“Hey, you can’t talk to Minnie that way.” Keith Tanaka, one of the older teachers who worked in Rafe’s middle school, aimed the pointy end of his pizza slice at my beloved. “She’s your fiancée. Be more respectful.”

I grinned around the big bite of pizza I’d just put into my mouth. In many situations it would have been inappropriate for an employee to help his boss install light fixtures in his house, but this was Chilson, and here all things were possible. And while there were many reasons I liked Keith—how he truly listened to each and every one of his students, how he had the worst-ever fake English accent, how he could pull off a bow tie—the way he talked back to Rafe was one of my favorites.

“Okay,” Rafe said. “Minnie, my sweet, love of my life, light of my heart, what on earth makes you think you should schedule yourself to work that many hours in a week? Are you nuts?”

I chewed and swallowed. “I have it on good authority that I am full of vim and vigor.”

“Not if you schedule yourself for that many hours a week. Because I know you. Schedule for fifty, and you’ll work more like sixty. Or seventy. You do remember you’re salary, right? You don’t get paid overtime.”

Annoyance crept in. “And how many hours did you put in last week? You were at the school by seven every morning, and did you get back before eight any evening? You did not. Hang on, let me do that math. That’s, um . . .” Once again, I realized I did not have a Math Brain.

“Sixty-five,” Keith whispered to me.

“That’s sixty-five hours a week! You think you can do it but I can’t?”

With the flats of his hands, Keith did a drumroll on the card table we were using as a dining table. “Gotcha! Your turn, boss,” he said.

Rafe eyed him. “Isn’t it about time you retired? I know you said in a couple of years, but what do you think about this coming June?”

“Questions like that make me want to keep working forever,” Keith said. “And where are you going to find another math teacher with my background and experience?”

“That’s right.” I pushed the pizza box in Keith’s direction. “Not many math teachers spend their summers helping their electrician sons with their contracting business. It’s very handy for us.”

“Just another of my many careers.” Keith picked up a piece of sausage and onion. “Want to hear about the summer jobs I had through college?”

“No,” Rafe said.

“Absolutely,” I said.

Keith smiled. “One year I had two, and they were the best- and worst-ever summer jobs.”