Read Online Goldengrove by Francine Prose - Free Book Online Page A

even so she saw Elaine as a cool adult, as proof that you could grow up and even have a kid without turning into our parents. I’d catch Margaret eyeing Elaine the way she watched a film from which she was planning to copy a gesture or snappy line.
    Elaine had asked me something. What were we talking about? I vaguely remembered promising her not to see some Swedish movie.
    “How’s Tycho?” I said.
    “Fine, I guess,” said Elaine. “Any day he doesn’t chew through an electrical cord is a good day.”
    Tycho was always a funny kid. I could still picture him as a frowny, superintense little baby with zero interest in the normal goo-goo games. When he finally learned to talk, his voice rasped like a kazoo. He’d gotten more peculiar since his diagnosis. Every so often he’d bang his head against the wall, and at stressful moments he’d bite his hands all bloody.
    I’d known him so long that it hardly startled me when he’d yell for no reason, or ask loud, inappropriate questions, like did I have hair under my arms? Sometimes you could feel the pressure build, and he’d ask if he could go rock, then he’d bounce himself into a trance on his large rubber ball, a cross between a beach toy and some kind of Pilates equipment.
    Elaine had ways of distracting him and talking him down from his obsessions. Perseverations , she called them, a word I’d come to love. My response to Margaret’s death had been one long perseveration, so I felt even closer to Tycho than I had before.
    Elaine said, “When do you think is the best time to give your dad some bad news?”
    “Bad news?” I said. “What could bad be at this point?”
    “Not that bad,” said Elaine. “Oh, honey, I keep telling myself how important it is to remember the difference between a tragedy and an inconvenience. If only we could keep that in mind every minute of every day—”
    “I do,” I said. “Every minute of every day.”
    “I know,” said Elaine. “I know you do. But you won’t always. No one can. No one could live that way. No one would want to.”
    “You just said you wished you could.”
    Elaine said, “Let’s take it from the top. My babysitter quit, so there’s no one home after one o’clock when Tycho gets back from his mind-blowingly expensive special-needs day camp. That someone’s going to have to be me. I’ll have to take off until I find a replacement me to stay with him. Which isn’t easy.”
    “Bring Tycho to the store,” I said. “He can play his Game Boy.”
    “Not an option,” said Elaine. “He can rip the covers off the whole manga section in the time it takes me to go to the bathroom.”
    I said, “Dad can handle the store on his own for a while.”
    Then, just to prove me wrong, Mrs. McPhail from the post office came in and wanted to know if we had the new P. D. James mystery. She asked if Henry was around, and when Elaine said he was taking a break in back, Mrs. McPhail said, “How is he?” Her voice caught, and a micro-sob hiccuped down in her throat.
    “You see?” Elaine said, when Mrs. McPhail left. “With all the best intentions in the world, they’ll chew your dad up and spit him out in little pieces. He needs to hire a kid to run interference for him until—”
    “Until when?” I said.
    “Until I find someone to stay with Tycho.”
    “ I could stay with Tycho,” I said. “We get along great. We could play video games all day.” In fact, it seemed like the perfect way to get through the rest of the summer.
    “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” said Elaine. “But it’s always a crap shoot with Tycho.” Elaine was being kind, as usual. She didn’t say I was having enough trouble taking care of myself.
    In theory, it should have been easy to find a temporary Elaine. School was out, and working in Goldengrove was every high school book nerd’s dream. But when Dad put a sign in the window, not one person applied. A cloud hovered over the store. It was one thing to stop by, flirt