If You're Reading This

by Trent Reedy

  “I don’t …” Mom’s cheeks flared red.

  Did I want Mom and Derek to go out? Well, why not? He was a cool guy, and it would be good for Mom to go do something. “You should go,” I said.

  “What?” Mom suddenly focused on me as if I’d just popped out of thin air.

  “You have the night off anyway,” I said. “I’ll watch Mary … I guess.”

  Derek shrugged. “What do you say?”

  She smiled. “I’ll go.”

  “Really?” he said.

  Mom nodded. “I’ll go. Why not? It sounds fun.”

  “Great!” Derek laughed a little. “So I’ll swing by at nine to pick you up?”

  “Sounds good.” Mom shifted the bag to her other hip. “See you then.” She went back inside the house.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Derek.

  He stared at the front door for a moment. “Huh?”

  “You just totally asked my mother out,” I said.

  “What?” he said. “No, it’s just hanging out, like old times. Going to see a band. So it’s … Let’s go fix this.”

  Derek brought his extension ladder around to the corner of the house while I carried his bucket of tools. He climbed up to check out what was wrong. When he came back down, he frowned. “It doesn’t look good, Michael. Every shingle up there is old and falling apart. I found a spot where one had fallen away and the tar paper underneath was torn. That’s got to be your leak right there.”

  I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, dreading hearing about the thousands of dollars it would take to fix the roof.

  “You can patch it, no problem, but it’ll be a temporary fix. It’s only a matter of time before more leaks spring up. Eventually, you’ll have to face the fact that the house needs more serious, more permanent repairs.”

  I dropped my hands to my sides. “We don’t have the money,” I said quietly.

  “I know.” He patted me on the arm. “Let’s not worry about that right now.”

  He handed me a tool belt with a hammer and nails. Then he gave me some shingles and explained how to patch the hole. I climbed the ladder, found the spot he’d mentioned, and lifted the bottoms of a couple shingles to slide the new ones underneath. Then I hammered in nails to lock it all in place. The color wasn’t an exact match, but it was close enough, and a mismatched spot on the roof was the least of the troubles for this old house.

  Back on the ground, I smiled as I handed Derek his hammer and tool belt. I felt good — tough. Sure, Derek told me how to patch the leak, but then he just held the ladder and I took care of the problem. Dad would have been proud.

  I put Derek’s tools in the cab as he put his ladder away and climbed in behind the wheel. “I got some stuff to do. Keep an eye on things next time it rains. Let me know if there’s any more trouble.”

  I watched as he drove away. Derek made most other adults seem pretty lame by comparison, and I trusted him more than a lot of people. If Mom had to date someone, he’d be the best choice.

  Now that I’d dealt with the roof, the time had come to move on to another project: getting ready for Isma to come over. Mom left for work, and then I had to get rid of Mary. I found her, as I often did, in the living room, slumped with one leg up over the arm of the faded recliner, flipping through the stations on TV.

  “If you’re not watching anything in particular, do you mind if we watch football?” I asked. “It’s the Hawkeyes’ first game of the season.”

  “Why can’t we get better cable?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard me. “We don’t get any good channels.”

  “It’s kind of expensive to get the better package.”

  She stopped on some cartoon show and dropped the remote in her lap. Her head flopped back against the recliner as she sighed. “We have to do something about the cable. I’m so bored.”

  “I’ll ask Mom about it. Now will you find the game coverage? I really want to watch the Hawks,” I said. She made no effort to change the channel. Boredom had taken over. This was good. “Why don’t you go out with your friends? Doesn’t Crystal Rhodes go shopping about every weekend?”

  “You’re such an idiot. Yeah, it would be so fun to go to Iowa City and watch Crystal try on every cool outfit at the mall while I have no money and have to wear dork clothes.”

  “I just got paid at the farm. I might have a little extra if you want. You could get a shirt or … earrings or something.”

  She flashed me an excited look. “Really?” I shrugged. Then she narrowed her eyes. “Wait a sec. Why do you want to get rid of me so bad? What’s going on?”

  “No. Nothing. Just, you looked so bored and —”

  “I’m always bored around here,” Mary said. “You usually tell me to go read a stupid book.”

  I dropped down on the couch, and a little cloud of dust puffed out. Mary waved her hand in front of her face. “Ugh. Idiot. Anyway, Crystal isn’t even going shopping this weekend. She has to visit her grandma in Illinois or something.”

  What was I supposed to do now? She’d be suspicious of anything I recommended that would get her out of the house. “Fine.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I might as well tell her. She would find out in a few hours anyway. “I have this group project on the Civil War for history. My partner, Isma, is coming over later so we can work on it.”

  Mary flashed her gotcha smile. “Isma Rafee? That weirdo Iraqi girl? You like Isma Rafee?”

  “No!” I stood up. “I just told you, moron! We’re working on a history project. And she’s not Iraqi or weird.”

  “You sure are getting mad over someone who is just your school partner.”

  “I’m getting mad because you’re a moron.” I went to the arch between the living room and dining room. “So stay out of my way today because I want to clean this place up before she comes over.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Mary went back to flipping channels. “You want to impress your girlfriend. I know.”

  She didn’t know how much I couldn’t stand her sometimes.

  I worked for hours to get the house ready, taking periodic breaks to make Mary turn the channel so I could at least check the score of the game. Our dusty little yard didn’t have much grass, but after fighting to get our aged mower started, I cut the long weeds. I washed, dried, and put away the dishes. I scrubbed the toilet, sink, mirror, and shower. I vacuumed our rugs, mopped the scuffed wood floors, and dusted everything that needed dusting, which was everything. Mary wouldn’t accept a bribe to run to ThriftyTown for Coke and pretzels, so I finally had to make an emergency run on Scrappy.

  All of this made me pretty sweaty, so I cleaned myself up and changed clothes. At first I wondered if I shouldn’t try to find a kind of dress-up shirt, but I only had a white, long-sleeve, button-down shirt with an irritating collar. A newer Roughriders T-shirt would have to do. Then I sat on the couch in the clean living room and waited. It was only three thirty, but I kept going to the window to peek up and down the street in case Isma came early.

  “Mike. Sit down,” Mary said. “I don’t know how it is with two people as dorky as you and Isma, but a normal girl would be totally creeped out by the way you’re acting.”

  I suppose she picked up her know-it-all attitude from hanging out with Rhodes’s sister all the time. “I’m not acting any different,” I said. “This is no big deal. Just a history assignment.”

  “Whatever.” Mary went back to watching her show, where a couple was having an awkward conversation over a candlelit dinner.

  I sat back down and tried to calm myself. She had a point. Why did I feel so nervous? I couldn’t relax or get rid of that hollow feeling in my stomach. Was it because of Dad’s second challenge that I was making a bigger deal out of this than it really was?

  I heard Isma’s footsteps on the porch before I saw her out the window. I waited to give her enough time to press the button so I could fake like the doorbell worked. Then I answered the door.

  “Hi,”
I said. Isma looked great in dark jeans and a light blue T-shirt.

  Mary stepped up behind me and to my right, pinching my arm. “Isma! Come in! Oh my gosh, that shirt looks so good on you. Where did you get it? I totally want a shirt like that.” She pulled me back into the dining room.

  Isma came in. “You must be Mary. It’s nice to meet you. And the shirt? I can’t remember. Somewhere at the mall, I guess.” Her school bag was slung over her right shoulder and she held a big bowl covered in plastic wrap. “I brought a snack. We might get hungry.”

  “Oh, something from your country?” Mary asked.

  Isma kept her grin, but I could tell the question annoyed her. “Um, it’s caramel corn.”

  I chuckled.

  Mary’s cheeks flared red. “Oh. Yeah. Love that stuff. I’ll shut the TV off and let you two have the living —”

  Isma stepped back. “I don’t want to be a bother if —”

  “We’ll just work on the project in my room,” I said. “It’s no problem.”

  I led her up the stairs and around the corner in the hallway, where I held aside the curtain over the doorway to the attic steps. “Right up here.” I followed her up the steep stairs, keeping my eyes down so I wouldn’t be staring at her backside.

  When I came up out of the stairwell, Isma slowly spun around, taking in my rough, unfinished attic. When her turn brought her around to face me, she smiled and pushed back a strand of her black hair. “Is this really your room?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. It’s a small house. Only two real bedrooms. My mom and sister use those. I’m stuck up here.”

  “Yeah, but I love it.” She put her book bag down on my bed. “It’s like your own space, you know? You have your own floor of the house all to yourself. I have a bedroom with thin walls next to my little brother’s room. I hear his stupid video games all the time.” She ran her fingers along the spines of some books in my bookcase. “Are these all yours?”

  “Some of them,” I said. “A lot of them — the spy-thriller paperbacks, the Stephen Kings, and the Patrick O’Brians — belonged to my father. He … sort of gave them to me.”

  “Have you read them all?”

  “Most of them.”

  “I’d want to read all the time too if I had a quiet, hidden-away place like this.”

  “Yeah, well …” I couldn’t believe she saw my attic as something besides a dark, run-down slum-dump, that she understood what I liked about this place. “It’s pretty quiet up here. Unless it rains. Then the drops sort of pound the roof.”

  “That sounds kind of nice,” Isma said.

  I watched her. “It can be,” I said quietly. She looked away, and I went to flip on the light and switch on my desk lamp.

  “What’s on the other side of the curtain?” she asked.

  “Oh, not much,” I said. “Some storage space and … my gym.”

  “I thought you must have been working out. You have muscles. Can I see this gym?”

  In the history of my whole life, no girl had ever noticed that I had muscles before. “I’ll show you.” I led her to the other side of the curtain and pointed to the cement weights I had made. “They’re not exactly Olympic quality, but between lifting here and the work I do on the farm … Well, they work okay, I guess.”

  “You must really love Hawkeye football.” She motioned toward my posters hanging on the stacks of boxes.

  “I never miss a game. Well, almost never.”

  She smiled. “Did you make these weights? That’s so cool.”

  I didn’t want to act super cocky. I shrugged. “It took forever to figure out how much concrete to pour for the different weights. So instead of the normal ten-, twenty-five-, thirty-five-, and forty-five-pounders, mine are like thirteen-and-a-half pounds.” I lightly kicked a different weight. “That one is something like twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Best I could do, I guess.”

  She rested her warm hand on my bicep. A tingle went up my spine from her touch. “I wouldn’t have expected a lot of this.”

  “I did a lot of curls. Bench press.”

  She dropped her hand from my arm. “No, I meant the books, the desk — that I can understand. But all the Hawkeye posters, the weights, your going out for football — that just seems to clash with the image I have of you.”

  I shrugged. “For a long time I convinced myself that all I needed were my books. But I’ve always liked football. It’s a fun game. The posters? They help motivate me when I’m lifting, and they’re a reminder of my future, hopefully at the University of Iowa.”

  “To play football?”

  “No.” I laughed. “I’m not close to that good. But they have a good English program, and one of the best writing programs in the country.”

  “Too bad those things don’t get the kind of attention that sports do.”

  I pulled the curtain wall aside and led her to the other part of the attic. “That would be nice. It’s just that the writing and everything is not as dramatic in the short term as football.”

  “Your gym took a lot of smarts and a lot of work. I’m impressed.” She took another look around the attic. “Wow. That is a huge stereo.” She crouched down in front of Dad’s old CD-and-cassette player. It was one of those all-in-one units with a three-disc carousel on top and a double tape deck in front. Plus, for some reason, it had tons of blue, green, and red flashing lights. I joined her by the stereo and tapped the POWER button to bring it to life. The whirl of color started on its front panel and in its buttons.

  Isma clapped her hands together. “What’s it doing?”

  I laughed. “It just does all that when it turns on. I guess in the nineties, this was supposed to look futuristic.”

  She looked at the shelves stacked high with CDs in their cases. “Are these all yours?”

  “I guess so. I mean … they were my father’s.”

  “He gave them to you? He’s really generous.”

  I rubbed my hand across the back of my neck. “My dad died in the war in Afghanistan.”

  She stood up straight and put her hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

  “I didn’t know. I just thought your parents were divorced. It must be …” She reached out and brushed her hand down my arm. “I’m sorry. You must miss him very much.”

  It was very quiet for a moment. I hardly ever talked to people about Dad. It felt strangely good to tell Isma about him. I wanted to tell her more, but I didn’t know what to say.

  Finally Isma took a deep breath and smiled. “Play us something?”

  I hit the button to start the last disc I had in. In a moment, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” filled the room.

  I’d never shown anyone my attic or my gym. Nobody had ever listened to music up here with me. For a moment, I thought of the dance Dad had written about and the mission he’d set for me. Should I ask Isma to dance with me? I had zero experience with girls, and I’d never actually slow danced before. It looked easy enough, but even if Isma didn’t think my request was weird and she said yes, I would probably mess it all up.

  “Are you okay?” Isma asked. “You suddenly went all quiet.”

  “You said I must miss my dad very much.” I pulled the two letters out from under Hamlet on my desk. “That’s the thing. I do miss him, but now I’ve gotten these letters from him.” The expression on her face told me she thought that sounded crazy. “Before he died, my dad wrote a bunch of letters for me to have before I turned sixteen. Someone is mailing them to me. I’ve received two so far.”

  “Wow,” Isma said. “That must be so intense. Who’s sending them?”

  “I have no idea. Dad had planned to have one of his war buddies deliver them, but I found out that guy didn’t make it home either. I think of the sender as the Mystery Mailer. There’s no return address or note explaining anything.”

  Isma looked at the papers in my hands. “Did your dad leave you any clues?” Without thinking, I held
the letters out to her. She took a step back. “No. No, I can’t. Those words are between you and your father.”

  “No, it’s cool,” I said. “I want you to read them. I mean, if you want.”

  She slowly reached out and took the papers from me. “I’m … honored.”

  I didn’t want to sit here watching her read. I remembered the soda downstairs. “Want a Coke?”

  “Um, sure.” She started reading, and I went downstairs to the kitchen.

  Had I really just done that? Handed over my dad’s letters? What if she thought I was weird for letting her read them? What if she didn’t really want to read them, but didn’t want to hurt my feelings about a serious subject like my father?

  I went to the fridge and reached down to get two bottles. For some reason Riverside’s grocery store, ThriftyTown, sold actual glass bottles of Coke. Soda tasted way better from a glass bottle, and suddenly I was very thirsty.

  “How’s your date?” Mary said from behind me.

  I stood up. “It’s not a date! We’re working on a school project.” I put the bottles on the counter and took the opener from a drawer.

  “Whatever. She’s cute. You should totally date her.”

  “I don’t need relationship advice from my little sister.” I pried the cap off one bottle. “Anyway, it’s not like that. We’re just —”

  “You’re so clueless. She totally likes you, Mike.”

  “Would you just leave me alone!” I felt the heat in my cheeks, and I took a deep breath to calm down. “She does not.”

  “Yeah, right.” Mary made a big show of tossing back her hair and blinking her eyes really fast. “Oh, hi, Mikey,” she said in a high-pitched voice as she leaned back against the counter like a model. “I brought you some caramel corn. Don’t you think I’m — Oops! I mean, don’t you think the caramel corn’s — soooooo sssweet?”

  “What happened to you?” Not long ago Mary had played with Barbies, and now she thought she knew enough to offer expert advice in romance. “You’re only in seventh grade.” I popped the top off the other bottle.

  Mary stood up straight. “Yeah, and I’m the only one in this family who is living in modern times.”