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taste, or buy bottled water.
You could even order water and have it brought to your door
straight from—the TV advertising promised—some crystal clear and
pristine spring which looked like the fountain of youth. Or you
could do what my parents did: take water jugs to the grocery store
and fill them up at 25 cents a gallon at the water machine.
    Six hundred and ninety-nine dollars.
    At 25 cents a gallon you could buy . . . I
took a moment to do the math . . . 2,796 gallons of water for
$699.
    How long would it take for a reverse osmosis
system to pay for itself?
    I didn’t try to figure it out. It seemed too
much like an algebra problem.
    Dang. Mrs. Swenson had told us that we would
use algebra in real life. Maybe she was right all along.
    I swung my backpack onto my shoulder and
headed for the front door. The price of the RO didn’t matter. After
all, Tony’s dad sold houses. They were a lot more expensive than RO
systems. If he could sell a house, he could tell me how to sell a
water purifier.
    After school, while Tony’s dad drove us to
the ballpark, I decided to bring up the subject. Instead of goofing
off in the back seat with Tony, I leaned toward the driver’s seat
and said, “Coach Manetti, you’re good at selling houses,
right?”
    “I’d like to think so,” he said.
    “What are the secrets?”
    “The secrets?”
    “Yeah, you know, the secrets to selling
stuff.”
    He shrugged. “Well, in general, I guess I’d
have to say you get a good product and then show the buyer how the
product will improve his life. And if the buyer doesn’t bite the
first time around, you keep working on it until you find something
he does want. You be persistent.”
    I took the brochure out of my backpack and
unfolded it. “So, if I were going to sell a reverse osmosis system
to you, I’d have to tell you about its twelve-month warranty and
how much better off you’d be drinking fresh, clean water straight
from a Hendricks system.”
    “Right,” Coach Manetti said.
    “It has four filters which completely take
out color, odor, and bad taste. It also takes out microorganisms.
You wouldn’t want to drink those, would you?”
    “I guess not,” he said.
    I waited a moment. “So, do you want to buy a
Hendricks RO from my dad?”
    The coach glanced back at me for a moment.
“You’re really trying to sell me one?”
    “Sure. Is this the part where I get
persistent?”
    Coach Manetti shook his head and laughed. “I
walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
    “Microorganisms could probably kill you,” I
said.
    Coach Manetti looked at me through the rear
view mirror. “When did your dad start selling ROs?”
    “He just started. Do you want to see a
brochure? The RO costs six hundred and ninety-nine dollars, but
it’ll pay for itself. Sometime.” I dropped the brochure on the seat
beside him. “How long do I have to be persistent for? Hours?
Days?”
    He laughed again. “Okay, Okay. I guess I have
been thinking about getting an RO. I’ll call your dad when I run
out of my supply of bottled water.”
    I leaned back into my seat and smiled. Not
only did I now know the secrets, but I’d made a sale on my first
attempt. It was easy. My dad would be so impressed. He’d be
grateful. Maybe he’d even sell enough ROs he would get a promotion.
A new house with a nice big empty room for me couldn’t be far
away.
    Tony rolled his eyes at me, and I knew he
thought my salesman’s routine was stupid, but he could afford to
think that. Tony had always had his own room.
    We got to the baseball field and did our
normal warm-ups. While we were waiting to bat, Tony and I sat next
to each other on the bench. He stretched out his legs and leaned
back as much as he could without falling off of the bench
altogether.
    “I talked to Rachel today.” He said this in a
louder than normal voice, so I knew that part of the reason he was
telling me was to impress the other guys on the bench.
    “Oh? Were you funny, honest,