A Step Toward Falling by Cammie McGovern Read Free Book Online

perfect kids. “Everyone’s got a ten-year-old playing soccer these days,” she says.
    Mom doesn’t have a ten-year-old playing soccer. Mom did things out of order and had me when she was still in high school so even though her friends have ten-year-olds, she has me and I’m twenty-one. “That’s fine with me, Bee. You’re not the problem, they are,” she says.
    That makes me feel better. Sometimes I wish my mom wasn’t so shy and scared about seeing people she used to know in high school. I think maybe there were mean people, but maybe there were also nice people, too. She doesn’t talk to anyone except for Nan and me and the people on the phone who send her data entry work every week.
    Some people feel sorry for us because we are three women in a house without any man. A boy in my class once told me it’s not a family if there’s no dad. I told him it is too a family. It’s not our fault my grandfather died of a heart attack when my mom was seventeen.
    Nan says we are better than a regular family because we’re happy to be together. “Every single day I wake up, Belinda, I’m happy to have you here with me, helping out with your mom. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
    She still says this even though Mom is much better nowthan she used to be. It used to be she didn’t get dressed a lot of days. Now she comes out of her room most mornings dressed like she’s ready to go. She still doesn’t go anywhere mostly, but the important part is, she could .
    Nan still gets nervous. She says things like, “Maybe your mom is better but we need to be careful. Upbeat but careful.” Upbeat means thinking about happy things and not crying about little things like buying a carton of eggs and finding one broken when you get home. That happened one time to Mom and she couldn’t even eat the dinner she got so sad. So Nan and I ate the dinner and said, “These eggs sure taste good and it doesn’t matter that one of them broke.”
    Upbeat means not talking about what happened at the football game.
    I’m not supposed to ever talk about that. Nan says I shouldn’t think about it either. “What’s done is done, sweetheart. The important thing is you’re home now and you’re safe. You never have to go back to that school or see those people again as far as I’m concerned.”
    Nan used to say that school has done a great job because even though I can’t see very well, I can read and alphabetize and type twenty-three words a minute which is better than anyone else in my class. In our classroom, I’m considered one of the smartest and definitely the best typist. No one else comes close to me in typing.
    I used to love my teachers at school like Cynthia and Clover and Rhonda who is my speech therapist even though I talk fine and everyone can understand what Isay. A lot of other kids in my class need help with pronunciation. She makes them blow feathers across the table so their mouths will get stronger and work better. Supposedly that will help them talk better, but I’m not sure it works. It seems like they’re all better at blowing things, but they talk the same as they always did.
    With me, Rhonda says we can just talk which is what we mostly do. She says we’re working on social skills which is what you need to have when you’re talking to people who don’t know you very well. You have to know things like: don’t spend the whole time talking about yourself. I used to have a little problem with this because silence makes me nervous and I fill it with whatever is in my head which is sometimes lines from movies other people haven’t seen. Rhonda explained that if someone hasn’t seen the movie, they won’t understand what I’m saying. She had a different suggestion: “Try asking the other person a question about their life.”
    It turns out