Just My Luck

  The worst would be if Dad gets caught up in the moment and forgets what he can’t do. If he thinks, Oh look, friends! and comes down to spend twenty minutes trying to get hello to come out of his mouth.

  George doesn’t mind running up the stairs to stand next to Dad. Dad puts his arm around George and everyone waits for a long minute to see what will happen next. I have to say this—George and Dad look more related to each other now than they used to. Like they’re more than just father and son now. They’re two people who’ve been in the same car accident or something. They’re both reeling away, trying to figure out what happened.

  I’m not sure why Mom isn’t climbing the stairs to do something. Maybe she’s like the rest of us, waiting to see what Dad is going to do. Finally he smiles, squeezes George to his side, and holds up a big thumbs-up sign. George does it, too, and everyone claps.

  Mom climbs the stairs and turns around to say, “Brian just wants to thank everyone so much for coming out today. Our whole family appreciates this incredible show of support.” She’s crying as she says this, which makes me run over and stand next to her. “I mean that,” she says, squeezing me. “We’ve learned a lot today about how generous people can be. We are so grateful to all of our friends who have helped us.” She looks over at Olga, who is listening and counting her coffee can of money. It looks like she’s made a lot.

  Martin’s friends at the toy sale whoop and hold up a fistful of dollar bills. I hadn’t even noticed until now but all the Nerf guns are sold. And so are most of the other toys. “Go, Mr. Barrows!” one of them yells.

  Dad raises his eyes and gives them another thumbs-up. It makes me wish I had a crowd of guy friends like Martin does. Rayshawn hasn’t come, which means the only person I have here is Olga. Maybe she’s my only friend, which shouldn’t depress me, but it sort of does.

  And then I look over at my station and see another surprise. Mr. Norris and Aaron and Ms. Crocker are all standing in the game arcade. He must know this is my spot because I made one of the games from the recycle bin in art class. It’s a cardboard ball maze constructed with toilet paper rolls stapled onto a piece of cardboard. It’s my favorite game in the arcade even if no one has played it yet.

  I come over and say hello to Mr. Norris and Ms. Crocker and offer Aaron a high five, which is the only way George will say hi to strangers. Aaron does it, sort of, only he misses my hand.

  Mr. Norris and Ms. Crocker tell me it looks like a great fair and a great game arcade. They keep talking, but I don’t listen too closely because I’m looking at what Aaron is studying: our old beanbag toss game with the clown nose that’s too small.

  I pick up a beanbag and show him how, even if you stuff it, it’s hard to get through. I’m surprised because I’ve got his attention. He’s definitely watching. When I finally get the beanbag to disappear through the nose, he does something George would totally do: he laughs really loud.

  I reach around with my other hand and pull the beanbag out again. “Ta-da!” More laughter!

  Stuff it through: he laughs.

  Make it reappear: he laughs again.

  I do it a bunch of times and then I change it up a little. I hand the beanbag to him. He doesn’t take it. He pushes my hand toward the hole, so I’ll keep doing the trick. This is just like George, who will pull me over to the refrigerator to get me to open the door for him. He knows how to do things, he just doesn’t think he can. “You do it,” I say, holding the beanbag out to Aaron.

  He puts his fingers in his ears like he’s trying to say, No, don’t say that. You do it.

  I do it a few more times so he’s laughing again and the fingers are out of his ears. Then I take a risk: I just put the beanbag in his hand.

  He doesn’t want to do it himself, but he wants the game to keep going, so it’s almost like his hand does it by itself. He pushes the beanbag through and laughs. I pull it out. “Ta-da!” And he laughs again. He does it again and we crack ourselves up.

  We’ve got a pretty good joke going that reminds me of playing around with George, where nothing you’re doing is all that funny and you laugh just because the other person is laughing so hard.

  The game ends when I see my fourth big surprise of the day: Jeremy pushing his bike across the lawn. He looks mad, like he’s already been to the toy sale and found out all the Nerf guns are gone. Maybe he’s figured out this is Mr. Norris’s son I’m standing with. Maybe he saw Mr. Norris put a twenty-dollar bill in my coffee can, which he did a few minutes ago. I wave to Jeremy, nervous about what he might say. “Hi! Thanks for coming!”

  “Are people supposed to pay for these games?” he says.

  Aaron has already walked away, so it’s fine for me to talk to him. I look around at what he’s seeing. Each game is balanced on a plastic lawn chair. It looks pretty stupid. “Yeah, but not too many people have. Mostly they’re doing the other stuff.”

  “I can see why.”

  I want to tell him he should try to sound less mean. Maybe it would even help him if I pointed this out, but I’m not so sure. He looks over at Olga, sitting at her table. “Are you pretty good friends with her now?”

  “I guess.” I shrug. “You should look at her books. They’re pretty good.”

  He doesn’t go over there.

  Part of me wishes he would just leave.

  At least my dad is back inside and George went with him, so I don’t have to worry about either of them. But there’s some people who can make you feel embarrassed about everything in your life, even things like your lawn or your swing set.

  Then I’m really surprised. Jeremy rolls his bike over to the tree next to my arcade and lays it on the ground. “Maybe I could help you,” he says. “You need to get people over here. How about if I be your barker?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The guy at the circus who shouts at people to get them to buy things.”

  “You want to do that?”

  He shrugs. “Sure. I don’t mind.”

  A few minutes later, he’s rolled up some extra poster board paper to make a megaphone and he’s shouting, “All right, everyone! There’s a game arcade over here that no one’s going to, but it’s pretty fun. The price is right because it’s pay whatever you want, and you can win some prizes!”

  Some people standing near him look like they’re not sure if he’s joking or not.

  “Right over here, sir. You, on the grass next to the swing set. It might not look like too much, but it’s a homemade game arcade and you should bring your kids over to try it. This might be the only chance they ever get to play in a ball maze made out of toilet paper rolls. It’s something they’ll tell their grandkids, and their grandkids will get confused, like, wait, wasn’t there electricity then, so why the toilet paper rolls? Just go, sir. You with the Red Sox shirt on. Go. Seriously.”

  I look over at my mom, who is laughing harder than I’ve seen her laugh in a long time. The man starts laughing, too, and shuffles his kids over in my direction.

  Jeremy keeps going, using his megaphone to talk to people standing five feet away from him. When my area fills up with little kids dropping pennies and throwing beanbags, he starts selling the other areas.

  “You, sir, in the orange jacket! You look like maybe you need some new comic books in your life.”

  Olga has never liked Jeremy much. Not that she’s said it, but I can tell from the way she looks at him over her glasses and usually rolls her eyes. This time though, I’m surprised. She laughs and holds some of her sample books up high. “Right over here!” she yells louder than I’ve ever heard her speak in five years.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  JEREMY KEEPS US BUSY FOR THE rest of the afternoon. When Rayshawn walks up and asks if he’s too late, Jeremy shouts through his megaphone, “Too late? Are you kidding? We’re just getting started.”

  Rayshawn is still wearing his basketball clothes so he doesn’t have any pockets or any money. Instead of buying anything he comes over to the game arcade and help
s me with the three little kids I have playing the games. He does a great thing at the beanbag toss, where he tells them to forget the clown and try to hit him. Then he dances around and makes it really hard. The kids laugh so hard and stay so long at the game, the dad puts another five dollars in my can. Considering it’s a terrible game that doesn’t work very well, we’ve had a pretty good time at the beanbag toss this year.

  After it’s all over, Mom hugs all my friends and invites them inside to count our money and eat the one pie that’s left over, strawberry rhubarb.

  “No offense, Ms. Barrows,” Jeremy says. “But there might be a reason that pie is left over.”

  My mom laughs again and tells Jeremy he should be a comedian. I’ve never thought about it this way, but maybe Mom is right. Maybe all the things he says that have made me feel bad weren’t insults but were jokes.

  Olga says she’d love to stay and find out how much money we made but she’s allergic to gluten so no thank you on the pie. George, who has come back outside and is bouncing in a circle near us, comes straight over to Olga.

  “You’re allergic to gluten?” he says. We’re all surprised. Usually George doesn’t listen in on conversations unless we force him to. “I’m allergic to gluten, too.”

  Olga’s eyes shake a little when she tries to look at him, which George loves. He stares right into her weird, shaky eyes. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him make perfect eye contact.

  “It sucks sometimes, doesn’t it?” she says.

  George bounces away with an excited laugh. “It sucks!” he says and then repeats the whole sentence a few more times into his hand. It didn’t last very long, but I look at Mom and I can tell she’s thinking the same thing: it seems like George tries to be a tiny bit more normal around girls. This isn’t saying much because he’s still pretty far from normal, but maybe it’s a start.

  First Lisa, now this.

  Maybe he is changing.

  It turns out we made the most money at the bakery table, where the adults were congregated and a few people donated hundred-dollar checks and took a pie as a thank-you. Mom felt pretty embarrassed about that, but Martin told her that was the whole point, so she should stop feeling embarrassed. The next surprise was that Olga made the second most—seventy-two dollars. “My goal was seventy-five,” she said, shaking her head. “But I got close.”

  Seventy-five dollars?? I thought. It reminded me of something Dad used to say: You’ll be very surprised by which kids in your class end up being the most successful grown-ups. I used to assume it would be Jeremy but maybe not.

  “Olga, we thank you so much for donating your day and all your books to this effort,” my mom says. “It was very generous of you.”

  Olga shrugs and her eyes shake. “It’s okay. I liked it.”

  Martin comes over and surprises everyone by putting his arm around Olga and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re cool, Olga,” he says. “A very cool girl.” I’m pretty sure he’s doing this because Mary Margaret is here and he’s in a good mood. He told me last week that he finally talked to her about how he felt. They’re not boyfriend and girlfriend yet but they’re hanging out more and next week they’re going to a movie together.

  Olga blushes and scratches her face so hard her glasses tip to the side of her nose. “I don’t know about that,” she says.

  Mom doesn’t forget to thank Jeremy and Rayshawn. “I’m pretty sure you two are responsible for doubling Benny’s haul at the game arcade.” She’s right. I had about twenty-four dollars when Jeremy came over. Now I have fifty-seven. They both look happy about that and I can’t help it—I’m happy that Martin isn’t the only one with friends who don’t mind coming over and helping out.

  When we add everything up, including the silent auction donations people sent who couldn’t come, we have more than six hundred dollars. We’re all amazed.

  “And you still have your Lego dudes,” Martin whispers.

  He’s right. I do.

  It all feels great. Then Dad wanders in to smile at the pile of money and then at all of us.

  We got through the earlier moment that Mom was so scared of and now I can see how nervous she is. As she sweeps up the money, Dad tugs on my shirt and hands me a note. My heart starts to beat so fast I can feel it in my stomach.

  I don’t want to read his note.

  I don’t want to ruin the nice day we’ve just had.

  But everyone saw him hand it to me and everyone wants to know what it says. I don’t want to read it. “It’s okay,” Mom says.

  I shake my head. I can’t read it. I’ll cry if I have to read it.

  “Dude, Dad’s trying to tell you something,” Martin says. “Just read it.”

  Martin doesn’t know what Dad’s been asking me to do. He doesn’t know that Dad’s brain is stuck in a groove it can’t get out of. Suddenly it’s like all the happy feelings inside me turned into mad ones. “No!” I scream. “I’m not going to!”

  I have to leave the room because if I don’t, Olga, Jeremy, and Rayshawn, my only three friends in the world, will see me cry. They’ll know I’m not just stupid, I’m uncoordinated, too. I’m a fourth grader who’s terrible at multiplication and bike riding. Which is another way of saying if the rest of my family didn’t have huge problems, I’d be the one everyone is worried about. Because even Dad, who’s got a lot of problems, is more worried about me than he is about himself.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I DON’T EVEN SAY GOOD-BYE TO MY friends, I just disappear up to my room after that. When Mom comes in later and sits down on the edge of my bed, I start crying.

  “You know what I’m starting to think?” Mom says.

  “What?”

  “I’m thinking maybe we should all just go to the track tomorrow. Maybe Dad needs this for some reason. Maybe it’s not a terrible idea.”

  Just the idea of getting on a bike again scares me and makes me start crying again. “I don’t want more bad things to happen.”

  “They won’t, baby. I promise. Nothing bad will happen.”

  “What if we do it and he just keeps suggesting it? What if this is his thing now?”

  “Then we’ll figure out a way to get him off it.” She puts her arms around me and kisses the top of my head. “I watched you today with Mr. Norris’s son. You were so good with him. The way you figured out a game he wanted to play and then got him to play it with you. There aren’t too many kids your age who could do that.”

  “You think Dad might want to play beanbags instead of bike riding?”

  “No,” she says. “I think if we listen to Dad and do this for him, we might figure out what he’s after and get him to move on. That’s what I hope anyway.”

  “I just keep being scared. I can’t help it. I don’t know why. It’s stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid. It’s scary because bad things can happen so suddenly. But it wasn’t bike riding or your accident that made Dad have his aneurysm. That was going to happen sooner or later anyway. I think our whole lives we’ve been getting ready for this. George helped us and we didn’t even realize it.”

  “So we have to do it? We have to go bike riding?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I think we have to do it.”

  The next morning, everyone tiptoes around me like I’m a crazy bomb that might go off any second. Martin is already sitting at the breakfast table, eating cereal out of a salad bowl. When I sit down, he nudges the almost-empty box of Cocoa Krispies toward me. Then he looks up, and gasps. I look over and see: Dad is standing there wearing his old jogging shorts and his terrible terry cloth wristbands we haven’t seen in more than four months.

  Under his breath, I hear Martin say, “Oh my God.”

  Mom comes in a minute later, wearing yoga pants and sneakers. Her hair is up in a ponytail. “Dad thinks we should all go to the track this morning! I do, too! It’s a beautiful day—we’ll have fun.”

  We’re all putting on a show that no one told Martin about. Finally he says, “A
h, Mom, are we allowed to talk about this?”

  “I’d rather not,” Mom says, clapping her hands. “I’d rather just go.”

  Martin stands up and walks over to her. “Seriously, Mom,” he whispers over her shoulder. “This is a joke, right?”

  “Not at all. Go put on some shorts, Martin. It won’t kill you to run around the track a little. Benny and George can bring their bikes. Come on, guys. Up and at ’em.”

  An hour later, we’re all at the track, with Lucky bouncing around on the leash Martin’s holding. Mom has packed a cooler of water and snacks, and Martin can’t walk and text on his new phone, so he’s sitting in a patch of shade under a tree in the distance. Earlier I heard them having a fight in the pantry about this. Martin said it was a weird, stupid idea going back to a place where something so terrible happened. “What’s the point, Mom?” he whispered because he didn’t want me to hear, I’m pretty sure. “It’ll just make Benny feel like crap. We had a nice day yesterday. Give it a rest.”

  “I can’t give it a rest. Dad doesn’t want to give it a rest. He wants to do this.”

  “Dad isn’t exactly thinking so clearly these days, right? So maybe we don’t need to do every bad idea he has.”

  Their voices were getting a little louder like maybe Martin didn’t even care if I overheard or not.

  “Don’t ruin everything that was nice about yesterday. I don’t care if you come with us or not. The four of us are going to the track because Dad has been asking Benny to do this for a long time. I don’t know why. Maybe he wants to replace a bad memory with a good one. We’re doing it because for whatever reason, Dad needs it. That’s all. Period. End of discussion.”

  I didn’t think Martin was going to come at all, but then at the last minute he started walking with us, reading something on his phone so he didn’t have to say anything about it. Mom smiled but didn’t say anything either.