Billion Dollar Boy

CHAPTER ONE By nine-thirty, fifty full breakfasts had been cooked and served. The pans and dishes were cleaned and back in their racks, and the staff of the house were more than ready to relax and enjoy their own meal. They were sitting at a long wooden table on the basement level. The words that came wafting down to them through the house's internal communications system produced a communal shudder. "Say, didn't you hear what I told you yesterday?" It was a young male voice, high-pitched and whining. "I like my omelette just a little bit undercooked and runny. What you sent me was firm all the way through. I'll take another oneand you better get it right this time." The kitchen staff stared at each other, until at last one of them stood up. "All right, I'll do it." He was a heavily built man in his late fifties with a worn, weather-beaten face. He turned to one of the women at the table. "I thought what I cooked was just the way he liked it. Didn't he eat it?" "Are you kidding? Young Porky?" She made a grunting noise like a pig. "He ate every scrap. It looked like he licked the plate. You don't get that fat without working at it." "I thought so." The man stared down at his own untouched food. "Keep this hot for me, would you, Mitzi? I made the first one, so I guess it's my job to give him another. But I won't tell you what I'dliketo give him." "And what I'd like to give him, too," said a thin young woman at the end of the table. "Yesterday afternoon, I was all finished cleaning upstairs. Then just when I was set to leave,hecame in. You know how it had rained. He didn't bother to wipe his boots. He trampled mud all over the rugs and up the stairs, and I had to start over. He knew it, too. He stood there and smirked at me and the mess. I felt like giving him a good one with the vacuum cleaner." There was a murmur of agreement from around the table. "Pity somebody didn't do that long ago," said another of the maids. The others chimed in. "A smack on that fat backside would work wonders." "If only his mother had somecontrol." "Or his father was around more." "I'm not one for violence, but a whack or two would do him a power of good." "Don't even think of it." The heavily built man spoke with authority as the senior member of the household staff. He was over at the long metal-topped range pouring oil into a skillet. "His mother has no control of him, so she won't let anybody else have any, either. If you was so much as to touch His Lordship, you'd be out of this house and off the estate by midday." "Sometimes I feel like it would be worth it, Branton," said the thin young maid. "There's a limit, you know. A person can only put up with so much." "You talk like that, Edna, because you've never worked any place but here." Three eggs had been broken into a bowl and were now being beaten vigorously, as though the older man was taking his feelings out on them. "If you'd been in the Pool for years, like me, wondering if you'd ever get a job again, you'd feel different. Cleaning up mud's a whole lot better than lying down and sleeping in it. You'd put up with plenty from God's gift to Earth before you'd be willing to go back to the Pool. If I was" "Hey down therSheffield, Charles is the author of 'Billion Dollar Boy' with ISBN 9780765345660 and ISBN 0765345668.