We drove to my bank. On the way, I started to argue—about modern life, about how everything was subscription now, about how I didn’t choose the rules. He didn’t answer. He turned on the local AM station that sounded like it was broadcast from a submarine and let a preacher scold me about stewardship for six exits.
Back at the table, we filled the jars with actual paper. It felt primitive. It also felt like truth.
By lunch, Frank had me canceling things. We opened my laptop and made a list: four streaming services, two “free” trials I had generously continued for eleven months, three cloud storage plans for the same photos of my dog, a meditation app I used while scrolling doom, and a “pro” version of a note-taking app I used to write “buy milk” and then forget to buy milk.
I winced at each “Are you sure?” popup like they were asking if I wanted to amputate joy. Frank read the screens over my shoulder and snorted.
“Funny how none of them ask that when you sign up,” he said.
When we got to food delivery, I hesitated. I told him it helped me “save time.” He barked a laugh so sharp the dog on the AM station turned his head.
“You spend forty minutes choosing a hamburger,” he said. “You could have cooked a potato army in that time.”
We made a deal: No delivery for thirty days. I could cook, meal prep, or invite disaster by not eating at all, but no little bags arriving at the door with fries that taste like regret.
“Thirty days?” I said. “That’s extreme.”
“You’re not marrying it,” he said. “You’re just dating self-control.”
That afternoon, we went to the discount grocer across town where the aisles are stacks of boxes and the music is the sound of your grandmother being right. Frank quizzed me on unit prices like it was a game show for people who wanted to keep the lights on.
“Oats,” he said, holding two bags. “Big one is $3.99 for 42 ounces. Little one is $2.49 for 18. Which one?”
“Big,” I said.
“Why?”
“Cheaper per ounce.”
“What does cheaper per ounce buy you?”
I blinked. “Money.”
“No,” he said. “Time. The time you don’t have to spend working to pay for the dumb small bag.”
When we got home, he taught me to make soup out of anything that used to be alive. We chopped, simmered, salted, and ladled. The whole kitchen smelled like humility and onions. He set aside containers for the freezer and wrote dates on the lids because “future you is a forgetful little prince.”
At night, when I would have usually scrolled until my eyes felt like raisins, we sat at his little buzzing TV and watched the news I never paid attention to. It was weirdly calming to hear about the world for free.
On the third day of my unwilling apprenticeship, the hot water heater died with a groan that sounded like a whale giving up on humanity. I stood in the basement and watched the water puddle under the tank, calculating interest rates in my head and wondering how many burgers this emergency would cost.
Frank didn’t curse. He didn’t panic. He just went to the desk and took out an envelope labeled OH-NO.
He counted out $600 and put the envelope back, now thinner but not sad. He called a guy who knew a guy. The guy came, replaced a part, and drank a coffee so strong it could walk to work on its own. By dinner, the water was hot again.
“You didn’t even think about using a credit card,” I said, stunned.
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