Just My Luck Read online

  I think about a story my parents used to tell. How George was born with a big red birthmark on one cheek. It was raised and bumpy and so ugly that Dad took all his baby pictures from one side and Mom joined a support group for parents of infants with facial abnormalities. Then the birthmark faded and now she always talks about it like it’s a funny story. “Imagine me thinking a birthmark would be George’s biggest problem in life.”

  I used to not understand why that story was funny. Now I think I do. Bigger problems put littler ones in perspective. Worrying about spelling tests and footprints seems stupid when I come home and watch Dad take ten minutes to write down a question he wants to ask me.

  Today, he holds the pencil balled up in his fist like we all did in kindergarten. It takes so much concentration his tongue sticks out. After three words he takes a break to think and then writes two more. Finally he shows it to me and I can’t believe it:

  Want to ride bike at track?

  TWENTY-THREE

  MOM IS OUTSIDE IN THE GARDEN, digging in her compost heap, when I finally find her and tell her. “Why won’t he let this stupid idea go? It’s okay if I’m not a great bike rider. Martin said so.”

  She shakes her head and blows some of her hair out of her face. “I don’t know, Benny. I honestly don’t. It’s something his brain has latched on to, I guess.”

  “Why would he want to go back to the place where all the bad stuff started?”

  “Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s why he can’t let go of it.”

  “I don’t ever want to go back there. I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s like he can’t stop thinking about it and it makes me feel terrible.”

  “Oh, Benny, I don’t get it either. I’m sorry.”

  “Even if I tell him there’s no way I’m going bike riding at the track—even if I’m really mean about it—he’ll probably forget I said it and ask me again tomorrow.”

  This is the part none of us has wanted to talk about: how bad Dad’s memory is. How much he repeats himself. How frustrating and sad it is.

  I start to cry and Mom hugs me. She cries a little bit, too.

  “It’s hard, baby. It really is. I know.”

  “What if it doesn’t change? What’ll we do?”

  We sit down side by side at the picnic table that’s covered in little pinecones and leaves. “I don’t know,” she says. “Live with it, I guess.”

  As long as we’re having this conversation—as long as I’ve said this much—I might as well say it all. “What if it’s like having two Georges for the rest of our lives?” I don’t say the other part I’m thinking: What if it’s worse? At least with George we don’t remember a different person that makes this one seem sad. “It’s not fair,” I say. I’m crying more now. “You’ve already had it so hard with George.”

  “No, Benny, I don’t think it’s like that. George used to be hard. The first five years were hard, figuring everything out. But now he’s not hard. He’s just George.”

  “But he doesn’t change! He’s not going to get better.”

  “Sure he will. A little bit. Maybe he doesn’t change a lot, but there’s something interesting I’ve noticed about George. He changes other people. Dad and I were very different before he came along. We worked too hard. We were always worried about getting more clients and growing our business. We were kind of competitive about it, which we thought was fun, but now I look back and I don’t think it was. If I had kept working that way, I don’t think I would have been very happy.”

  This isn’t the first time I’ve heard her say this. Now I have to wonder, with all our new money issues, if she really means it. Pretty soon she’ll have to be working twice as hard if Dad can’t work at all. But she doesn’t seem to be thinking about this. “Having George around has changed all of us. It’s made you the nicest, most thoughtful fourth grader I know. It’s given Martin a certain amount of depth he might not have had otherwise.”

  I smile. I like when Mom makes fun of Martin.

  “I think about this funny habit I developed years ago, trying to teach George about small talk. Whenever he’s with me in the grocery store, I force myself to stop and talk to anyone we know, so maybe he’ll start to learn, this is how you extend your conversations. So his might go a little longer than his patented ten-second exchanges.” She laughs. We both do. “I don’t think he’s ever gotten better, has he?”

  “Not really.”

  “So I’ve been having all these conversations over the years and here we are with all these friends around town. Dropping off meals and doing all these nice things.”

  She’s right about this. Some people have actually set up a schedule now where friends sign up for a day to drop food off. Some of the baskets are great—with little wrapped desserts for each of us and a bone for Lucky. “Did you notice the yard?” Mom says. “The soccer team came over and raked the leaves a few days ago.”

  How did I not notice this? I think about some of the kids on the soccer team, the ones who are really good at soccer. The ones who like my dad but never talk to me.

  “These things widen our world, Benny. They make us see that we’re part of a bigger community. People want to be nice. They want to help. Most of the time we’re all just too busy to show it. But look around. . . .” She points to the lawn that’s been covered in leaves for weeks and now is completely clean. It must have taken hours to do this or else a whole bunch of kids. I can’t believe I didn’t notice.

  “Did Dad see them? Does he know?”

  “I don’t think so. He was asleep at the time. I’ve tried to tell him, but I don’t think he remembers that the leaves were here. He’s still so confused about time and what season it is. He’ll get it eventually.”

  “Is that why he keeps wanting to go back to the track? Because he thinks it’s summer?”

  “Maybe. I honestly don’t know. I know he was happy that morning because you agreed to go. I know he was really proud of you, riding your bike around that track.”

  “Was he that worried about it?” I’m sort of asking a bigger question: Are you still worried?

  “Not worried, no. He just didn’t want you to be scared of things. He didn’t want you to back away from something just because it was hard. He did that a lot when he was a kid and he doesn’t want his own boys to do the same thing.”

  “He did?” I say. “Like with what?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard the stories. Dad wasn’t a particularly great athlete and he got a lot of Cs when he was in high school.”

  No one’s ever told me this before. Cs equal threes, which means maybe I’m more like my dad than I realize. “How did he become an architect?”

  “I don’t know. He went to college and figured out what he wanted and worked a lot harder.”

  “Do you know what grades he got in elementary school?”

  She laughs, surprised. “No! I have no idea. Isn’t that funny? I think he really liked elementary school, but I have no idea how he did academically. I guess—maybe—” She slaps her hands on her knees and makes a funny face. “Because it doesn’t matter all that much in the end.” Then she puts her arm around me and pulls me into a sideways shoulder hug. “What matters is working hard and finding things you love.”

  “I have that!” I say.

  I finally got up the courage to show my Lego movie to a few more people. Mom watched it last week and said it was the best one I’d ever made. “I think it might be my favorite Lego movie ever.” This isn’t saying all that much since Mom has never seen The Lego Movie, but still. It was nice of her to say.

  Now, she puts her arm around my shoulder again. “It’s true, you do,” she says.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THAT NIGHT I KEEP TRYING TO think of solutions even though, right after our talk about money, Mom told me I shouldn’t worry about money. “I only told you because I want you to know the truth, but you’ve already got enough worries on your plate. You don’t need to add this one, too. Please, Benny. I mean it.”
>
  “Okay,” I said.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  Then I spend most of the night sorting through my Lego bins, separating out the smaller items that are sellable on eBay. If you want to get the highest price, the trick is to sell everything individually. After I’ve collected what I’d consider twenty minifigures with the highest resale value, I take them into Martin’s room to get his advice. He knows eBay selling better than I do, but he might point out that most of these were his once, which means he should get all the money.

  When I show him the box, I explain it the best I can. “We have to do something, Martin. Mom doesn’t have the money to pay all these hospital bills.”

  Maybe I’ve told Martin so he’ll start thinking of some ways he can pitch in, too. I already know that whatever I make won’t be enough. Maybe I also want him to tell me that I shouldn’t have to worry about this. Instead he reaches over to the shoe box I’ve filled with the most valuable pieces I could find. He stirs through the box with his finger. There’s a lot in there. Minifigs I bought whole sets to get. Minifigs that have starred or played a role in all of my movies. Minifigs I used to put in my pocket and bring to school back in first and second grade, before I had any friends to eat lunch with or talk to at recess.

  “You’re really gonna sell these guys?” Martin says.

  “I think we have to. We don’t have much choice.”

  I want him to say, Of course we do. You need these people to make your movies. You shouldn’t sell them. Instead he says, “You can get twenty dollars apiece for some of these.”

  “More for a few of them. The original Spider-Man is very rare. One just sold on eBay for forty-five dollars.”

  He picks it up and turns it over. It doesn’t look much different from all the other minifigs, but he’s one of the older ones so he’s worth more

  I care about Spidey. Even though he wasn’t in my latest movie, he’s always been my favorite. There was a time when I was young that I couldn’t sleep unless he was tucked in my hand. He mattered to me a lot, which made me play weird games with myself. I’d wake up in the morning and hide him somewhere upstairs so I’d have to remember and find him later in the day before I went to bed. It was always a little scary, thinking maybe this time I’d forget where I’d hidden him.

  I was that kind of kid, I guess. Before I had real problems, I created some of my own.

  Martin’s got six guys in one hand, too many to keep looking, so he lays them out on the bed. Penguin, Count Dooku, Princess Leia, two Yodas.

  “The Yodas are not as rare as some of the others. They came in too many sets.”

  He nods. He used to know all this stuff. He was obsessed with Lego for years before I was. He finds more and lays them out. By a generous estimate we could sell all my future cast members and get two hundred dollars.

  “That’s pretty good, right?”

  Martin shakes his head. If making money on these old Lego sets was our end goal, we’ve made terrible mistakes over the years, throwing away our boxes and all our instruction booklets. We’ve played too hard with them. We’ve broken apart every original spaceship and battle tank to make forts and bunkers. We’ve mixed sets so much that Han Solo and Chewbacca sleep in twin beds from a police headquarters, with a coffeemaker between them.

  Now that I look at them lying on Martin’s bed, it’s hard to imagine putting them into envelopes and sending them off to strangers. I’ve never told anyone this, but I think of my minifigs as my oldest, truest friends. Because of this, I also think of them as pretty happy time travelers. Han Solo doesn’t mind eating medieval food. He’s told me, sort of. Or he’s given me that impression. I’ve never told anyone how much I care about them, but all of the sudden, it’s like Martin knows.

  “You shouldn’t sell these, dude.” He puts them all back in the shoe box. “That’s not how we’re going to do this. Two hundred dollars is chump change. I’ve got a better idea.”

  He’s moving around his room getting a piece of paper. I follow him, hugging my shoe box because I’ll love Martin forever if he can think of a way to spare this box of little plastic best friends.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “WE’RE GONNA MAKE A LIST,” MARTIN says. “Our top ten moneymakers from the past. We’ll see if there’s a way to combine them all.”

  Because our parents never signed us up for camps, we’ve spent most of our summers around the house, bored and looking for ways to make money. Over the years we’ve come up with a few decent ones.

  Probably our best is the kiddie carnival, which works because there are a lot of kids on our block, most of them much younger than us. To do this, we put flyers in everyone’s mailbox and then spend a few hours in the morning setting up. Surprisingly no one has ever complained, even though we charge fifty cents for the carnival and some of our “games of skill” are things like Stand on a Chair and Drop a Penny in a Muffin Tin. The prizes are all old Happy Meal toys and other junk we’ve collected from the bottom of our toy boxes. Martin usually includes a sign saying Play Till You Win!, which means some kids stand on the chair for twenty minutes, dropping pennies. We also have beanbag throws with a cutout clown nose so small no one can ever win, so we have to give prizes for hitting the board at all, which makes it boring.

  Last time, the most popular attraction was the Toddler Roller Coaster, which is basically a cardboard box Martin pushes up the hill in our backyard with a toddler in it, then he turns around and slides them back down. The kids loved laughing at Martin’s sweaty face, and in the end, it made the most money.

  Another moneymaker we’ve done is having a tag sale, where we bring out all our broken toys, lay them on a blanket, and try to talk all the little kids into buying everything that doesn’t work anymore or wasn’t fun to begin with.

  I’ve also tried setting up a lemonade stand, where I sat for two hours beside the bus stop. Doing that, I learned that not everyone will feel sorry enough for a kid sitting by himself with a pitcher of lemonade to buy a cup. Some people will say, “What kind of lemonade?” and when you say “Crystal Light,” they’ll shake their heads. That day I lowered my price twice and still only made two dollars and fifty cents, which isn’t very much for a long time of sitting. Finally Mom felt so sorry for me that she came out and paid me a dollar for a cup of lemonade she’d originally paid for herself. I don’t think we should do that again.

  Martin’s trying to get ten items on the list, so I remind him of the small jobs we’ve done for neighbors. Every winter I offer my services knocking icicles off old people’s porch roofs. This earns more money than you’d think, especially if you grunt while you do it and make it sound like hard work. I also pick up rotten crab apples in the fall, which can be messy and dangerous if there are bees underneath them. Sometimes I have to wear a catcher’s mitt.

  As I list these for him, Martin includes some of the regular jobs he does for neighbors: lawn mowing, dog walking, cat feeding.

  “Here’s the idea,” he says when he’s got ten items. “We’re going to have a big block party carnival to benefit the Brian Barrows Medical Fund. We’ll combine all these things. We’ll have games and a tag sale. We’ll have a bake sale table and ask people to bring things. We do a silent auction where people bid on certificates good for lawn mowing and all these other chores.”

  I’m surprised. Lawn mowing all spring and summer is Martin’s main source of income for the year. Because he makes so much doing that, Mom doesn’t give him an allowance anymore. “But that would be all your money.”

  “Yeah, true, but look at you. You were about to sell Spidey. This is the least I could do. Plus think about it. People want to help out—they just aren’t too sure how, so they’re raking our leaves and leaving all this food. The truth is, we don’t really need the food anymore. This is what we need. And I’m telling you, people will totally overpay us for stuff this time around.”

  He laughs and writes down more ideas. “Thanksgiving’s coming
up! We’ll make it a holiday carnival. We’ll sell pumpkin pies and turkey place cards. We’ll get a theme going.”

  “Turkey place cards?” Mom says when we tell her the idea over dinner that night. “You mean the folded pieces of paper with turkey stickers on them?” Mom makes new ones every year, so George, with his terrible handwriting, can have one job every year, writing everyone’s name. “How much could you charge for those? A quarter? A nickel?”

  Martin smiles. “Here’s the best part of the whole idea.” He holds up one hand like a movie director framing his shot. “No prices on anything. We’ll make one sign that says, Pay What You Want to Benefit Brian Barrows Medical Fund.” Martin took a class in psychology this year as an elective. Now he thinks he knows everything about how humans think and what motivates people. He drops his hand, really smiling now. “If you don’t tell them a price, they pay more. All the studies bear this out. People rip themselves off out of guilt. Or the fear of seeming cheap.”

  Mom shakes her head. “Martin, it’s a nice idea, but I don’t want to bring the whole neighborhood in on our problems. It feels a little desperate. I don’t think we’re desperate.”

  “Well, I mean I’m sorry, Mom, but we sort of are.”

  Mom looks at both of us.

  “Look at it this way, Mom,” Martin says. “We could try this or we could try something else. We could be the coffee-can family that collects change next to cash registers around town. Would you rather do that?”

  “Okay,” she finally says, smiling and wiping away a tear at the same time. “But we have to make sure it’s a fun carnival for the kids. I don’t want this to be a big pity party for the Barrows family.”

  “No way, Mom. Trust us,” Martin says. “This’ll be all about fun.”

  Which also means there’s one thing everyone agrees on: Dad shouldn’t come.

  “It’ll be way too overwhelming for him,” Mom says. “Plus I don’t want him to start worrying about all this money stuff. He’s got enough on his plate just getting better.”