Playing the Field (3 page)

As I looked around the room, I caught
Serena’s eye. She smiled at me, then turned back toward Mrs.
Swenson.

Or maybe, I thought, maybe Serena wasn’t such
a bad choice after all.

Chapter 3

When I got home from school, the first thing
I noticed was that my little brother, Kirk, had gotten into my
dresser and dumped my clothes all over the floor. I put my backpack
on my bed and went to find the little shrimpola.

I was an only child for eight years before
Kirk came along, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t appreciate my
onlyness. My parents had tried to have more children for years but
weren’t able to. They’d just decided we were stuck being a
three-person family, then Kirk surprised us all. When my parents
told me I was going to have a brother, I was so happy I went wild.
That was five years ago, before I realized a little brother’s main
purpose in life is getting into his big brother’s stuff.

I walked into the family room and found Kirk
watching TV wearing only my underwear. “Kirk, what are you
doing?”

“Watching TV,” he said.

“I mean,” I said a bit more forcefully, “what
are you doing in my underwear?”

“Watching TV,” he said again.

I went and stood in front of the TV. “Number
one, you’re not supposed to get into my dresser. Number two, you
left all of my clothes on the floor. And number three you’re not
allowed to wear my things.”

He stood up and put his hands on his hips.
“Get out of my way or I’ll tell Mom.”

“I’m not moving until you put my clothes back
in my dresser and get out of my underwear.”

Kirk scowled and tried to push me. I put my
hand on his head and held him away until he got so frustrated he
yelled for Mom.

Mom came into the room two seconds later and
looked at me accusingly. “You can’t even be home for five minutes
without fighting with your brother?”

I let go of Kirk but didn’t step out of the
way. “He dumped my clothes on the floor, and he’s wearing my
underwear.”

Now mom’s gaze turned to my brother.
“Kirk?”

“I spilled milk on myself and got all soaked,
and I didn’t have any clean underwear.”

Mom sighed, mumbled something about doing the
laundry, then said, “Go pick up McKay’s clothes and put them back
in his dresser.”

“And my underwear?” I asked.

“It won’t kill you to let him borrow your
underwear.”

“But Mom—”

“You’re not using them right now, and he
needs some.”

This just goes to show you how unreasonable
mothers can be. After all, a guy’s underwear ought to be sacred. I
mean, what if somebody came over and saw those size 16 boxers
hanging off of Kirk’s skinny little body? They’d know they were
getting a firsthand look at my private matters.

Kirk gave me a smug look and left the
room.

“Put everything back in the right drawers!” I
called after him. Then I followed Mom into the laundry room.

“I need my own bedroom,” I told her. It was a
matter we’d discussed before, but Mom always used one of three
excuses to tell me I had to stay put: (1) It’s too much work to
move somebody out; (2) Kirk will be lonely without you; (3) We
don’t have the room.

We have a three-bedroom house, and the
smallest bedroom is used as an office. My mom works at home as a
medical transcriptionist, so she needs a computer, a filing
cabinet, and that sort of stuff. In addition, she has every sewing
project and craft she ever planned to finish stuffed into the
closet. It’s probably the most crowded room in the house, but to my
way of thinking, where there’s a will, there’s a way to get Kirk
out of my room.

This time Mom started out with excuse number
three. “We don’t have the room for separate bedrooms in this
house.”

“Then let’s get a bigger house.”

“We’ve gone over this before. We don’t have
the money for a bigger house yet.”

“Well, when is ‘yet’ ever going to
happen?”

“Either when you and Kirk stop outgrowing
your clothes on a monthly basis, or when Daddy or I get a raise.”
She picked out some whites from the laundry basket and threw them
into the washer. “Neither of which,” she muttered, “is likely to
happen soon.”

I leaned against the dryer. “Couldn’t you
just move your desk and all that office stuff into your
bedroom?”

Mom threw a few more clothes into the washer.
“You know how early your dad gets up. If we had the computer in our
room, then I couldn’t work on things at night because he’d be
sleeping. Besides, I’m not sure all of that stuff would fit into
our room.”

“But Kirk constantly gets into my things. He
has no respect for my property.”

Mom sighed. “I’ll talk to him about it.”

“When my friends come over, we can’t hang out
in my room because he always follows us in there.”

“He looks up to you,” Mom said.

“I’d like him to look up to me from a
different bedroom.”

Mom dumped some soap in the machine and
turned the dial slowly. “I’ll discuss it with your father.”

This was farther than I’d ever gotten before
on issue number three. “Really?”

Mom shut the lid of the washer and picked up
stray socks from the floor. “Right now it’s just talking.”

“Right,” I said. But after Mom left the room.
I did a little victory dance anyway.

When my dad came home from work, I was a
model child. I complimented him on how clean he kept his truck. I
got him the mail. I even made Herculean efforts not to fight with
Kirk.

When dinner came, I remembered to say please
and thank you as the food was passed around. Then I asked him how
his day had gone.

“My truck, the mail, and now my day, huh?” He
nodded at me knowingly. “You’re in some sort of trouble, aren’t
you?”

I put my hand across my chest as though I’d
been wounded. “I’m just trying to be the thoughtful kind of person
you’ve raised me to be.”

Mom rolled her eyes but didn’t contradict
me.

Dad broke a roll in half and spread margarine
on one side. “My day . . .” He took a bite of his roll and seemed
to contemplate this for a while. “I took a shower half way apart to
find a leak, and then I fixed a couple of toilets—had to take one
of them all the way off –and then I spent nearly two hours
installing a reverse osmosis system. It was the most annoying piece
of equipment I’ve come across in a long time, and the worst thing
is it was our own RO system.”

The water in Arizona has roughly the same
aftertaste as cough syrup, so most people either buy bottled water
or filter their water through an RO system.

“Hendricks plumbing has their own RO
systems?” I asked.

“They do now. About a month ago, they bought
out a local RO company. So now not only do I have to install the
stupid things, I’m supposed to be pushing them too.”

“Sounds like hard work,” I said. “Any chance
you’ll be getting a raise soon?”

Dad guffawed. “You know what Mr. Hendricks
told us at our last general meeting? He said we give ourselves our
own raises now—through commission sales. Every time I recommend a
Hendricks system and someone buys it, I get a two-hundred-dollar
bonus.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“I’m a plumber, not a salesman. I’m not about
to go pushing RO systems. Honestly, what does Hendricks expect us
to say to people. ‘I’m here to unclog your sink, and by the way,
have you ever considered the advantages of purified water?’”

Dad and Mom then discussed several other
faults Mr. Hendricks had, including the fact he tried to get out of
paying overtime. But I wasn’t listening anymore. I was calculating
how many RO systems Dad would need to sell in order to pay the
mortgage on a four-bedroom house. How much extra a month did bigger
houses cost? Two hundred dollars? Three hundred perhaps? My parents
had never discussed the mortgage payment with me, but certainly
four hundred dollars a month ought to pay for another bedroom. That
meant my dad would only have to consistently sell two ROs a month.
Selling two a month didn’t sound that hard.

Granted, my dad had just said he didn’t want
to be a salesman, but then probably no one wants to be a salesman
in the beginning. It’s something people just do because they have
to.

Last summer I’d gone door-to-door and sold
magazine subscriptions to earn money for baseball camp. At first
I’d felt awkward ringing door bells. I’d been afraid people would
be mad at me for interrupting them. But after awhile, I realized it
wasn’t so scary. Most everybody was nice, and some people actually
wanted to buy a magazine. I made enough money to go to camp. If I,
a thirteen-year-old boy who didn’t actually read magazines, could
sell them, then certainly my dad, a water expert, could sell some
ROs. All I had to do was convince him he’d be successful.

Between bites of spaghetti, I said, “I think
you’d be a great salesman, Dad. I mean, if I were a stranger and
you told me about Hendricks ROs, I’d buy one from you.”

“Yeah, and I keep my truck very tidy too.
Flattery will get you nowhere, McKay. I’m onto you.”

“No, I mean it.”

He cocked his head and folded his arms across
his chest. “Just get it over with and tell me what you want. The
suspense is killing me.”

Mom spooned some green beans onto Kirk’s
plate. “McKay and I were talking this afternoon about moving my
work stuff into our room and making the office into a bedroom. I
think that’s what all these compliments are about.” She looked over
at me. “How come you never told me my car was tidy before you hit
me up for a new room?”

“Hmm,” Dad said, and it wasn’t a very
enthusiastic hmm.

Mom watched Kirk, who was smashing his green
beans into mush. “The boys are a little old to share a room.”

“I shared a room with my brother until I
moved out of the house,” Dad said.

She smiled over at him. “Yes, but if you
remember, you didn’t like that arrangement.”

“I also don’t like turning my bedroom into an
office.”

Kirk must have finally realized what the
conversation was about because he suddenly piped in with, “Is McKay
leaving our bedroom?”

“No,” I said. “You’re leaving.”

“Uh-uh,” he said.

“Yes-huh,” I said.

Mom gave us a stern look. “I think your
father and I will discuss it later by ourselves.”

“And I can tell you right now,” Dad said
pointing at me, “if you want to convince me to turn my bedroom into
medical transcription central, then you’d better not let up on that
flattery for weeks, maybe months.”

“You’re the perfect dad,” I said.

“You’re darn right I am,” he said and went
back to his dinner.

* * *

I was in a great mood for the rest of the
evening—that is, I was in a great mood until I sat down to do my
homework. I diagrammed sentences for my English class, I read about
Jamestown for history—and then stared at my math problems. Not only
had
x
shown up again for today’s assignment, but he’d
brought y along with him too. They were both in disguise, and I was
supposed to figure out which numbers they really were. Thirteen?
Fifty-four? Sixty-nine and a half? They weren’t telling, and I had
no way to know.

I hadn’t even gotten the
x
equations
figured out, and already the assignments were getting harder. I
wondered how many letters Mrs. Swenson planned on adding to our
math class and how far behind I’d be by the time we’d gone through
the whole alphabet. I flipped through the book and thought about
waiting until tomorrow morning to do the assignment. Then I thought
about baseball and keeping my parents happy, and I plunged into the
assignment anyway.

It didn’t go very well. I was able to do the
first problem but wasn’t sure I’d done it right. Could
x
actually equal 2y? Was that a legitimate answer? I mean, that only
limited the value of
x
to somewhere between infinity and
negative infinity.

Wasn’t Mrs. Swenson looking for something a
little more specific?

Hmm.

Perhaps I could convince my parents that you
didn’t need to know algebra to become a brain surgeon.

I did the rest of the problems, then called
Tony to check my answers with his. We got different answers for six
of the fifteen problems. Tony was sure he’d done his right because
Jenna had helped him, so I decided to bike over to his house so he
could show me how he’d done them.

After I got there, I looked over Tony’s
answers and decided to cross Jenna off of the Possible Tutors
list.

I pointed to one of Tony’s problems. “Look at
this answer. It can’t possibly be right.
X
can’t equal
2
x
. That’s like saying 3 equals 6.”

Tony picked up his paper. “Dang. You’re
right. I wonder why Jenna didn’t catch that?” He looked at it a
moment longer and muttered, “She was probably too busy lotioning up
her cuticles to notice.” He shoved the paper back into his notebook
and shrugged. “Oh well. I’ll just ask her about it when she gets
home from her date. Let’s get something to eat.”

I followed him into the kitchen glumly. How
could he be so unworried about it? I watched him open cupboards and
said, “Your parents don’t want you to be a brain surgeon, do
they?”

“I’ll probably be a realtor like my dad. He
says he can teach me all the secrets to sell homes.”

“There are secrets?”

“Sure.”

Tony was probably right because the Manettis
seemed to have lots of money. They lived in a big house with nice
furniture and had both a BMW and a Silverado to drive. Tony had
every electronic device there was, including an expensive cell
phone that did everything but the laundry. I didn’t have a cell
phone at all.

I wondered if there were secrets to selling
ROs, and if so, who knew them.