My Million-Dollar Donkey by Ginny; East Read Free Book Online

read again. I still have to volunteer 100 service hours and report to a parole officer.” Her eyes were downcast. “I just want you to know the truth, before you find out later and quit because you decide I’m not worth your time.”
    I understood her now. Motherhood was the hand guiding Kathy to the altar of reading rather than a desire to enter the world of philosophy and great works. Motherhood would be our common bond. I would do anything for my kids too and, instantly, I wanted nothing more than to help her be a better mother as well as a more functional female in general.
    “Are you clean now?”
    “Absolutely, and I plan to stay that way.”
    That was good enough for me. We made plans to begin the following week.
    Driving home, I couldn’t help ruminating over how normal Kathy seemed and yet so different. I stared at my neighbors going about their business. That man closing the gate on his pasture of cows: did he know how to read? How about that woman picking beans in her garden? She looked Kathy’s age. If she grew up here, she probably went to the same school during the same years. Was she capable of reading? On the other hand, I’d met more than a few lifelong Blue Ridge residents with accents as thick as Dolly Parton’s who were not only literate, but had even gone to college. Was Kathy the exception or the rule?
    I felt a small itch of worry. Had I moved my children to a place where education and intellectual stimulus from peers was less than it should be? Mark and I had chosen to simplify life, and if that included simple acquaintances, so what? A fair number of the intellectual people in the city I left behind seemed pompous bores anyway. I could probably learn more from Kathy than I could from any one of them.
    That night I told Mark about Kathy’s past, explaining that, in my opinion, a person who volunteered to be a tutor and then quit, leaving the poor non-reader with worse self-esteem than when she started, had to be pretty irresponsible.
    “But I can see how that happens. After all, this is going to be at least a year commitment, don’t you think?”
    For the first time I considered the time frame of my little project. The entire point of our life reinvention was to spend more time together as a family and I’d been looking forward to celebrating my leisure hours as a mother, and when not in service to the family, contemplating lofty, intellectual thoughts. I wanted to be free for that trip to Paris when Mark got over his obsession with building. Teaching a person to read would undoubtedly involve a tedious hike up a mountain of words. Was I up for that? I had no training for this sort of thing and I was going to be awfully busy with my MFA studies. So why was I taking on an unnecessary pet project that didn’t support our new life mission statement?
    I came up with a dozen selfish reasons why I shouldn’t take on this project but there was a name and a face on my cause now. I no longer wanted to help with literacy; I wanted to help Kathy with literacy.
    I spent the rest of the weekend studying the different techniques used to teach reading and phonetics, trying to understand how the human mind processes words, connects sounds, and associates meaning to them. I wasn’t a trained academic teacher, but certainly I could figure this out.
    Mark came home to find me poring over reading books, taking notes. “You’re not ready? I thought we were going to drive over to our land and pick the perfect location for our dream home. Ronnie and I are ready to apply for a permit.”
    I shoved the papers aside. “I’m sorry. I was so busy I lost track of the time. The English language is more complicated then you’d ever guess. I’m not qualified to be a reading tutor, you know.”
    “You know how to read. Kathy doesn’t. That makes you qualified enough. I think it’s great. Teaching someone to read will keep you busy while I work on the house. Come on, let’s go pick a site.”
    I followed,