Читать книгу Crenshaw - Katherine Applegate - Страница 16

I love my mum and my dad and usually my sister. But lately they’d really been getting on my nerves.

Robin was a little kid, so of course she was annoying. She’d say things like “What if a dog and a bird got married, Jackson?” Or sing “Wheels on the Bus” three thousand times in a row. Or steal my skateboard and use it for a doll ambulance. The usual little sister stuff.

My parents were more complicated. It’s hard to explain, especially since I know this sounds like a good thing, but they were always looking on the bright side. Even when things were bad – and they’d been bad a lot – they joked. They acted silly. They pretended everything was fine.

Sometimes I just wanted to be treated like a grown-up. I wanted to hear the truth, even if it wasn’t a happy truth. I understood things. I knew way more than they thought I did.

But my parents were optimists. They looked at half a glass of water and figured it was half full, not half empty.

Not me. Scientists can’t afford to be optimists or pessimists. They just observe the world and see what is. They look at a glass of water and measure 125 millilitres or whatever, and that’s the end of the discussion.

Take my dad. When I was younger, he got sick, really sick. He found out he has this disease called multiple sclerosis. Mostly he has good days, but sometimes he has bad ones when it’s hard to walk and he has to use a cane.

When he learned he had MS, my dad acted like it was no big deal, even though he had to quit his job, which was building houses. He said he was tired of listening to hammering all day long. He said he wanted to wear fancy shoes instead of muddy ones, and then he wrote a song about it called ‘The Muddy Shoes Blues’. He said he might work from home, so he taped a sign on the bathroom door that said OFFICE OF MR THOMAS WADE. My mum put a sign next to it that said I’D RATHER BE FISHING.

And that was that.

Sometimes I just want to ask my parents if my dad is going to be OK or why we don’t always have enough food in the house or why they’ve been arguing so much.

Also, why I couldn’t have been an only child.

But I don’t ask. Not any more.

Last autumn we were at a neighbourhood potluck dinner when Aretha ate a baby’s disposable diaper. She had to spend two nights at the vet’s until she pooped it out.

“Poop in, poop out,” my dad said when we picked her up. “It’s the cycle of life.”

“The cycle of life is expensive,” my mum said, staring at the bill. “Looks like rent’s going to be late again this month.”

When we got to the car, I came right out and asked if we had enough money for stuff. My dad said not to worry. That we just were a little financially challenged. He said sometimes it’s hard to plan for everything, unless you have a crystal ball and can see the future, and if I knew someone with a crystal ball, he would love to borrow it.

My mum said something about winning the lottery, and my dad said if they won the lottery, could he please get a Ferrari, and she said how about a Jaguar, and then I could tell they wanted to change the subject.

I didn’t ask any more hard questions after that.

Somehow I just knew my parents didn’t want to give me hard answers.