Notes from the Dog (5 page)

Matthew lifted the second shoe from Johanna’s hand and set it on his lap. He pretended to be casual, but his cheeks got red. “So you’re running to raise money?”

“Swimming, biking and running. Actually, it’s a super-sprint triathlon. Shorter distances than a regular one. It’s at the end of the summer at Centennial Beach and City Park. I have ten weeks to get in shape.”

“Ten weeks?” Matthew sounded doubtful.

“I have proxies. A couple of my friends will do it for me if I’m not all buffed out and ripped by then.”

Johanna was joking, but Matthew didn’t smile.

“How much money do you have to raise?” I asked.

“There’s no minimum requirement, but I’m hoping to get somewhere around ten grand.”

“Whew.” Matthew whistled between his teeth. “Are you going to ask everyone you’ve ever met for money?”

“Pretty much. Gimme your wallets.” She held out her hand and grinned.

“How do you raise that much money?” I asked. She might as well have said a million dollars.

“I sent letters to everyone I know, and I’ve gone up to people at school and in the bookstore and asked for their support.”

“I want to help,” Matthew and I said together.

We all looked surprised.

“You do?”

“Sure,” Matthew said. “We know people. Well, I do anyway.”

“Shut up, Matthew,” I said. “But I might do better with the letter-writing part.”

“Are you sure?” Johanna asked.

“Yeah,” Matthew said. “I can start by asking the guys at the construction site to chip in. We’ll need to put together a presentation, though. With graphs and stats. They like stuff like that. And you should see the calendar in the manager’s trailer. They like boobs.”

Johanna threw back her head and laughed. “You’ve identified a target audience.” Then she looked over at me with a raised eyebrow. “I have a three-ring binder
you can share with them about the prevalence of breast cancer and how the money will be used.”

“I can’t work outside today anyway because the ground is muck from the rain last night.” I looked out the window. “I can go with Matthew this morning and help.”

We spent the next half hour going through Johanna’s collection of facts and then Matthew and I wrote up notes on index cards. When Pat got back, Matthew and I headed out.

As soon as we got to the construction manager’s trailer, some big guy in a yellow hard hat bellowed, “O’Malley! Haul your sissy butt to the donut shop for two–three dozen. No custard fillings this time, ’less you want us to get food poisoning when that goo in the middle goes off in the heat.”

Matthew almost saluted. He hustled off the lot, leaving me in front of a group of huge men standing around the trailer. I clutched Johanna’s binder and the stack of index cards in my sweaty hands. About thirty pairs of eyes looked at me.

One man finally grunted, “Kid. You here to help O’Malley pull his weight today?”

I dropped the index cards. I was going to have to wing it.

“Uh … no. I mean, not that I wouldn’t like to work with you, because, of course, I would. Well, I don’t mean of course, because I’ve never thought about
construction as a career before because I’m only fourteen and I don’t have a job yet, but … now that I’m here, it sounds like fun. I mean, not
fun
, because it’s clearly dangerous what with all the … um, power tools and … everything, uh, else, but um … it sounds interesting and, well, let’s see, inspiring. Is that the right word? You know, when you stop to think that you’re
creating
something like …” I stopped. Several men were tipping their heads and squinting at me.

“What are you here for, then? What’s with the notebook?”

“Well, see, we, Matth—O’Malley and I have this friend, well, our neighbor, no,
my
neighbor, because Matthew doesn’t live with me, even though my dad says he’s over enough to legally qualify as a member of the family, and if he were, then my dad could take the additional tax deduction—”

“Son,” the guy interrupted. “You see this half-completed structure behind you? We’ve got a deadline, so spit it out and we can get to work.”

I saw Johanna’s face looking happy when Matthew and I’d said we wanted to help. I pulled myself together.

“Johanna, that’s my neighbor, she has breast cancer.”

They stopped sipping coffee and checking cell phones.

“That’s a tough break, kid; she gonna be okay?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, I sure hope so, because she’s …” I remembered the binder I held and flipped it open, holding it up like a teacher reading aloud to a class. “The thing is—she’s going to participate in a triathlon at the end of the summer to raise money to find a cure. The bar graph here shows how much she intends to raise, ten thousand dollars, and she’s a little, well, a lot, actually, shy of her goal, so Matthew and I, well, just me right now because he went to get donuts”—I was starting to lose their attention—“we’reheretoaskyoutodonatemoneytohercause.”

Dead silence.

I started to sweat. I’d just asked a bunch of men I didn’t know for money and they were all standing there, looking at me.

I
knew
I should have stuck to my plan not to talk to anyone this summer.

I’m like a verbal machine gun when I get nervous. I mean, I know the power of words because I read a lot, but once I pull the trigger on them I can’t seem to stop.

“Dude.” A tattooed man three times my size lumbered forward. His nose ring caught the sun and there was a picture of a skull on his black T-shirt. He opened his wallet, which was attached to his jeans with a metal chain. “Here’s something for your girl. My ma had that. She’s all right now, but, man, that’s one badass disease.”

He handed me a hundred-dollar bill and thumped
me on the arm so hard it drove me sideways into a stack of lumber. He turned to his coworkers and boomed, “It’s payday. Git yer cheap selves up here, you miserable tightwads, and give this kid a few bucks.”

He stood next to me, watching as the men filed by, handing me wads of dollar bills, more fives and tens than I’d ever seen in my life, and a few fifties, too. Someone passed me an empty nail box to hold the cash.

It was all over in minutes and everyone went off to their jobs. I stood staring at a box of crumpled bills.

Matthew sauntered up with three boxes of donuts. “Okay, I’m back. We can go around now and I’ll talk to everyone about the fund-raiser while you pass out donuts and then you won’t even have to talk.”

I held out the box. His mouth dropped open.

“What did you
say
?”

“Um …”

“Yeah, I thought so. But, man, just
look
at all that money. What great guys.”

Matthew hurried to the office with the donuts as I picked up the index cards. Then we ran all the way back to Johanna’s. She was curled up on the couch with Dylan and a book. When we burst into her living room, she looked up and pretended to be disappointed.

“You gave up already? I’d expected more from you boys, I really di—” I raised the box over her and dumped it. The money fluttered down.

“What did you do? Quick, lift your shirts so I’ll know you didn’t sell internal organs on the black market.” She started collecting and smoothing out the wadded-up cash. “Is that a hundred-dollar bill? What
happened
?”

Matthew, who was picking money off the carpet, said, “Finn. It was all Finn.”

Pretty nice of him to give me the credit. She turned to me.

“Matthew and I had worked out what to say. He had to go do his job, but I stuck to our plan and they just gave it to me. Really nice guys.”

“That’s for sure.” Johanna made neat stacks of bills on her lap. “One thousand and forty dollars! You raised over a thousand dollars in one morning!”

“It’s too bad we can’t hang around bars,” I said. “My grandpa says drunks are pretty free with their money. We could clean up at Frankie’s Blue Room or Jimmy’s Bar and Grille on Friday and Saturday nights.”

“Finn! That’s it. You’re brilliant.” Matthew had jumped to his feet, a big goofy grin on his face.

“Uh, I don’t think bars are going to let us in, Matthew, and it wouldn’t be smart to hang around in the dark outside with a box of cash.”

“No. Not the bar idea. The grandpa idea. We should totally hit up the geezers at his old folks’ home.”

“You mean the assisted-living retirement community? Where my grandfather lives independently with
his dignity and privacy intact until such time as medical or lifestyle assistance becomes necessary?”

“You memorized the brochure?”

“Grandpa threw the TV guide at my head when I called it an old folks’ home.”

“Whatever. Let’s go ask them for money. It’s … what did they call it in social studies? An isolated community. They’ll be glad for the visit.”

“We should really wait until Tuesday. That’s apple brown Betty day in the cafeteria.”

“What’s today?”

“Rice pudding.”

“Gag.”

“Don’t you have to get back to work?”

“Nah, they won’t notice. To tell you the truth, getting the donuts is the biggest thing I do around there.”

“Let’s go right now; we can catch them after physical activity time. They’re really mellow then.”

“Who knew I’d moved next door to such natural-born hustlers?” Johanna mused as we rushed off.

Grandpa had an apartment in a cluster of buildings connected by walkways about twelve blocks from our house.

I visited him a couple of times a week (apple brown Betty Tuesdays and banana cream pie with chocolate curls on top Fridays) and he came over to our house for Sunday dinner.

We’d play cribbage or listen to baseball on the radio—he said television ruined the game; that if you couldn’t be at the ballpark in person, you were better off listening to the color commentators on the radio and picturing the plays in your head rather than depending on “those talky morons on TV who don’t know a force-out from a pop-up.”

Mostly, though, we just hung out together reading. He always had a great mystery novel to share with me—he loved reading as much as I did.

Grandpa didn’t have any brothers or sisters. And my dad was an only child, so I was his only grandchild. My grandmother had died before I was born.

“Finn, my boy!” Grandpa boomed when we knocked on his door. “It’s rice pudding today. Matthew, always good to see you.”

“Hi, Grandpa.” I kissed his cheek and Matthew hugged him. “No dessert; we’re on a mission.”

“I thought you looked very purposeful when you walked in.”

Matthew and I told Grandpa about Johanna and the race and the guys at the construction site. He nodded. “Follow me, lads, I know just who to speak to.”

In the activity room he introduced us to a tiny woman in a purple tracksuit—Ruby, the social director. She took charge and led us to the gathering room, where a couple dozen people were playing bingo. She marched up to the caller and grabbed the mike out of his hand.

“Sorry to interrupt your game, but Josiah Duffy has a guest with something to ask. Finn.” She held the mike out.

I remembered seeing a horror movie where the ground opened up and swallowed people whole. At the time I’d thought it was pretty scary. Right then, though, it seemed like a fine idea. I looked at Matthew, who shook his head and shoved me toward the microphone.

“Uh, good morning, I mean good afternoon, no,
wait … Not that it matters what time it is, well, it always does, matter, I mean, but …”

Words I didn’t recognize came rushing out of me. I felt the sweat running down my sides, and the clenchy feeling in my stomach was making it hard to breathe. But then the image of Johanna sitting on her couch, money raining down on her as she smiled at me, filled my mind. I took a slow, deep breath.

“I’m Finn Duffy and I’m here to ask you to support our friend Johanna’s pledge to raise ten thousand dollars for breast cancer research. Anything you can spare would help. Thank you for your attention.”

“You there.” An impossibly old lady crooked her finger at me.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I don’t normally appreciate being hit up for money, but that cancer—I had it once. They said I wouldn’t make it.” She was silent for a moment. “But that was twenty-some years ago and I’m still here. I’d like to meet this friend of yours. If I give you my winnings from today, will you bring her here?”

“Oh, sure.”

She handed me a neat stack of money she hadn’t stopped to count and squeezed my hand.

Matthew and Grandpa were working the other tables.

Ruby slipped a twenty into my hand. “Thank you for thinking of us. No one ever asks for our help. You did a good thing coming here today.”

Grandpa drove us and an orthopedic shoe box full of money back to Johanna and Pat. After they had pulled him into a big hug, we counted out $224.

“You’d be wise to open a bank account,” Grandpa told Johanna. “I don’t know if Finn has mentioned it, but I worked at a bank, and I’d be honored to set things up for you.”

“Wonderful! Thank you.” Johanna handed him the box of neatly stacked bills.

The five of us toasted the official launch of Team Johanna with ginger ale.

Later that day Grandpa and Ruby distributed flyers that he’d printed up. The word spread and Johanna’s bank account grew and grew.