the numbers. If she took $250 out of the account, that would get her down to barely two months. The $75 she gave to Gram every month, for room and board, were seventy-five dollars she could ill afford. For a second, Dicey imagined that she might not give Gram the money, but she knew that she couldn’t fail to pay her own way at home.
    When she had the figures all written down in front of her, Dicey added in the $500 check that was in her pocket. That would pay for tools and supplies. She didn’t like the idea of spending it, because it meant she was spending her profit before she’d made a single cut in the wood, before she’d even unloaded the wood into the shop. It meant she was spending what she hadn’t earned.
    Dicey leaned her head on her hands, and looked at the numbers. Looking at them, at how they didn’t change, at their balancings between debits and credits, she made herself look again at Claude’s offer. You had to balance time and money. She had to weigh the time she’d have to waste working on Claude’s boats against the money that work would bring in.
    Working full-time, which was about a nine-hour day, she couldprobably get the thirty boats done in two months. If she put eight or nine hours a day into Claude’s boats, and if she were willing to work longer hours, then she could still spend two or three hours a day on the boat for Mr. Hobart.
    Dicey could work, she knew that about herself. What she didn’t want to do—and she didn’t want to do it so much that it was the same as not being able to do it—was borrow money, even against future earnings, or fail to pay Gram the monthly room and board.
    That looked like the decision, then. She couldn’t call it a choice when there was nothing else she could really choose to do. All she was deciding was that she would be able to do what she knew she’d have to do.
    Dicey took another sheet of paper and roughed out a work schedule: with eight weeks, she’d have to do three or four boats a week. It would be tight, because she had to allow time for the coats of paint to dry, but it could probably be done. She didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to spend her time on that kind of work—but doing it was the only way she could see to stay in business. At the end, she’d have three clear weeks to concentrate on Mr. Hobart’s boat.
    It wasn’t a decision she liked, but it was a decision made, and she felt better for it. She lifted her head from the pages of numbers and looked out the window. The sun had come up, dragging low gray clouds behind it. Dicey got dressed, fast, and went downstairs.
    Gram was ahead of her in the kitchen, with a batch of pancake batter in a bowl and the griddle hot, the table set, and the bottle of maple syrup warming in a pot of simmering water. That was one of their few extravagances. They bought real maple syrup, the cheapest kind, but still the real thing, and real butter, too. Everywhere else the Tillermans pinched their pennies, hard.
    Sammy stumbled in while Dicey was still eating. He’d always woken up slowly and reluctantly. Dicey watched him clumsily pull out a chair, sit down on the edge of it and then slide cautiously over to the middle, look at the fork and knife as if he’d never seen utensils before; she lowered her face to hide her smile. The first ten minutes of Sammy in the morning were as much fun as puppies. After two plates of pancakes, his eyes brightened and he began speaking