When Friendship Followed Me Home by Paul Griffin Read Free Book Online Page A

SOCKS
    The next four days passed in a blur. I didn’t sleep, didn’t have one asthma attack, didn’t cry one tear. I was actually kind of mellow. It’s not like any of this was a surprise. Here was the proof: Nothing perfect lasts forever.
    I do remember one thing very clearly, breakfast the first day of the wake. I was making myself some Cap’n Crunch when Aunt Jeanie came in and said, “That’s not a proper breakfast, Ben. That’s not even food. Let me make you something that’s—oh!” She clutched her chest, like she was about to follow in Mom’s footsteps. “Your slacks!”
    They were a little short. I must have grown another inch in the last year, since the last time I wore them to my interview for my coupon delivery job, which everybody laughed at me for—but hey, I got the job. “You can see your socks!”
    â€œOnly a little,” I said, lowering my pants some, except they were already below where my butt crack started.
    â€œThey’re white!”
    â€œSo?” That’s what Mom would have said. “So they see your socks, Ben? Is the world going to stop spinning? You look cool. In fact, I might wear my slacks like that too.” And she would have hiked them right up and laughed. Aunt Jeanie, on the other hand, turned into a freakazoid. “Let’s go,” she said. “In the car. Now.” The whole way over to Macy’s she kept saying, “This is a disaster. You poor dear. If Tess could see us now, she’d have my head on a platter.”
    Really, she would have said,
Jeanie? Take a pill.
    â€œWe’ll get you fixed right up, don’t you worry at all.”
    â€œI’m really not worried, though,” I said.
    â€œYou poor thing.” She called ahead for them to have a pair of slacks ready for us. She was like the queen when we walked in there. The sales assistant practically bowed to her. She waved him off and said, “Abso
lute
ly not,” when the guy suggested a pair of pants that were only half lame, sort of comfy-looking like jeans but with dress pants material, very shiny. “We’re not going out to a
night
club, Angelo. We’re going to my big sister’s . . .” She got all teary.
    â€œJeanie, I’m so sorry,” Angelo said, or would have said if Aunt Jeanie didn’t cut him off.
    â€œThis young man has a classic look. No no, here.” She grabbed a pair of the thoroughly lamest pants in all of Macy’s, the kind you see in the catalog where the models are all old men who would have like these tufts of frizzly gray hair growing out of their ears if they didn’t trim it.“Perfect,” she said. “Hurry, Ben, go put them on while I get you some proper socks.” I swear she picked the itchiest pair in the store.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    By Sunday night all the people I never met till now but who hugged me like they knew me forever were gone, and it was just Aunt Jeanie, Leo, me and Flip at the kitchen table. Aunt Jeanie kept at it with the face cream but she couldn’t hide the fact she’d been crying pretty much the whole way through the past four days. I heard her at night, through the wall. She and Leo were camped out in Mom’s room. “Don’t let the dog sit in your lap like that, Ben,” Jeanie said. “Not in those nice slacks. The fur. You’ll never get it out.”
    â€œBabe, easy,” Leo said. “You want to end up like your sister?”
    â€œNice, Leo,” she said.
    â€œAh honey, I’m sorry,” he said.
    â€œNice.”
    â€œYou know what I mean.”
    I put Flip on the floor between my feet. He sat like he’d learned at the training place, front paws up, like give me high ten, and that’s when I realized I missed his last certification class. I had one chance to make it up, or else we had to start all over and pay the whole fee again too.
    â€œSo we