Wow, she really thought that through!
“What about Sadie?” Dad asks.
“I’m not sure I want to have kids. They create too big of a carbon footprint.”
Dad turns to me, gives me a straight-on father-to-son look, and says, “Sam, go do your homework.”
If I owned this team, he’d be a free agent now.
After dinner I Skype with Alistair.
“Will I be needing a suit for your funeral?” he asks.
“Mine is a fate worse than death,” I tell him. “It’s homework.”
I ask him for the assignments. He says he’s not sure I want to hear.
“After you got thrown out, Mr. Powell teamed up with all our other teachers. They went on a rampage.”
“Just give it to me straight,” I say. “The whole list.”
Onscreen, I see Alistair push up his sleeve. He reads the first assignment from his arm. “Science, chapter three, on volcanoes. Do chapter review and connections.”
He pushes up his sleeve a little more. “Read up to page forty-seven in Black Ships Before Troy—that book gives me nightmares—and do a character chart.”
“Anything else?” I ask.
“There’s one on my left leg.”
He hikes up his pant leg. “Flash cards. We have to look up definitions and draw vocabulary pictures.”
“How many words?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Anything else?”
Alistair’s pant leg comes up over his knee. I can see the scar from when he rolled down his backyard slope and struck a sprinkler head.
“Remember the early humans diorama that’s due before Christmas?”
“Yeah.”
“Now it’s due before Thanksgiving.”
“Terrific. Anything else?”
“Hang on. Got to check one more place.”
He steps away from the computer, untucks his shirt, and yanks it up. Alistair’s been known to write reminders across his stomach, too.
Lucky for me, it’s just his face that pops back onscreen. “Nope,” he says, “that was just an itch.”
“Thanks, Alistair. Glad I Skyped you before you took a shower.”
And we hang up.
Day one of my suspension is actually kind of nice. I get to sleep in on a Wednesday. Around nine thirty I roll out of bed, head to the kitchen, and pour myself a bowl of Lucky Charms. Lucky Charms are supposed to be a rare breakfast treat, but with all the work I’ll be doing, I’m giving myself permission to eat the whole box.
There’s a Post-it from Mom on the fridge: “Gone to a caravan. Home by noon. Get some work done!”
A caravan is an open house just for real estate agents. So they can see what’s new on the market and spread the word. Once, when I was home sick on a Wednesday, I got to go with her. I noticed how all the agents seemed more interested in test scores than in house things like countertops, termites, or if the yard had room for a pool.
“Reed has some of the highest scores in the city,” Mom always says. “Among the top ten in the state.”
Seems to me, if our test scores are driving up the home prices in the neighborhood, we should get a cut of the money every time a house sells. I tried to tell Mom that, but she said those ideas are better kept to myself.
Then she gave me a cookie.
At ten I look out the window and see Mr. Kalman’s newspaper in the gutter in front of his house. Mr. Kalman is the oldest living person on our street. His property has the oldest living trees. Mom says he stopped having them trimmed when his wife died. If you were new to the neighborhood, like a temporary mail carrier, you might wonder why there’s a mailbox in front of an overgrown lot. Dad says tree trimming is expensive and maybe Mr. Kalman is short on cash. Mom says she doubts that because Mr. Kalman is a retired lawyer.
Since I’m off for the day—and my bibliography woke him the other night—the least I can do for Mr. Kalman is rescue his paper from the gutter sludge. I head across, pick up his paper, and push open the gate on his wooden fence.
His wife used to paint this fence every year on the first day of spring. She’d start at six in the morning and finish at six at night, her floppy yellow hat making its way across the yard like a sun. One time she saw me watching from my window. Her yellow hat tilted back and showed me this big smile on her face. Then she held her paintbrush out to me. I pointed to myself and gave her a look like, Me? You want me to help paint? Her yellow hat waved up and down.
You’ve never seen a boy who just turned five tie his shoes so fast. When I got outside, she was waiting for me on our driveway.
“But I’m just a kid, Mrs. Kalman. I don’t know how to paint a fence.”
“A kid can learn to do anything, Sam,” she said.
Her hand held my hand, and my hand held the brush, and together we turned the fence white again.
I carry Mr. Kalman’s LA Times up to his front door. The path used to have sunlight and shadows. Now it’s all shadows.
I knock on the door hard because he might not have his hearing aid in. It takes him about as long as it takes me to brush my teeth before the door opens. Mr. Kalman stands there in a long T-shirt, sagging track pants, and old slippers. I’m pretty sure he wore something spiffier when he went to court.
He puts up a finger because he’s on the phone.
“You keep a man on hold? What if there’s a gun to his head? No, there’s no
