Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas Sparks, Micah Sparks Read Free Book Online

“It takes a lot of energy to stop the rain—I can’t keep it up for long.”
    It wasn’t until a few years later that I noticed my father only seemed to have these powers when we were approaching a highway overpass.
    In 1972, things began to change in our family. With my sister now in kindergarten, my mother started working, so after school we found ourselves alone. We had an older neighbor who was supposed to look in on us, but she seldom did. Instead, we’d head up to her apartment, tell her that we were home, then ignore her for the rest of the afternoon. This suited her perfectly. She was more of the “contact in case of only dire emergencies, lest I miss my soap operas” kind of baby-sitter, and besides, we’d been on our own in the afternoons for so long by then that we didn’t really need someone to watch over us.
    Unsurprisingly, my brother and I suffered an exceedingly high number of injuries during our early years. Already, I’d had my head cut open by a rock thrown by a teenager (which not only involved the police, but a visit by my father to said teen, where the teen was threatened with grave bodily harm if it ever happened again), lost a couple of teeth while learning to ride a bicycle, sprained both wrists and both ankles, and nearly cut my finger off with a piece of broken glass. My brother had the same types of injuries, only, if anything, they were more frequent and serious.
    Yet, with the exception of required vaccinations, we children were seldom taken to see doctors or dentists. By seldom, what I mean is “maybe once in our lives, and only then if there was a better than even chance that we might die. ” I was eighteen years old before I ever set foot in a dentist’s office. I sometimes wondered how much blood I’d actually have to lose before my parents finally broke down and brought me to a clinic. They had no religious reasons for avoiding medical care, they simply believed that seeking medical attention would not only be a waste of time, but more costly than they could afford. Add in the requirement to be tough, and the only doctors my brother and I saw were on television. I remember, for instance, that after I was struck by the rock, blood literally gushed over my face. I couldn’t see well, and was barely able to stagger home.
    “You’ll be fine tomorrow,” my mother said after taking a look at it. “You’ve got a thick skull.”
    Luckily, I did indeed have a thick skull and was able to heal on my own.
    It was around that time, however, that my sister developed epiglottitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the epiglottis. Neither Micah nor I knew exactly what was wrong with my sister that morning; all we knew was that my sister was burning up with fever, pale, delirious, and had vomited through the night. My parents, who knew a real emergency when they saw one, rushed her to the hospital. Unfortunately, without health insurance, the hospital required a deposit of $200, and after dropping the family off, my dad sped off in search of someone to lend him the money.
    My mom went into the hospital with my sister; she told my brother and me to wait near a tree at the edge of a parking lot. “Don’t go beyond here, there, and there,” she pointed, outlining an imaginary box about twelve feet square. Even at that age, we recognized the fear in her voice, and knew enough to do exactly as she said.
    It was hot that day, probably close to a hundred degrees. We’d been left with neither food nor water, and to keep our minds off the heat, we spent the next few hours climbing the tree or walking just inside the lines of the imaginary box. We made a game of getting as close to the imaginary lines as we could without stepping over. At one point, I stumbled and fell over the line. I remember standing quickly, but the thought that I’d disobeyed my mom, coupled with the stress that we were under, brought me to tears. As always, in situations like these, my brother was there to comfort me,