Read Online The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green by Joshua Braff - Free Book Online Page B

her spoon on her napkin. “Judith Cohen. From the temple. Steven, her son, is selling raffle tickets or something . . . for a carnival at the Hebrew school. She just wanted to know if we were interested.”
    “The boys’ Hebrew school?”
    My mother nods.
    “Wonderful. So you have them to sell as well?” he asks me. This could be bad. Neither of us has been to Hebrew school quite yet. “I have them,” I say.
    “What are you waiting for? How many do you have to sell?”
    “Twenty. I think . . . twenty.”
    “You think? How many’d
you
get?” he says to Asher.
    “About that. Twenty. Twenty-ish.”
    “Have you tried to sell any?”
    “No,” Asher says. “There’s still a lot of time.”
    “Have
you
tried yet?” he says to me.
    “I’m . . . tomorrow I was going to—”
    “You’ll call the Litvins, the Brotts, the Kafins. Everyone at my office. I’ll give you the temple registry. You’ll have ’em sold by Friday.”
    “Thanks, Dad,” I say.
    “What are they, a buck apiece?”
    “I think, yeah.”
    “Yes, not
yeah
. Yes.”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll buy five,” he says to me.
    “Great,” I say, smiling and nodding. Asher gives me a death glance, and I pull back on the joy.
    “And I’ll buy five of yours, Asher,” my mother says.
    My father looks up at her. “Let him do his own legwork, would you, please?”
    “You can’t offer to buy some from J and not—”
    “Asher doesn’t have a learning disability, Claire.”
    In the pause that follows, I wait before looking at my mother. She shuts her eyes and lets her head fall sideways on her shoulder.
    “I’ve asked you not to do that,” she says. “I’ve asked you not to say that in front of the others. To label him.”
    My father brings a spoonful of soup to his mouth and dabs his lips with his napkin. “The point is this: With the grades Jacob gets in school, he should be studying, not selling. This one can sell his own raffle tickets. Maybe the kid you punched will take a few. His parents too.”
    “Who did Asher punch?” Dara says.
    “I want puuuunch,” Gabe says to my mother.
    “You have juice right there.”
    “No, Mommy.”
    “Gabriel,” she says. “Sit back down and eat your dinner. We don’t have any punch in the house.”
    I see my father look my way as he reaches for more challah. “Besides, Jacob tells me he’s doing wonderfully at his new school.” He peeks at my brother. “The kids like him, the teacherlikes him. Not a scuffle for miles. Says he’s gonna change things around, right? Start anew.”
    I put a carrot in my mouth and stare down at my plate.
    “Sometimes,” my mother says, with her hand on mine, “change is the perfect medicine for—”
    “You want to go to a real college someday, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Like where?”
    “Michigan.”
    “I want to go to Michigan too,” Dara says.
    A laugh seeps from Asher’s lips. “It’s the only college he’s ever heard of.”
    “No it isn’t,” I tell him.
    “This one,” he says, pointing at Asher with his thumb, “an
adult
in the eyes of the Lord and he can’t think of anything to be grateful for in life.”
    “I told you what I was grateful for. You just didn’t like it.”
    “The doodler. Doodles all day long and rides his skateboard. ‘How’s your bar mitzvah boy doing, Abram?’ ‘Well, today he drew a cow skull in one of his fifty notebooks. How’s
your
son, Irv?’ ‘Well, he’s in all AP classes and he’s going to Israel this summer.’”
    “That’s what you want from me?” Asher says.
    “Enough,” he says, waving his hand.
    “You want me in
Israel,
Dad?”
    “Asher drew something beautiful today,” my mother says. “All in pencil, it’s this montage of—”
    “Oh, that’s just . . . my son the doodler. He can take over for Charles M. Schulz. Draw . . . Snoopys and things for a living.”
    “Abram. I really don’t like that.”
    “You really don’t like
what,
Claire?”
    My father tosses his fork on his plate.