Chapter 16: Street Food

She started paying him on the second of the fourth month. It wasn't generosity. She explained this to him carefully, sitting on the stern bench with the string of coppers in her lap. He was paid off. He'd been paid off since the twenty-sixth. And a man who poled her ferry every day from first light to the evening bell, and caught her rope, and held the boat against the post, and hauled drunks and farmers and goats, was doing a polesman's work. Two coppers a day was the rate at Willow Crossing, and her grandfather had paid it. She was not going to be the first Hong in three generations to cheat a polesman. "And if I don't want wages?" said Fish. "Then you can throw them in the lake. I don't care what you do with them." She counted two coppers off the string and held them out.…