By Summer's End by Pamela Morsi

Author:Pamela Morsi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2005-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

REAL LIFE

21

My mom was in a really tough place in her life. She was broke and sick and living among strangers. I finally began to get it that the only way I could really help her was to distract Mrs. Leland.

Sierra was doing a better job than me. She liked clothes and she liked to shop. Mrs. Leland enjoyed that. So the two of them spent some amount of time on that. But even my sister can’t shop every moment. And Sierra was getting deeper into her crush with Seth every day. The sound of his Spitfires on the sidewalk in front of the house became more and more familiar. So much so that Spence and I lost interest in the boring things they said to each other. They went out together to the movies. Vern took them. According to Sierra, he was very good at being right there and yet maintained invisibility. She thought him highly preferable over Seth’s parents, who she thought didn’t like her all that much.

So Sierra’s social life was going great, but that got in the way of her ability to keep Mom and Mrs. Leland separated. I needed to get the woman to like me, be interested in me. I couldn’t imagine any way to do that. So I went to somebody I thought might know.

“How do you get someone to like you?” I asked Del Tegge one hot afternoon as he sat on his back-porch steps. He was dirty and sweaty from lawn mowing. His hair was all stuck down to head and his muscle shirt was all wet and plastered against his chest.

He raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. “You mean, like a boy?” he asked.

“Yuk, no,” I assured him. “I leave the boys to Sierra. I mean like, well, a regular person. I mean, you like me. I can tell that. What makes it okay to hang out with me? How can I make, say, another grownup be interested?”

He didn’t shrug off my question. I knew he wouldn’t. And he didn’t just spout some canned answer like teachers do. He actually thought about it for a minute or two.

“I do like you,” he said. “And I think it’s for the same reason I like all my friends,” he said. “You’re smart and funny. I find you entertaining to talk to. You respect my interests and you’re willing to listen to me talk about them, sometimes more than you want. That’s what being a friend is.”

“Just listening while somebody talks about stuff?”

“Like Spence and his stargazing,” he said. “I know that’s not really your thing. But you let him talk about it. And you don’t get all mush-faced and say, ‘bor-ring,’ even though we both know that sometimes he is.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “It’s like Sierra listening to all that talk about skateboarding.”

Del chuckled. “Yes, I think that’s it exactly.”

“And that works on everybody?”

He thought about that a moment before nodding. “I think that’s true about everybody,” he agreed. “The trick, maybe, is figuring out what a person’s interests might be.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.