Sally had been relieved when Lily came home for lunch, and then worried when she saw the shopping bag full of ingredients.

  She felt bad that Lily felt like she needed to support the family.

  She was only eight…

  At her age, she should be playing, not worrying about money.

  But, she was also at that age when she wanted to do things herself, too.

  And Sally wanted to support that.

  So when Lily declared that she wanted to practice cooking, Sally forced herself to stand back and simply watch over her daughter.

  And…

  In the end, the lunch Lily had cooked for the three of them was incredibly delicious!

  Sally hadn’t seen Bill, her husband, smile like that in a long time…

  And Lily had been very proud of herself with how it turned out.

  “Praise the Gods and Goddesses!” she had declared when she finished cooking. “Praise the God of Death!”

  That had concerned Sally a bit.

  “Mr. Lord Hades sent me the recipe!” Lily had explained, and Sally and Bill had just smiled.

  Since when did the God of Death send recipes to eight year old girls?

  Still, it had turned out well in the end, so the family said their after-meal prayers with sincerity and gratitude in their hearts, and Lily raced back out the door again, this time with her father’s old lunchbox, now Lily’s money box.

  Lily was feeling much more confident now that she had tried the recipe herself.

  Both that she really could cook it up herself, and that people would like it.

  The ghosts were right, it really was super yummy!

  Sure, the bit with the potatoes had been awkward, but the ghosts had promised that there was a tool to make slicing them easier, and that if she used a real fryer, cooking them would be fast and easy.

  That afternoon, Lily went to the various stores and put in orders to pick up first thing tomorrow morning.

  Buns from the bakery, ground beef from the butcher, cheese and ketchup and mustard and pickles and potatoes from the market, as well as lemons and sugar.

  The ghosts said there was something called ‘coffee,’ made from beans, but Lily couldn’t find anything at the market like that. Nothing they could do about it.

  After that, Lily went to the village smith to ask him to make her a cart she could push, and he installed on it a refrigerator, a griddle, a small oil fryer, and some heat lamps.

  It was rather small, but the smith was really good at his job, so he fit it all in, and just as the ghosts had said, all the cooking equipment Lily would need cost about two hundred dollars.

  It hurt to spend that much money, but Lily had faith!

  She had the God of Death’s ghostly minions on her side!

  Rich and Mac didn’t really like being called ‘minions,’ but it was kind of accurate, so they just smiled awkwardly.

  Now, while Lily could push the cart herself, it was still really hard. And if there was a slope, forget about it! The smith was really nice, though, and pushed it to the mine for her, and there Lily spoke with the supervisor again.

  It turned out, the supervisor’s name was Mr. Foreman!

  How apropos!

  “Mr. Foreman,” Lily asked politely, “would it be okay to plug my cart in here starting tomorrow?”

  Mike Foreman, the supervisor, looked down at the little girl and her cart. He knew she was Bill’s daughter, and he felt bad about what had happened. Poor Bill had been hurt in a mining accident, and had been laid up recovering for the last month.

  “What’s the cart for?” he asked.

  “It’s a business! I’m going to make food for the miners!” Lily declared, puffing out her little chest proudly.

  “Good job, Lily!” Mac encouraged her.

  “Yeah, you’re selling it!” Rich added.

  Though, only Lily could hear or see the ghosts.

  Mr. Foreman rubbed his jaw. “Hmmm, that should be alright.” He inspected the wiring, made sure it was safe, and confirmed the power draw wouldn’t be too much of a strain on the mine’s power system. It wouldn’t, of course, since mining uses a lot of power! But better to be careful.

  “And can I keep the cart here overnights?” Lily asked.

  They had ordered a cloth covering for the cart, to cover it up when they weren’t using it.

  Mr. Foreman nodded. “Sure, I don’t see why not.”

  Lily lived in a safe community, where people didn’t steal!

  And with that, Lily went home, with butterflies in her stomach.

  She was back earlier than normal, and went up to her room and counted how much money she had left.

  After buying the cart and ordering her ingredients for tomorrow, she was down to just fifty-one dollars and thirty cents, a lot of that in coins.

  “Oohhh…” she groaned. “All my money…”

  “Don’t worry, Lily.”

  “Yeah, it’s gonna be okay. You gotta spend money to make money. It’s an investment.”

  “Investment?” Lily asked.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “Yeah. We’ll explain it more tomorrow.”

  And so, Lily helped around the house and talked with her Papa about his work in the mine.

  Even though that was where Papa had gotten hurt, he was okay with talking about it. About digging into the earth, putting up the timbering that held up the roof, carting out the ore—which was the valuable rocks—and so on.

  Lily’s Mama sighed. “I just don’t know what it is about boys and digging holes…” she said. Lily’s Papa chuckled weakly. “It’s just one of those things,” he answered.

  “And you got hungry working in the mine, right?” Lily asked hopefully.

  Papa glanced at Mama before answering. “Well, yes, it’s hungry work, mining,” he said, and quickly added, “but your Mama always packed me a big delicious lunch, so I was fine. Some of the other guys, though… To be honest, I shared my lunch with them a few times. Your Mama’s the best cook out of all the other guys’ wives that I know.”

  Lily was happy to see her Mama smile proudly when she heard that.

  She wanted to see her parents smile more!

  That was why she had to make a lot of money, so they could stop worrying and be happy!

  She clenched her little hands into fists, determined to make a lot of money tomorrow.

  And so, after her usual prayers, and some extra ones to the God of Business and the Goddess of Healing, for her Papa, she lay down in bed and conked out, fast asleep.

  “Lily, wake up.”

  “Lily, it’s time to go!”

  “Ah!”

  Lily woke up a little earlier than normal, with the ghostly brothers’ help.

  The sun had just started rising over the horizon.

  Lily ate an extra big breakfast of porridge, and ran out the door.

  She had a lot of work to do!

  First, she ran to the bakery, and picked up her order of buns.

  They were in a big bag, which she carried carefully to the cart, and Mr. Foreman plugged it in for her. She put the buns down, and ran back to get the rest of her orders and carry them to the cart.

  “Huff… puff…” Lily panted as she went back and forth in the cool morning air.

  “Hopefully you can negotiate deliveries directly to the cart going forward,” Mac said.

  “Right, if today goes well, you’ll be able to put in a standing order for ingredients,” Rich added.

  Lily frowned.

  “Will I have enough money for that…?”

  She had already spent most of the money she’d earned last month.

  But the ghostly brothers nodded.

  “Yep, put that all down and we can start the prep work, and we’ll explain.”

  First, Lily made sure all the ground beef, cheese, and other ingredients that needed to be cold were safely in the refrigerator, and it was working properly. Then she washed her potatoes, using the sink on the outside of the supervisor’s shack. There was also a water fountain there, for the miners to get water to drink.

  That done, she started slicing the potatoes as the ghostly brothers explained.

  “See, each potato you bought was five cents, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the fry slicer you ordered was fifteen dollars.”

  “Yeah, it was super expensive!”

  “It was worth it though, trust us.”

  Lily had to admit, it was a lot easier to cut up the potatoes with the special slicer rather than using a knife. With just one motion, each potato was instantly turned into a bunch of potato strips.

  “Now, we’ll sell fries in one serving size, which is about as much as you get from one potato.”

  “So it’s five cents worth of potato in each serving of fries.”

  “Uh huh,” Lily said as she continued slicing potatoes and storing the fries in bag for later.

  “And we’ll sell each serving of fries for fifty cents.”

  “Huh?!” Lily gasped. “But that’s so much more!”

  “Well, that’s how you make a profit,” Mac said patiently.

  “And the potatoes aren’t the only cost, Lily,” Rich added. “There’s the oil to fry them in, the salt, the slicer you’re using, the cart, and your labor making the fries.”

  “If you figure it’s ten cents of ingredients for each serving of fries, that’s about forty cents of revenue left to cover all the rest. And we’re not even figuring in rent for location, or power, or water, or anything else.”

  Lily gulped. Business was complicated!

  But she would do her best!

  “And eventually, you’ll want to make your money back from the cart and the slicer and everything. The cart was two hundred dollars, roughly, and five servings of french fries would make you two dollars after the ingredient costs, so you’d need to sell five hundred servings of french fries to make all your money back.”

  Lily gasped. She couldn’t help herself.

  “That’s so many!” she exclaimed. “Can I really sell that many french fries?!”

  She hadn’t even bought five hundred potatoes! She’d bought ten today!

  The brothers laughed.

  “Oh, you certainly can!” Mac said.

  “Trust me, the limit isn’t going to be customers, it’s going to be how fast you can serve them.”

  The brothers went on to explain the rest of the menu items.

  The bun was about five cents each, and the ground beef was about ten cents, and the condiments and all the rest was four cents. There was also cheese, and each slice of that was about one cent, since it was cheap and not that much was needed.

  “So we think you should charge ninety cents for a regular hamburger, and a dollar for a cheeseburger.”

  Lily liked cheese on her burger, but her Mama had liked a hamburger without cheese, so she nodded.

  “So the cost for a hamburger’s ingredients is nineteen cents, and a cheeseburger is twenty cents,” she said, adding up the numbers in her head.

  She was good at math!

  Mac nodded. “Right, and so your gross profit for a hamburger is seventy-one cents, and for a cheeseburger its eighty cents.”

  “And since you can add the cheese at the end, when the customer orders, and the cheese won’t go bad for a long time compared to the rest of the ingredients, there’s very little waste. It’s a good way to increase the money you make.”

  While they talked, Lily formed the ground beef into patties and put them in the refrigerator, too.

  A little bit before lunch time, she’d cook them up, put the burgers together, and then put them under the heat lamp.

  Finally, there was the lemonade. She squeezed all the lemons, mixed in the water and sugar, and stirred it up.

  It was almost lunch time, and the water was icy cold, so it should stay cold throughout the entire break.

  Lily and the brothers had calculated that each serving of lemonade would cost about five cents, and she would sell it for fifty cents each. Most of the miners had their own cups, and it would be easier for her to just let them fill up their own cups. For the food, the burgers and fries, she had had the smith make her thin metal plates.

  The ghosts frowned at the plates, reminiscing.

  “Man, Mac, we broke so many plates back in the day…”

  “Yeah, ceramic plates were terrible. Switching to paper was a good idea.”

  But there was no good supplier of waxed paper in Lily’s village, and the metal plates were reusable and much harder to break, so it was a good compromise.

  It had just been expensive up front.

  And they would need to be washed after each use.

  If things got busy, they’d need to buy more…

  With the brothers’ direction, Lily started cooking up the burgers and fries, stacking her completed products under the heatlamps.

  Ten servings of french fries.

  Ten hamburgers, which she could add cheese to if needed.

  A pitcher with what they figured was ten servings of lemonade.

  Lily had invested over two hundred and fifty dollars into this venture.

  The lunch bell rang! Miners started coming up out of the mine towards the benches.

  Lily gulped nervously. All of them were carrying lunch boxes!

  Would any of the miners buy her burgers and fries?

  Lily prayed to the Gods and Goddesses!