The Great Jeff Read online

  “What would I say?” I asked her. “To who?”

  “Because as far as they’re concerned, everything’s normal. No one can know. You’re not telling Tom or any of your other friends, you hear me?”

  “I don’t have anybody to tell. And I told you a thousand times, I’m not friends with Tom Bender anymore. I hate this. You never listen when I talk.”

  “Don’t smart-mouth me.”

  He hasn’t been my friend since before I left St. Catherine’s. First of all, I took pity on him. He was chubby and klutzy, but he was usually around and thought I was funny, which he was right about. Then, all of a sudden, he became a jerk over this girl. Forgetting all the junk we did together, he started telling bad stories about me and my mom, I’m sure he did. Sorry, that’s it. No more stupid Tom Bender.

  “What difference does it make if people know about your job anyway?” I asked.

  Mom had moved to another room and didn’t hear. I finished my eggs alone and rinsed the plate. Dried egg yolk is hard to get off.

  Then she was back, flapping a stack of envelopes in her hand. “Here’s something else you need to know. Don’t be surprised if I cut down on things. These bills are eating us alive. And I don’t care what they say, first thing Monday I’m going to the unemployment office and register.”

  She winked as if we were getting back at someone in a sneaky way.

  “I thought you couldn’t,” I said. “That they wouldn’t give you anything—”

  “Let them tell me to my face when I’m standing in front of them with a stack of bills I can’t pay. If I look them square in the eye we’ll get benefits. It’s insurance. They’ll have to give me it. Until I find a new thing.”

  She was so scattered and scared it was hard to make out what she meant. One thing was clear: If I got lying from my father, I’m pretty sure I got the victim thing from her.

  “You mean they pay you not to work? They should. You’ve worked forever.”

  “You bet I have,” she said. “I’m taking care of it. I’m on top of it.”

  She ought to be. She did the same thing when the hospital let her go in January for being late too many times. I should have seen that coming. Even last fall, a year ago, a few times when I came home from school she’d be there, sleeping. It took her until this summer to find another job. Now after less than three months she’d lost that one, too.

  “Plus, you need to wash that hair,” she said, sitting down at the table across from where I’d been. “People’ll think our water’s turned off. Well, not yet. So get in there. I’ll make a grocery list. You want a comic if I see one at the store?”

  “I have all the new ones.”

  “Good. We’ll save four dollars.”

  So, yeah, I took a shower. After I toweled off I dressed in the same jeans but a clean shirt, my usual procedure. I wondered what it actually meant that Mom had lost her job. How long would it be before she had another one? Could I believe that she was taking care of it? Should I do anything differently?

  I came downstairs to find she’d left for the store.

  It was after ten so I headed to Rich Downing’s house.

  CHAPTER 3

  BEST FRIENDS

  It’s not like I chose Rich for a friend.

  He chose me because I make him laugh. Hard not to do. We’re on different levels and I’m so much quicker it isn’t funny, except, of course, it is. He mostly comes to my house because I have better comics and we’re usually alone there. It was too soon to figure out if Mom’s no-job would change things like that.

  Four short blocks and a dogleg through some backyards is how you get to his place. I wore a jacket and a sweatshirt under. It was cold, but not as cold as last fall, not yet. It was freezing last year at Halloween and we had snow at Thanksgiving.

  Only one of their two cars was in the driveway. Rich’s father coaches soccer Saturday mornings—Rich’s younger sister plays—but his mother is usually home, and he has an older sister, too, so I can’t just walk in. I rang the bell.

  His mother smiled when she opened the front door. The smile was the right shape and all, except her eyes looked over my shoulder at passing cars or the future or somewhere. I mumbled, “Hello, Mrs. Downing,” like you’re supposed to. “Is Rich home?” Which she didn’t even have to answer because he came bounding down the stairs to let me in, while she went off to another room. We went into what he called the den.

  “I have to play you this. I just learned it.” He picked up his electric guitar and switched on the amplifier. The amp snapped loudly and a red light glowed on the dashboard.

  He got the guitar over the summer. His father had been teaching him for a while, but this was Rich’s first electric. “Ready?” He hunched over it and placed the fingers of his left hand one by one on the strings. I could tell it was a song he had just learned because that’s not how you play anything good. To really play, your fingers move where they need to without thinking. I didn’t know how to play, but Rich wasn’t much better.

  He has two electric guitars. Well, one of them’s his dad’s, a big old gold thing covered with chrome and gold knobs. If it’s there, I mostly just jang the open strings and fool with the knobs to make cool effects while Rich plays real chords on his. But when both of us play, with his real janging and my fake janging, it almost sounds like a song.

  I could learn a musical instrument if I had a chance. I’m always humming. We used to have a piano at home that my mom played, and my dad bought a drum set once. They got rid of those when Grandpa moved in.

  Rich’s new song was only four chords, but when he got going it was pretty good. He told me where to press strings on my guitar, so I joined in. We were strumming away and I was thinking he could maybe teach me real chords—because how hard can it be?—when something changed.

  I must inspire people to be gross. I don’t know. Maybe I ask for it. The Marx Brothers were dirty sometimes. Not really, because their movies are old. But since I’m quick, people think I’m bad even though sometimes I’m just pondering nachos or hang gliding or what the president said about Korea, when all of a sudden bam, it happens.

  “Courtney must have been wearing last year’s sweater,” Rich said between chords, leering like an old bum on the street. “It was tight.”

  It’s like they think I’m always working dirty stuff over in my mind, so it’s okay to be disgusting in front of me in a way you wouldn’t be with other people.

  I wasn’t into it, so I just nodded, but maybe I grinned, too, because then he did.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You know it!”

  Courtney Zisky was this long-haired dark-haired girl in our class at St. Catherine’s. I’d say she was hot except she was always pretty cold to me. Which is a small example of my humor. Seriously, Courtney was just really good-looking from every angle, and I liked to look at her, but not everything I thought was creepy.

  Just then, Rich’s older sister came into the room and together he and I blasted our guitars like a band, and she said something. She had blond hair and was in high school. I don’t know why, but I jumped to my feet, mashed up my face like a rock star in pain, and started flailing away on the strings, when she suddenly reaches out and grabs the neck of the guitar.

  “Did you hear me, Rich’s friend?” Her face was squinched up worse than mine.

  I stopped. “What?”

  “I said you better not scratch my dad’s guitar.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Don’t get all…”

  “Don’t get all what, Rich’s friend?” She stood a good half foot taller than me.

  I didn’t want to tangle. “Don’t get all worried,” I said, and put the guitar gently back on its stand.

  Rich had kept playing through this and twisted his fingers into the next chord, but the thing was blown now, ruined. His sister left the room, saying, “I don’t like you, Rich’s friend.”

  I gave her a face behind her back. “Let’s do something else.”

  “Yeah, my fingers hurt.�
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  We went out the kitchen door to his backyard. It had clouded over, and it was colder than before. I picked up a dog ball. Rich’s dog died a couple of weeks ago, but her toys were still around. I lobbed it to him.

  “Richie, don’t go anywhere,” his mother called from the back door.

  He waved to her and turned to me. “So what your mother was saying yesterday, that’s not true, is it? That she got fired and you’re going to lose your house? How does that even happen?”

  My chest buzzed with adrenaline. “Lose our house? What are you talking about?”

  “I thought she said—”

  I was so quick I almost didn’t know where it came from. “Ha, no! She was joking about somebody at her work. She was doing a voice, that’s all. There are all kinds of nutty people at her job. Old freaky ladies.”

  Rich grinned. “My dad does that a lot. He’s great at voices.”

  My mother had told me not to tell anyone. Maybe it was already too late.

  “Rich, lunch,” his older sister called, leaning out on the back step. “Just you.”

  Rich did his best to laugh that off. “She’s joking. Come on in.”

  It wasn’t like I wanted to be there. I could shut myself in my room or hide out in my basement, but if Mom was back from the store she’d ask me to eat lunch with her or listen to her talk. Since yesterday she seemed weirdly clingy.

  “I gotta go anyway,” I said. “My mom promised to get me all the new comics.”

  “Yeah, Mrs. Tracy gave us a ton of reading I really gotta start.”

  So I left. On the way down the street I sort of realized that Rich was the only actual person in my world, and I didn’t even like him that much. How do you like somebody? Would I know if I did?

  I stuck my key in the lock and pushed into the house. “Mom?” She was still at the store. The living room seemed farther away than when I left, like I was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I stood in Grandpa’s old room. Maybe I held my breath. I don’t know. Lose our house? Friends? St. Catherine’s. Rich. Tom Stupid Bender? I felt light-headed and went upstairs, fell into bed, and pulled the covers over my face.

  CHAPTER 4

  A CHURCH THING

  Bad things happen on Fridays. The other days of the week, sure, but Fridays more.

  This was, I don’t know, October last year? Yeah. October. The Friday before Columbus Day. The misery started even before the morning bus. I had just finished a glass of juice, cranberry, if you want to know, and poured my cereal, when Mom suddenly started screaming and throwing things in Grandpa’s old room.

  “How could you do this to us?” she cried. “To me!”

  I ran in to find her swearing at a stack of papers in her hands. The dresser drawers were tipped out, papers, envelopes, cards, photos splayed on the floor.

  “What are you doing? Mom?”

  “His second life insurance policy! He cashed it in before he died! Why?”

  I knelt down and collected the photos. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means your father reminded me after all this time that Grandpa had a second life insurance policy and there could be money we forgot to claim when he died, but there isn’t. It’s worthless!” She threw the papers at the floor and kicked them. Some shiny little cards fluttered out of the mess. She sank to her knees and picked one up.

  “Oh! His holy card. From his funeral. Daddy, why…”

  The whole thing was insane. Out of nowhere she goes into a meltdown. I sat down next to her, picked up a card, and smelled wine. “You’re working a shift today, aren’t you?”

  She got to her feet. “Later. Never mind. I think I hear your bus.”

  I stood up. “Will you be here when I get home?”

  “Yes. No. I have to work all weekend because everyone else put in their hours first. Your father will take you until Monday.”

  Take me. Like I was a dog. “I hate it at his place.”

  “Yeah, well, we all hate something.”

  It was just as stupid at school that day, too.

  Jessica Feeney was a girl in our class who’d been burned in a big fire that made her really hard to look at. People started saying her sister died in the fire, so she got mad and went home, and they all buzzed about that, but my head was all Mom screaming and her wine breath and Grandpa’s old dead head and his room torn apart, and I needed something regular or I would explode.

  Tom had promised to come over after school like normal, so when we were packing up for dismissal I went over to him. “You’re coming, right?”

  He didn’t really look at me, like Rich’s mother doesn’t look at me. “I can’t,” he said. “I have a church thing to do. My mom’s making me. She signed me up. To help.”

  Which didn’t sound right. “I thought you were coming over. You said you were going to.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, sorry.”

  “That stinks,” I grumbled. “But I’ll be home if you want to come after.”

  Then I heard Mrs. Tracy call him over. I hear her ask something like, “Are you doing anything?” and he shakes his head. Two minutes later, he’s digging in Jessica’s desk for stuff and I figure Mrs. Tracy asked him to bring Jessica something because he had no plans that afternoon.

  So. There wasn’t any church thing. He just lied to me.

  I went over to him. “Church thing, huh?”

  He stared at me. “Mrs. Tracy asked me—”

  I didn’t stay to hear more of his lies. I stumbled out of school to our bus. I didn’t say anything to anyone. At my stop, I jumped off and ran home. I threw my backpack on the floor, no, at the floor. What just happened? Did I even know? Was I wrong? Did he lie? Maybe he was going to church after all, and I’d gotten it wrong. I went back out, stole across some yards to see what he did.

  Yeah. I watched him.

  My head was shrieking inside and, hiding behind a tree, I watched him. He walked over to a house. There was a minivan outside. I’d seen it in the school lot. It was her house. He was in there until suppertime. So it was true. He lied to me. He just lied.

  I punched the tree trunk over and over.

  That was the first time I felt I could lose a thing just because of who I was.

  I was me, and I wasn’t good enough to keep a promise to. Tom Bender had promised to come over but he didn’t. You think that wouldn’t hurt because I don’t care about anything? Wrong again. Maybe I didn’t show it right away and tried to block it out, but you can’t block out something like that. It’s there and it stays there. He lied to me. To my face.

  Mom’s right. That’s what friends do.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DAYS OF THE WEEK

  First thing Monday Mom asked me to go with her to register for unemployment. I guess she wanted me there to show them she really needed help.

  “Should I look hungry?” I said. “Wear crummy clothes, shoes with holes in them? I can do that. Plus, I’ll miss school!”

  “Nice try. I’m dropping you off right after. You’ll miss one class.”

  “Aww, Mom. All the other kids get to.”

  “Uh-huh. Just untuck that shirt and practice your cough, mister!”

  We so funny, her and me.

  At seven thirty on the dot, we rolled up to a place called, if you can believe it, the Great American Job Center. It’s the center where you get jobs. In America. Which is great.

  She clicked off the Camry, the engine misfired once, and we got out, shutting our doors at the exact same time. I get that it’s weird to do so much with your mother, but it’s been just the two of us for years now, and if I didn’t have anybody, neither did she.

  The office wasn’t big, was overheated, and was already packed. When Mom got her number, seventeen away from being called, she got really quiet and dark, like she’d just figured something out. I didn’t want to know, so I went outside and walked up and down the street to try to cool off and calm down. It was colder than yesterday, and I wondered what kind of winter it w
ould be. A line started building on the sidewalk outside the door so I went back in. She was only eight numbers away now.

  Some kids might think to ask: Mom, why do you keep losing jobs? I guess the question didn’t occur to me. We just kept rolling along. Losing jobs is a way of life for some people. My dad was the king of losing jobs. He and my mother probably met in an office like this, bumping against each other as they shuffled up to the counter.

  “How long you been out of work, pretty?” he would have said.

  “Three weeks. You?”

  “Eight months. Wanna get a drink?”

  She would have laughed. “Before noon? No, sir! I want to keep my place in line. Don’t you?”

  He’d have shrugged. “What’s eight months and a day, sweetie?”

  Dad has always had a face like an actor. From the photos I’ve seen of their wedding, Mom was good-looking, too. But that was fifteen years ago, and you’ve seen pictures of smokers. All dry skin and face wrinkles. Her cheeks have hollowed out a little, the whites of her eyes faded into yellow—wait, it wasn’t fifteen years ago, it was barely fourteen years ago. I was born so soon after the wedding I could have been in it. Maybe I was.

  She got called up, and I sat outside the little cubicle she went into. A mistake. I overheard it come out that she’d been cut to part-time back at her old hospital job four months before they let her go in January, which explained why I sometimes found her home after school. Plus Fairchild Manor, where she’d just been laid off, had reported she’d been late back from lunch three times in the last month, and once didn’t come back at all. “It was an emergency,” she said to the guy in the cubicle. “I called them right up. It was my car. I called them and told them it wouldn’t start.”

  “It says here they suggested you take a cab, but you didn’t want to?”