“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.”
She’s right. And maybe there’s something she doesn’t want to say but we all know. Lisa isn’t the only person Dad has been weird around. He’s now spent the day with both sets of grandparents and both times he’s cried in embarrassing ways. None of us could watch it, he looked so much like a kid. So, no. We love Dad and we’re doing this for him, but we don’t want him to be there, embarrassing himself and the rest of us.
But where can he go? The rehab center where he spends most of his weekdays isn’t open on the weekend. Some people stay there all the time, but we can’t check him in for nonmedical reasons, Mom says. She thinks about her two best friends, who have already been over. One is Polly, our old kindergarten teacher, who Mom says is like the sister she never had. When she came over, she sat next to Dad and didn’t mind at all when he put his head on her shoulder and fell asleep for a few minutes.
“We’ll just have Polly spend the day with him,” Mom says. “She’ll bring him over to her house. She’ll be happy to do that. It’ll be good for him actually. The doctors are saying we should alter his routine so he learns to adapt to schedule changes.” She sounds like she could be talking about George.
Martin and I look at each other, but we don’t say anything because there’s too much to do and having a plan like this puts us all in a pretty good mood.
We need to start organizing the game part of the carnival. We need to start collecting old clothes and toys for the tag sale. We need to start baking a zillion pies that Martin thinks people will pay a lot for. It’s funny. Now that Martin’s being so nice about doing this so I don’t have to sell my minifigs, I want to do a really great job. I want to have a real games arcade and design the best games I can think of. I want to bake great pies and have people say things like, “Here, why don’t I give you fifty dollars for this pie.” I keep imagining moments like that.
We spend a week getting ready. We pull out our old toys and clothes. Martin gets some of his old friends to help, and I have to say I’m surprised. It’s been years since I’ve seen most of them do anything besides play a video game, but now they all bring over their best old toys and on Friday we have a pile of Nerf guns in our living room that’s higher than our coffee table.
“They all work, too,” Martin says when he catches me staring at them.
I wonder if I could withdraw birthday money from the bank and buy them all up or if that would defeat the whole point of this fund-raiser.
“I look at that and I think a hundred bucks, easy,” Martin says.
I have thirty in the bank so never mind.
Mom and George and I spend every afternoon making pies with homemade crusts, which is easy once you get the hang of it. By the end we have fourteen and have to stop because we have no room to hold any more.
Martin stares at the table on the screened porch where they’re all laid out with little place cards on top, saying what kind they are. “I look at this and I’m thinking another hundred and twenty dollars easy.”
When Mom looks surprised, he says, “You think anyone’s gonna give us less than eight dollars a pie?”
The Friday before our carnival is the last day of the C.A.R.E. footprints program. It turns out our class didn’t win the pizza party. We didn’t even come close. Ms. Shiner’s fifth grade class won with sixty-seven footprints and we had only nineteen. Three for Jeremy, one each for almost everyone else. As Mr. Norris passes each person’s footprint back to them, here is the biggest surprise: there are none for Rayshawn, who I think of as the nicest guy in our class.
I almost can’t believe it. It makes me wonder if he really was inviting me to play basketball with him, not just trying to get a footprint. Because if Rayshawn cared about footprints, he would have one.
Mr. Norris tells us we should keep our footprints as important artifacts from this year (we just learned the word artifact in social studies a week ago), which makes them seem a little cooler, except I can’t stop looking over at Rayshawn, who doesn’t have one.
“You should have gotten about five,” I whisper to him. “It’s not fair.”
“Nah,” he says, smiling like I’m being funny. “What for?”
I look down at my footprint, which means a lot to me because it’s one of the only ones with Mr. Norris’s handwriting. I thought for sure I’d keep this in my special treasures drawer at home, but suddenly there’s something I want to do with it more. I turn it over and write: I appreciate how Rayshawn invites terrible players like Benny B. to play basketball at recess. Someday Benny B. might actually do it.
When he turns around to get his math book out, I put the footprint on Rayshawn’s desk.
Here’s the best part—he laughs for about thirty seconds when he reads it. He laughs so hard his forehead touches his desk, then he looks back at me. “Thanks, man. I might just keep this,” he says.
I watch him put it in his backpack and I think, That feels better than getting the stupid thing myself.
Maybe I really am growing up because that afternoon Mr. Norris reads us the last Zen short story and I sort of understand it. Or I think I do.
“Let’s see what you think,” he says ahead of time.
The story is about a mother whose baby has died. She is so sad she goes to Buddha and says she’ll do anything to bring her baby back to life. Buddha says he’ll grant her wish if she brings him a mustard seed from a house that has never known death. The woman accepts the challenge. She starts in her own village and then moves across the countryside, knocking on doors and asking strangers if anyone in their family has died. She figures out that every house has lost someone. The last line of the story explains the point the way a lot of the other ones haven’t. “She loses the challenge but discovers a community to share her pain with.”
When he finishes the story, Mr. Norris looks up at me. When he did this before, I wanted to say, Don’t look at me! I don’t understand! But this time it’s a little different. This time I think I do understand it. I’m not sure I can put it into words, though. Just like he had a hard time writing up a footprint for me. George and Aaron aren’t always easy to be around, but we still love them.
That’s it, I guess. That’s what we share.
When you put it into words it doesn’t seem like much, but we both know it’s a lot.