by David Adler
At lunch, I ask Calvin about the dog.
“His name is Mitchell. It’s my aunt’s dog. She’s going somewhere. I think to visit some friends. She’s leaving on Thursday, and she said I could have Mitchell while she’s away.”
“She expects you to watch him and not rent him to some stranger.”
“How do you know that?” Calvin asks. “You don’t even know my aunt.”
Annie unwraps her sandwich, and I smell the salami. How does she eat that stuff?
“I bet you don’t even know my aunt’s name.”
“You’re right. I don’t know your aunt, and I don’t know her name. I just know that when she asked you to watch Mitchell, she doesn’t want you to give him to someone else.”
“I’m not giving him to anyone. I’m renting him, and my aunt’s name is Ruth.”
“Eat your lunch,” Annie tells me.
“And there’s another thing. You have my telephone number on your signs. What if someone calls to rent a pet and my mother answers the phone?”
“She’ll take a message.”
“Calvin,” Douglas asks, “do you have any extra cookie mistakes?”
Calvin gives him a few cookie mistakes and a funny-shaped jelly donut.
“Your telephone number is at the very bottom of the sign,” Calvin tells me. “I’ll just tear it off.”
Annie has celery stalks for lunch. She says they’re filled with vitamins and minerals.
Maybe they are, but they’re noisy. Salami and celery—a smelly, noisy lunch.
I finish eating, throw away my sandwich wrappers and other stuff, and we go back to class.
It’s a good afternoon. Mrs. Cakel doesn’t tell anyone to sit up, speak up, or wake up. After class, she gives me Evan’s homework. She tells me to ask Evan when he thinks he’ll be coming back to school.
On our way, Calvin and I stop by a tree. He takes a small hammer, a box of metal tacks, and a sign from his bag. I hold the sign against the tree and he tacks it on. We do that again and again on our way to Evan’s house. We tack up five or six before I remember the telephone numbers.
“Hey, you left my number on the signs.”
“My number is first. People always call the first number.”
I cross out my number on the rest of the signs before we tack them up.
We get to Evan’s house, and he’s glad to see us. I give him the baseball books, and he thanks me.
Evan is even glad to get the homework. He says he’ll be back in school on Monday.
I tell Evan about my unicycle, and Calvin demonstrates his juggling. He tears three sheets of paper from his notebook, makes three paper balls, and juggles them.
Calvin says, “I’m going to teach Danny how to juggle.”
Evan gets all excited.
“That’s great. There’s a talent show every Sunday in the children’s ward at my hospital. You and Danny can be in it.”
“Sure,” Calvin says. “We’ll be there.”
“Hey! I still can’t ride a unicycle and I can’t juggle.”
“Today is just Tuesday. You’ll juggle by Sunday. I’m a great juggler and a great teacher.”
You’re shaking your head, aren’t you? You don’t think Calvin is a great teacher. Well, I agree with you. He’s not a great student, and I’m sure he’s not a great teacher.
“You’re going to be a great juggler,” Calvin tells me as we walk home. We get to his house, and he says, “Your first lesson is now.”
Calvin opens the door and his mother is standing right there with a plate of cookie mistakes.
“I saw you coming,” she says, “and I thought you could use a snack before you start your homework.”
We follow her to the kitchen. She puts the cookies on the small table. She pours us each a cup of milk and tells us, “Milk is good for you. It’s good for your bones, nerves, muscles, and tissues. I’m talking about the tissues in your bodies, not the tissues in a box that you use when you have a cold.”
Calvin’s mother is an interesting woman. She talks like a runaway train. Just now, she started talking about milk. I wonder where she’ll end up.
“Tissues are more sanitary than handkerchiefs. My dad always had a fancy handkerchief in his jacket pocket, folded, pointy, and sticking out, but we always said it was for showing and not blowing, and it always matched his necktie. His name was Calvin. He was so proud when we named our son after him. Yes, my dad was Calvin too.”
Mrs. Waffle laughs.
“The way I said that it sounded like my dad was the second Calvin but he wasn’t. I was using the too that means also, not the two that’s a number. Why do they do that—have so many words in English that sound the same but mean different things?”
You see? She started talking about milk and ended with words that sound the same but have different meanings. I think they’re called “homonyms.”
Calvin and I eat a few cookie mistakes and drink some milk.
“Mom,” my friend Calvin says. “We have a lot to do.”
“Yes, I know. Your teacher gives lots of homework. That’s one of the things I like about my job at the bakery. I don’t get homework.”
I follow Calvin to his room. There’s not much furniture, just a bed, a nightstand, and a dresser. He takes some small beanbag balls from his dresser and tosses one to me. It’s easy to catch. He tosses another. I drop the first ball and catch the second. He tosses another and another beanbag ball to me. I keep dropping one and catching the next.
“At least you know how to catch,” Calvin says. “Now I’ll teach you how to juggle.”
Calvin picks up the beanbags and puts them on his bed.
“Do what I do,” he says.
Calvin takes one beanbag ball from the bed. Using just one hand, he tosses it up and catches it again and again. That’s what I do.
“Higher,” Calvin tells me. “It should go up to nose level, and you should not be looking at the ball. You should be looking straight ahead.”
It’s not so easy to catch a ball without looking at it, but I keep practicing.
Now Calvin does it with two balls, one with each hand. He throws one ball up and when it’s about up to his nose, he throws up the second ball and catches the first, and he keeps doing that. That’s what I try to do, but mostly I throw the balls up, and they fall to the floor.
Calvin gets a third ball. He juggles all three, and I just watch.
“Wait right here,” he says.
He leaves the room and comes back with an apple. Now he juggles two balls and the apple, and each time he catches the apple, he takes a bite of it. I sit on his bed and watch until he’s eaten the entire apple.
I try one more time to throw two balls up in the air at the same time and catch them. I can’t do it.
“I’ll never be able to juggle.”
“Yes, you will. You’ve got a great teacher. And I don’t mean the Cakel. I mean the Waffle.”
Calvin gives me three of the beanbag balls and tells me to practice. “That’s your homework.”
“What about Mrs. Cakel’s homework? Let’s do it together.”
“I’ll do it later.”
No, he won’t.
“Right now,” Calvin says, “I’m going to practice some new juggling tricks.”
I tell Calvin it’s time for me to go home, and he walks with me to the front door.
“Good-bye,” I tell Mrs. Waffle, “and thanks for the snack.”
“Yes, good-bye. And this week, there’s a good buy at the bakery. Three mini jelly donuts for a dollar.”
I walk home, and as soon as I open the door, my sister Karen yells at me, “Since when do you have a dog?”
“I don’t have a dog.”
“Two people called and asked about a miniature collie. They want to rent it.”
> “Mitchell?”
“No. The people who called are Mildred Foster and Jared Derby.”
I follow Karen into the kitchen, and she shows me the note she wrote with their telephone numbers.
“I told them we don’t have a miniature collie, and if we did, it wouldn’t be for rent.”
I tell her about Calvin and Danny’s Rent-A-Pet, Calvin’s Aunt Ruth, and her dog Mitchell.
Karen laughs.
“You know this is going to end badly. Mitchell might bite someone or run away, and you’ll be responsible. He might get fleas, and then so will you. You’ll be scratching and scratching until your skin is covered with red splotches. That all might happen and it might not, but one thing I know for sure: you’ll get into real trouble, and I’ll be here to see it all.”
She laughs again and says, “This will be fun.”
I don’t like that Karen is happy about my troubles, but I think she’s right. This whole Rent-A-Pet business will end badly.
Karen watches as I try to juggle the beanbags. After a while, I think the beanbags know when I throw them in the air that they’ll soon be on the floor.
Karen tells me, “You’re not very good at juggling beanbags.”
I know that.
“I’ll try something smaller,” I say. “I’ll try juggling Mom’s hard-boiled eggs.”
“I’ll get them,” Karen says.
Karen takes three of Mom’s eggs from the refrigerator and puts them on the table. With just my right hand, I throw one egg up just a bit and catch it. I do that again and again. Now I do it with my left hand.
“Throw them higher,” Karen says. “Juggle them.”
I hold two eggs in my left hand and one in my right hand. I throw one from my left hand, and when it’s in the air, I throw the one in my right hand, and then quickly the one still in my left hand.
The first one falls on the floor and breaks.
“Hey!”
The next two fall and break.
“Hey! These aren’t Mom’s hard-boiled eggs.”
“No,” Karen laughs. “They’re your broken eggs.”
What a mess!
“I should probably help you clean this up,” Karen says. “But I won’t. I have homework to do.”
Here I am with three broken eggs on the floor and lots of Cakel homework to do.
Isn’t life great?
That’s another rhetorical question.
Now it’s after dinner. I call Calvin and tell him about Mildred Foster and Jared Derby.
“Great!” Calvin says. “Call and tell them Mitchell will be ready Thursday afternoon.”
“They’ll want to know more than just that. They’ll want me to tell them about the dog. They’ll want to know if we will bring him to them or if they have to pick him up, and how much the rent will be.”
“The rent. That’s a good question,” Calvin says. “How much should we charge?”
Calvin is quiet for a minute. I guess he’s thinking.
“We could charge by the pound,” he says. “We could weigh Mitchell and charge fifty cents a pound for each day.”
“No,” I tell him. “Ferrets weigh almost nothing. If we charge by the pound, we’ll get almost no money for renting a ferret. And how would we weigh a parakeet or a goldfish?”
Calvin says, “Mitchell is a good dog. We’ll charge four dollars a day for him. How does that sound?”
I say, “That sounds like twenty-eight dollars a week. That’s fourteen dollars for me. That sounds great.”
I tell Calvin I’ll go to his house after I finish my homework. We’ll call together.
“Don’t spend too much time on your homework,” Calvin tells me. “Remember, the Cakel tells us to do it. She doesn’t tell us to do it well. The answers don’t have to be right.”
That’s Calvin. That’s not me.
It takes me a while to do it all. I finish and tell Mom I’m going to Calvin’s. I get to his house, and Mrs. Waffle opens the door.
“Hello again,” she says. “Do you want more cookies? Do you want more milk for your nerves and tissues?”
“No, thank you. I just want to see Calvin.”
“He’s in his room. I think he’s doing his homework.”
“Take a look,” Calvin says when I get to his room. He shows me his homework. All his answers are wrong.
He likes to be the bad boy. What he doesn’t want is for me to tell him his work is “very nice,” so that’s exactly what I say. Maybe if people don’t make a fuss when he gets all the wrong answers, he’ll try to get the right answers.
“Let’s call those two people,” Calvin says.
We’re sitting on Calvin’s bed. I give him Karen’s note with the names and numbers of the people who called. On his cell phone, Calvin presses the buttons for Mildred Foster and gives me the phone.
“You talk,” he says. “You’re better with adults.”
A woman answers the phone.
“Hello. I’m Danny Cohen of Calvin and Danny’s Rent-A-Pet.”
“Yes,” the woman says. “I want to rent that little collie. My nephew will be visiting with me, and he loves animals. Is the dog good with children?”
“My partner Calvin Waffle knows the dog. You can ask him all your questions.”
I try to give Calvin the phone, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t want to talk.
I tell him her question.
“Tell her that Mitchell is great with children.”
“This is Danny again,” I tell Mildred Foster. “The dog’s name is Mitchell, and he’s very good with children.”
I tell her what the rent will be and that we’ll bring the dog to her house Thursday afternoon. Calvin tells me and I tell her what Mitchell likes to eat. She gives me her address, and I write it on Karen’s note.
That’s it!
We’re in business.
Starting Thursday, I’ll be earning two dollars a day. That’s my share of the rent.
“What about Jared Derby?” I ask.
“You have to call and tell him the dog has already been rented.”
Calvin is lucky to have me as his partner. I don’t mind talking to adults.
Jared Derby wants the dog for his son.
“He’s eleven and thinks he’s ready to be responsible for another living thing. I disagree, so this rent-a-pet thing is a perfect opportunity for him to prove himself.”
I tell Mr. Derby that the dog is no longer available.
On the way home, I think that, over a full year, making two dollars a day adds up to $730.
I’m good at math.
After 1,370 years, that’s over one million dollars. Wow! In 1,370 years, I’ll be a millionaire.
On our way to school this morning, all Calvin wants to talk about is our pet business.
“I was right,” he says. “There’s a real need for pets you can rent. Our problem will be getting the animals. You should tell your parents you want a pet dog, cat, and ferret. You’ll train them to be good with strangers, and we’ll rent them out.”
“No, it’s not going to happen,” I tell him. “And you should let your aunt know that you won’t be watching her dog.”
Calvin stops walking. We are still two blocks from school. He turns to me and says, “Do you think if my aunt really cares who watches her dog, she would let me do it? Everyone knows I’m irresponsible.”
“Not everyone knows that.”
“Sure, some school teacher in Tibet doesn’t know it, but everybody else does.”
“I don’t think you’re irresponsible. I just think you’re different. That’s one of the reasons I like you.”
“It is?”
“Yes, it is.”
We start walking again.
I’ve had enough business talk.
“It’s Wednesday,” I tell Calvin, “and by Sunday, I’m supposed to be riding my unicycle and juggling.”
“That’s why I brought beanbags to school. You’ll practice at lunch.”
We get to school. We’re on time today, and I know what that means. Tomorrow Calvin will make sure we’re late.
Mrs. Cakel checks my homework and hardly looks at it. Now she’s checking Calvin’s.
“I can’t give you credit for this,” she says. “Every answer is wrong.”
“But I did it,” Calvin tells her. “I did my homework.”
She taps his notebook with her pen and says, “This is not homework. It’s nonsense, and it’s not acceptable. You’ll have to stay in class during lunch and do it then.”
Calvin looks at her. I know he wants to argue, but you don’t argue with Mrs. Cakel. Even Calvin knows that.
Missing lunch with us is a real punishment for Calvin. It’s his favorite time of the school day, and he’ll hate spending it with Mrs. Cakel.
Morning classes are boring, so I doodle. That’s pretty much all I do in school. Soon I’ll need a new doodle notebook. This one is almost filled.
The lunch bell rings, and Calvin gives me three beanbag balls and tells me to practice.
“Poor Calvin,” Douglas says at lunch. “How bad could his homework be?”
I don’t answer. I assume this is another of those rhetorical things.
“Really,” Douglas asks, “how bad could it be?”
The question isn’t rhetorical, so I answer it.
“Calvin purposely wrote the wrong answers. Listen to what he wrote for the one about who was on the committee to write the Declaration of Independence.”