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on talking. He went into a long story about how Elvis always cared about ordinary people, even when he was famous. “You could be a complete stranger and he’d turn around and give you a Cadillac if he felt like it,” my dad continued. “I read about somebody who was just admiring Elvis’s car in the parking lot and Elvis came over and told the person, ‘Lady, this one’s mine, but I’ll take you to the showroom and buy a new one for you,’ and he bought her a brand-new car. Didn’t even know who she was! Gave her an eleven-thousand-dollar Cadillac,” my dad finished.
    I had no idea what free Cadillacs had to do with washing Gladys’s dishes or my dad losing his job at Murphy’s, but I didn’t say anything.
    “Gladys is just a lonely old lady living by herself, Josh. The only family she’s got is some worthless nephew who never shows up. We spent an hour helping her to clean her kitchen. How hard was that?” Dad bumped his elbow into my side. “And as Elvis would say, ‘Hey baby’”—he pretended to hold a microphone out to me—“‘I ain’t askin’ much of you….’”

8. The Domino Effect

    Elvis was one problem. School was another. Before coming to Chicago, I’d been to only two schools in my life, both of them in Boston. Which is why I’d been dreading the whole possibility of going to a new one, even if it was only for a few months. What if it turned out to be one of those tough schools—the kind of place they show on the evening news where kids get clobbered by school bus thugs?
    I held on to the slim hope that maybe my dad would completely forget about enrolling me in seventh grade like he forgets his car keys, his sunglasses, his cell phone, and his mind on a daily basis. If I was lucky, maybe I could spend four months in Chicago free and clear of teachers and homework. Unfortunately, I’d only been at his house for about a week when he brought up the subject. We were eating lunch one afternoon and he said, “I need to buy some more milk and get you signed up for school, don’t I?”
    In case you’re wondering about the connection between buying milk and enrolling me in school, it turns out that the Dairy Barn grocery store where my dad buys his milk just happens to be across the street from the school. So if we hadn’t run out of milk, would he have totally forgotten about signing me up for seventh grade?
    Possibly.
    However, before I set foot in any school building with him, I had already decided he was going to make a few changes. Like wearing a hat. And socks with his sneakers. And a normal, non-parrot (or any other type of wildlife) shirt. I wasn’t taking any chances that somebody would see my dad’s Elvis hair or his weird clothes and start rumors about me before the school year even got started. I could hear it now:
You know that new kid? His dad thinks he’s Elvis. Ya-hah-hah….
    Talk about an easy target.
    “You gonna wear your Cubs cap?” I suggested as we were leaving for the Great School Sign-up Experience the next morning. Except for his hair, everything else about my dad looked fairly normal that day.
    “Something wrong with my hair?” he said, reaching up to check.
    “It’s sunny outside.”
    My dad glanced out the window at the sky, which was totally cloudy. “No, I’ll be fine.”
    “It’s supposed to get sunny.” I knew my voice sounded desperate.
    My dad gave me an odd look, but he pulled his Cubs cap out of the jumble of coats and shoes in his hall closet and tugged it on his head before we left. “How’s that?”
    “Great.” Actually, you could still see the bottom edges of the sideburns, but they didn’t draw as much attention under the hat. I figured the other advantage I had was the fact that my last name was different than his, so people probably wouldn’t make the connection between our names. Normally, I wasn’t too crazy about my last name, which was also my mom’s last name: Greenwood. Sounds like a golf course. But at least it