Read Online 100 Days and 99 Nights by Alan Madison - Free Book Online Page A

you?”
    “In the good ol’ U.S. of A.,” I chirped cheerfully, not feeling the need to keep secrets from him any longer. Sharing that not-so-secret secret made him very happy, which made me very happy.
    “That, my girl, is a good place to be. A good place to be . . . ,” he repeated, or the phone echoed a bad connection.
    “Ike around? Ike around?”
    “Ike! It’s Dad!” I yelled.
    He charged up the stairs from the basement and grabbed the phone.
    “Hello. Dad? Dad? Hello?” He dropped the phone; it rebounded off the floor, swung from its cord, and clattered across the kitchen cabinets. Ike stormed away, back to the basement.
    “That’s not funny, Esme!”
    I caught the still bouncing phone and put it to my ear.
    “Dad?” My own voice bounced back to me. “Dad?”
    I hung up and stood thinking. Mom entered.
    “What happened?’
    “We were disconnected.”
    “Oh. That’s too bad. He’ll call back when he can.” She continued to the stove. “Why don’t you finish your homework and then we’ll have dinner.”
    Nodding, I headed toward my room. As I passed the open basement door, I stopped and listened. Ike rumbled his trucks along the floor, talking to them, pretending they were people. I clomped down the stairs to give him fair warning of my arrival. He stopped his imaginary trucking and stared up at me.
    “You know, Dad was on the phone. We just got disconnected.”
    “I know.”
    “He’ll call back when he can.”
    “I know.”
    “Next time you can talk first.”
    He ducked his head and went back to pushing his long-necked crane. I squatted down to a laddered fire engine and gently rolled it back and forth. Ike didn’t bite my head off so I eased down to a full sit and moved the bright red truck farther along the carpet. There was a long silence as we both pushed our separate trucks across the floor. I hadn’t ever played with Ike’s toys before. He never let me and I never wanted to. We both needed time to figure out exactly what we were supposed to do.
    With his dirty brown buzz cut, sharp blue eyes, and jaw that came out past a flat forehead, Ike looked a lot like Dad — only smaller.
    “There’s a fire over there.”
    He pointed at a block-built building at the edge where the carpet met the concrete.
    I stuttered out a low vibrating siren sound and rumbled the truck toward the pretend blaze. He grabbed his big red pumper with his left hand and the small fire chief’s car with his right and raced them past me.
    “Faster, Esme! Faster! We have to save the people.”
    Rhinoceros Ofcourserous
    Anytime I say “rhinoceros,” my dad says “ofcourserous.”
    “This is Reginald my rhinoceros.”
    “Ofcourserous! Glad to make your acquaintance.”
    He says he didn’t make the word ofcourserous up, and that it is from a famous movie. But he can’t remember which one. I don’t believe him. I think he made it up and doesn’t want to admit it because it is sillier than spatula. Ofcourserous.
    I n math class, while others learned to add and then subtract, subtract and then add, I watched the wall clock’s thin black second hand collect minutes on its march toward dismissal. Even though it is my favorite subject, I couldn’t help but drift away, thinking about the next slice of my dad’s one hundred day and ninety-nine night tour of duty. “Doodee,” I muttered Ike’s mangled pronunciation, and grinned. Tour, not such a funny word, but then I imagined it as an actual tour. Dad sitting in a bus, driving across the desert; the guide gripping the microphone close to her lips, pointing out places of interest, like when we went on the class trip to Colonial Williamsburg.
    “If you look out the right side of the bus you will see an excellent example of sand,” explained the peppy tour guide. “And if you look out the window on your left you will see . . . more sand!”
    I chuckled out loud at the thought.
    “Esmerelda . . . Esmerelda McCarther.”
    I looked up and swallowed my smile