The five became a ten. The ten became a twenty on birthdays and report-card days, which Earl treated as Owen's holidays even when the report card was Lena's. By the time Owen was seven the Sunday bill was often a fifty, crisp, taken from the back of the wallet where Earl kept the bills he considered serious. He did not do it every week. He did it often enough that Owen had started to wait for it with a stillness that looked like politeness and felt, if you knew him, like bracing.
***
In October, Lena's science-fair board took the kitchen over for a week.
She was testing which household liquid kept cut flowers upright longest. Water, soda, apple juice, a teaspoon of sugar, a penny in a jar because a website had said copper did something and she wanted to see if the website was lying. The table disappeared under paper towels and mason jars. Owen was forbidden, gently, from drinking the experiments. He obeyed. He was a boy who obeyed until obedience started to hurt, and then he obeyed a little longer out of confusion.
Earl came on Sunday and stood over the jars with his hands in his pockets.
"This is the project," Lena said. She had practiced the sentence. Not "my project." The project, as if it existed outside her need to be praised for it. "The sugar water is winning, but I think it's the sugar and not the water, so I'm doing a second set with just sugar dissolved, to isolate the variable."
She said "isolate the variable" with the careful pride of a person who had learned a phrase and earned the right to use it.
Earl nodded at the jars. "Huh."
Owen tugged his sleeve. "Grandpa, I can whistle now. Listen." He whistled, badly, a thin sound that broke in the middle. Earl's face changed. The change was small and total, a porch light coming on.
"Would you listen to that," Earl said. "A man of talents. Come here."
He sat on the sofa and pulled Owen up beside him and made him whistle again, and again, and laughed each time the note failed, not unkindly, the way you laugh at a magic trick performed by someone you have already decided is magic. Lena stood by her jars with her hands at her sides. The sugar water had a carnation still upright in it. She had written the hours on a chart in pencil so she could ink them later if the results held.
Marcus came in from taking the trash out and saw the shape of the room: the man and the boy curved toward each other, the girl standing in her own experiment as if she were waiting for a bus.
"Dad," he said. "She's got a real thing going here. You should let her walk you through it."
"I saw it," Earl said. "Flowers in jars. My mother did that without a board. Lena, honey, you don't have to turn the kitchen into a laboratory to prove you're smart. Everybody already knows you sit still and do what you're told. That's a gift. Don't make it your whole personality."
Lena's mouth did something small. "It's not about sitting still."