Read Online My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson - Free Book Online

“There’s that, all right.”
    Two days later Janine had set the wedding date, reserved a country club, located an eight-piece orchestra and gone off to Cincinnati to get fitted for a wedding dress.
    We learned about all this from my mother, who was pleased for Willard but mystified by the arrangements. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her,” she said. “Why, that country club’s thirty miles away! What’s wrong with the V.F.W. hall? And when your Aunt Rhoda called to say she’d make the wedding cake, the way she always does, Janine said she would take care of that because she wants a cake with a waterfall and continuous music. Rhoda said, ‘Good luck.’ I think she’s crazy.”
    â€œOf course she’s crazy,” my father said. “Here’s a grown woman who hasn’t figured out what her name ought to be. Willard better think twice.”
    â€œWillard’s had six years to think twice,” Mother told him, “and all he can think is Janine.”
    It all seemed very romantic to me. “Just think, Louis,” I said, “if you hadn’t won your prize and given it to Willard, he’d still be waiting and thinking.”
    As it turned out, that had occurred to Willard too, and it bothered him enough to discuss it with my mother.
    â€œOf course, I know a nice wedding is important to a girl,” he said, “especially a girl like Janine, who has to think about her appearance and all . . . and I don’t really believe it was just the wedding that brought her around to say yes. You know, Janine doesn’t make up her mind in a hurry.”
    â€œNo,” Mother said.
    â€œI believe, though, that she’d about decided to make up her mind—and then, here came this wedding. And, naturally, she didn’t want to see it go to waste. That’s what she said. She said, ‘Willard, we can’t let this go to waste.’”
    At this point, Mother realized that she must have missed something somewhere in the conversation, and that, in fact, it was not even the conversation she originally assumed it to be—a discussion about expenses, and the relative importance of certain details, such as musical wedding cakes—and wet ones, at that. She had planned to suggest that Willard put down, if not his foot, at least a toe or two, and rein Janine in a little bit. Now he seemed to be saying that Janine was doing the whole thing out of frugality.
    â€œ. . . should think she’d be running out of ways to spend three thousand dollars . . .”
    Mother didn’t miss that. “Three thousand dollars! Willard, surely Janine doesn’t have three thousand dollars— you don’t have three thousand dollars, do you?”
    â€œI guess not!” Willard said. “Nowhere close.”
    â€œThen where’s it coming from?”
    â€œWhy—from Louis,” Willard said.
    It had not occured to him that Louis’s prize was a secret, nor had it occurred to Louis and me that it should be a secret.
    Louis said that if anyone had asked, “Did you win a magazine contest?” he would have said yes; and if they had asked, “What did you win?” he would have said, A wedding . . . and if they had then asked, “What are you going to do with a wedding?” he would have said, Give it to Willard.
    â€œBut nobody ever asked,” he told my father.
    â€œBut, Louis, why in God’s name would we ask—out of the blue—if you’d won a magazine contest?” Once again, my father said, we were up the river without a canoe; and, as usual, the details were buried in fog. He turned on Willard. “Why didn’t you say something about this?”
    â€œI did,” Willard said. “When Aunt Grace asked where the money was coming from, I said, ‘From Louis.’”
    â€œBut Louis doesn’t have three thousand dollars!”
    â€œI know