Read Online Caring Is Creepy by David Zimmerman - Free Book Online

seem to hear her or pretended not to. “You go on over to Dani’s and I’ll call you. I expect Hayes just owes somebody money. It’s none of our concern.” She shook her head and frowned at my feet. “We really got to get you some new shoes. You can’t start school wearing flip-flops.”

Boats in Bottles
    M y mom’s favorite thing in the world to do is to build model ships. Not just any ships—she likes the kind you build inside of bottles with tiny tools. She built her first one when she was eight with her grandpa. It came in a kit. We used to have a picture of her in our photo album with that first boat in a bottle. She’s standing on top of a chair with the bottle pressed up against her chest like a baby doll, wearing Mary Janes and a blue-and-white polka-dot dress. Grandpa is standing next to her with his hand resting on her head. Because of the chair, they’re about the same height. She has an expression on her face I’ve never seen in real life. She looks like someone just told her she’d become a princess, and in a few minutes, they were taking the whole family off to live in a palace. Since then she’s built dozens of these boats. She had special shelves made in the living room to hold her favorites. They were arranged by type—schooner, clipper, steamboat, frigate.
    The month she turned twenty-two, the year before she got married, she won a contest for building boats in bottles. It took place in Providence, Rhode Island. It was the first time she ever left Georgia. Grandpa drove her up I-95 in his nut-colored Chevy Malibu. She had the picture of herself receiving the award framed in black plastic and hung it above her bed. It could be another person, she looks so different in it. She has on what she calls her
Little House on the Prairie
dress, a sort of long sack with a busy-looking print, frilly cuffs and a high, button-up neck. Her hair hangs to herwaist and it’s brown and shiny, unlike now. These days she wears it in a short, frizzy bob. “I don’t have the time to do anything with it,” she’d tell me whenever I’d ask her why she didn’t grow it out again. “It’s not practical for a nurse.” In the picture, her skin is smooth and she’s smiling. Her eyes are clear and unlined. She looks beautiful and happy. But it isn’t really the features of her face or the length of her hair that make her look different. It’s more like the way she uses her face. When I used to look at that picture and then looked at what she’d become, I could see how much the way you feel about yourself and the world affects the way you look. You’d be hard pressed to even recognize my mom now, if all you had to go by was that photograph. Looking at it made me wonder how much different I’d look if I was ever just-won-a-build-a-boat-in-a-bottle-contest happy. Ever since I’d come across that picture, I’d been on the lookout for my own project, my own build-a-boat-in-a-bottle.
    I didn’t know it yet, but I’d already found it.

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    “I want to do something dangerous,” Dani said. “I’m so bored, it’s giving me an all-over body ache.” As she talked, Dani clipped fur off an old stuffed elephant with toenail clippers. Fluff drifted around the basement. She started with the belly and worked up to the head. It looked like a dog after it’s been neutered.
    If I’d told her about the ears, maybe she’d of felt that was danger enough. But I hadn’t. So I just asked her what she had in mind—rob a convenience store?
    “It’d be better than sitting around down here in the damn bat cave.” She got tired of the elephant’s belly and began giving the end of its trunk a circumcision.
    We kicked around a few other ideas. Skinny-dipping in Water Oak pond, going bowling in Statesboro. At last I suggested the barn.
    Dani tossed me the elephant and sat down at the computer. “I thought you hated going out to Wayne Keegan’s barn.”
    “It was just a suggestion.” I picked up the elephant and stroked