She tells it in cheap words. He is too young to hear the art.
Once there was a dog, she says, and the dog had a house, and the house had a door, and behind the door there was a bone the dog had put there. He has heard it forty times. He mouths the next bit half a beat ahead of her, the way people do with a song, and she slows down so that he stays ahead. Every day the dog went out and came back and the bone was there. Good, said the dog. Good, good.
Every word in it is a word she can afford to lose.
The block in the corner is nine years old and drops the last word of anything longer than a sentence. She keeps her sentences short. The boy thinks that is how stories go. The dear words stay in the tin on the shelf: ferry. Grandmother. Ash. The name of the water. Always. Nine of them now, saved since he was born, and a tenth coming at the end of the month if the tin allows. The molar at the back has been talking to her for a month; she answers it with her tongue and not the dentist, and tells the dog story around it. On the first of every month she says all nine out loud in the kitchen, one at a time, to keep the reading fresh. It takes under a minute. She does it with the tap running.
Is that the end, he says.
That is the end for tonight, she says. Tomorrow the dog goes to the shop.
At school they are taught which words are cheap, in a song, with actions. He can do the actions.
He is asleep before the dog reaches the shop. The shop is the good part.
She sits for a minute in the dark doing the sums she does. Two hundred and six words of proven retention in the household, against a board that read two hundred and forty in the spring and will read three hundred in the new year. The nine in the tin are the nine she can prove twice. Two adults. One child. The arithmetic has an answer and the answer is that somebody is not crossing, and every mother on this stair street has done the same sum and arrived at the same silence about it.
She checks the tin before she goes to bed. Nine words. She takes one out and holds it, the way you hold a coin, and says it once, quietly, to no one, and puts it back.
It is still in there. The school sends home a note about his vocabulary, with a figure on it, and the figure counts the dear words he has been taught and not the ones he has been saved; she reads it twice and keeps it in the tin. It costs nothing to say and everything to spend. She has not explained the difference and does not intend to.