CHAPTER 10

BE RICH OR BE HAPPY?

School let out at 3:15, but that still left plenty of time for the day to get even worse. Which it did. When I got off the bus and walked to our front door, I got that panicky feeling for the second time. I couldn’t find my house keys.

That used to happen to me all the time in California. This was the first time it had happened since we moved. With all the distractions of the day—the one hundred and twenty dollars in cash that I was carrying in my pockets; Mr. R. making it clear that he knew about the football pool; Clint Grayson and his rotting teeth, not to mention his threats—I’d forgotten to take my keys off the peg in my locker.

Even though it would mean risking a lecture filled with words like “responsibility” and “accountability,” I grabbed my bike and headed to Mom and Dad’s store to borrow their keys.

When I got there, Dad was sitting on his stool, legs crossed, playing his guitar. I recognized the first chords of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Not a customer in sight.

“Hey, Mitch,” he said. “How’s tricks?”

“What tricks?” I asked.

“How’s tricks?” he said slowly. “The kids don’t say that one anymore?”

“Maybe not so much,” I said. Add it to the list.… “Where’s Mom?”

“In the studio, working on a new painting,” he said, readjusting his ponytail. “Though I’m not sure what for.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think we underestimated Indiana as an art market,” Dad said, chuckling. “Not a lot of demand, you might say. That sounds like one of those business phrases you use, Mitch.”

“Are you worried?”

“No,” Dad replied. “Not at all.” But I could tell he was.

Now my lousy day at school seemed almost silly. This was serious. Without thinking it through, I reached into my pockets and pulled out five of the six twenty-dollar bills I had stuffed in there.

“That reminds me,” I said, unfurling the money. “There’s a kid in my grade whose mom wanted to buy a painting from you. One that costs a hundred dollars.”

“Really?” Dad said. “You’re not pulling my leg?”

“No, I have the money right here,” I said. “It was a watercolor.…”

“A hundred-dollar watercolor? Hmmm. Oh, it must be the small one of the covered bridge,” Dad said, suddenly excited.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” I lied.

“But why didn’t your friend’s mom just come by herself?”

“Um, uh, I think that she was too busy with work,” I lied again.

“Well, that’s too bad. I would have liked to explain the details to her,” Dad said. “Mom worked hard on getting the shade of red just right.”

He started to wrap up the painting but then stopped. “Do you know the woman’s name? I’d like to write her a thank-you note and let her know that she can exchange the painting if it’s not the one she had in mind. I’ll put her on the mailing list, too.”

“Uh, no,” I said.

“What’s your friend’s last name?” he said. “I can look up their address and drop it off on the way home from work.”

“I forget,” I said, less than smoothly. “I’ll just take it.”

Fortunately, Dad doesn’t really do suspicion. He’s too trusting, too look-on-the-bright-side, and too all-around nice of a guy for that. Besides, he didn’t figure I could have possibly had a hundred dollars on my own. “Well, I guess if she gave you a hundred dollars, she must really want it!”

“Exactly.”

“Your mom loved that painting,” Dad said. “This sure will make her happy!”

And me, too. I was out a hundred dollars, but I still had twenty in my pocket and a bunch more at home. I had done a good thing for Mom and Dad. (Plus, I was now the proud owner of a painting of a covered bridge.) Once Dad applied the last layer of Bubble Wrap, I stuck the package into my backpack and rode off.

On the way home, I realized that, with all my panicked lying, I had completely forgotten to get the keys, which was the reason I went to the store in the first place. Now I had some time to kill, so I took a detour past Jamie’s house. She was sitting on her front steps typing on a laptop when I rode up. “Hey, Mitch!” she shouted.

“Oh, hey,” I said from my bike. “Hey, Jamie.”

“What are you doing around here?” she asked.

“Just out for a bike ride,” I said. Another lie. They were really starting to pile up.

Bending the truth for Dad by pretending that the mom of a mystery classmate wanted to spend a hundred bucks on a painting? I could get away with that. Bending the truth for Jamie? That was tougher.

“Yeah, right.” She smirked. “If you wanted to hang out, you should have just asked. Wait a sec for me to put my dad’s laptop back in the house. I’ll get my bike, too.”

We rode around the neighborhood. Since there weren’t many cars, we mostly pedaled side by side. I was going to tell her about Clint Grayson stealing my homework in science, but she’d already heard about it.

“You should have told him to put his name on it and hand it in as his own,” she said. “It would have been the only time in his life he could’ve experienced the feeling of seeing an A on the top of the page.”

That made me feel better. “Before that, in Mr. R.’s class, he pretended to be a game show host,” I went on. “When it was my turn to be the contestant, my problem was all about a football gambling pool.”

“Probably just a coincidence,” she said nonchalantly.

“A betting pool where you put down ten dollars for the chance to win eighteen?”

“Oh,” said Jamie. “A coincidence. Ish.”

“And then to top it all off, I left the keys to my house in my locker,” I said.

“So, not such a good day, huh?”

“No,” I agreed. “Not really.”

“It’ll get better,” she promised. “I mean, things do, right? You go through these crappy days and nothing goes right and you think, okay, this is my life, this is what it’s always going to be like. And the next day it’s all back to normal. Hey, I lost something, too, today. My notebook. That’s why I was working on Dad’s laptop when you accidentally-on-purpose came by.”

I let that crack go. But, wait—

“You lost the notebook?” I said, skidding to a stop. Jamie sailed on ahead. “With all our information in it, who bet on what teams and how much?”

She stopped her bike and turned back to me.

“It’ll turn up,” she said. “I’m not worried. Come on, Mitch, ride.”

She wasn’t worried? That made one of us.

When we got to the Meadowbrook Park apartment complex, we stopped riding and sat on a picnic table.

“Let me ask you something, Mitch,” she said. “What are you doing with all your money?”

I couldn’t tell her how I’d bought a painting to help my parents’ lame business out. That was kind of embarrassing. Plus, I didn’t want her to catch me in another lie. “Nothing, really,” I said. “It’s mostly in my room. Why?”

“Why? Because we’ve each made three hundred and fifty dollars already. That’s a lot of allowance. And I haven’t really spent much of it either. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think that having money makes me happy. And if I spent it, I wouldn’t have it.”

“So are you?”

“Am I what?” I asked.

“Happy,” Jamie said. “Are you glad to have three hundred and fifty dollars you didn’t have just a few weeks ago?”

Actually, in my case it was two hundred and fifty. But I didn’t tell her that. “I guess,” I said. “I mean, yeah. It makes me feel better, having that money around. In case… you know.” She nodded, remembering what I’d told her about my parents.

“But really,” I went on, “it just feels good to have an idea no else had. It felt good to have a plan and then put it into action. It felt good that my actions turned into a profit.”

Plus, it felt good to be liked by a bunch of other kids. Or sort-of-liked. Being the Rookie Bookie was better than being “Mitch with a swirly.” And it felt best of all to have Jamie as a business partner.

But was I actually happier being rich? I hadn’t thought about it before, but—no. Not exactly. I was still me, still Mitch. Not that much had changed because of the cash stuffed into the back of my dresser drawer.

Our conversation was interrupted when we both looked up at the sky. It had turned from gray into something uglier, almost the color of a bruise.

“Just a Midwestern fall storm, California boy,” Jamie said.

“Is it coming or going?” I asked.

“Coming,” she said. “It’s definitely coming.”