Read The Summer I Learned to Fly for Free Online Page A

working.
    I don’t know what book or psychologist told her it was a good idea to tell a young child that her father’s heart stopped working, because I used to think that if only I’d given his heart more reason to work, it would never have gone and shut down.
    But it did.
    He was dead.
    And I was too young to miss him. Or at least to remember missing him. I told myself as I grew up that I was lucky. Ihad my mother to myself. I didn’t have to share her with anyone else. Those poor kids , I’d think. How do they get by, how do they even hear themselves think, with all those other people in the house?
    My mother kept a picture of him on her dresser. His red hair mussed from sleep, holding his bundled baby with her dull brown hair on his bare chest. Their bedside lamp didn’t give off enough light to show him clearly, but he looked peaceful. Happy. His heart full of reasons to keep beating.
    When I thought of him, which wasn’t often, I didn’t think of that picture. I thought instead of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz . A creaky shell of a man with no heart at all.
    But then I found his Book of Lists, and he slowly came to life again.
    Careers I Never Want to Attempt: coal miner, executioner, proctologist . (I had to look that last one up, and it wasn’t pretty.)
    Pet Peeves: people who have pet peeves .
    Greatest Loves: my electric blue Schwinn Cruiser, my cream-colored Fender Telecaster, my Lizzie Aberdeen Solo, and our little Birdie .
    Two things occurred to me, studying these lists.
    One: Life is short. I’d done my fair share of thinking about life span and how Dad, dead at thirty-three, helped keep down the average. But I hadn’t stopped and thought about Hum, had never even wondered about the life span of a rat, which I came to learn averaged two years. So if my rat was lucky enough to be average, he was already halfway to his grave.
    Two: Someone who keeps a list of all of these facts about himself is probably keeping it for a reason, so that someone can know him when he’s no longer there. Dad must have been aware that his heart would stop beating, that his body would soon be all done living , or else why keep the list in the first place?

word games
    I didn’t see Emmett again for days, though it wasn’t for lack of looking. I took the trash out hourly, causing Swoozie to glare at me like she’d just tasted a cheese of questionable freshness.
    “The trash? Again?” She leaned in close. “Girl, you better not be smoking cigarettes on my bench out there or Lord help me, I will put you over my knee.”
    “No, Swoozie. It’s nothing like that. I’m just trying to stay busy.”
    This wasn’t entirely untrue. Business was slow. I was still boycotting Nick. He continued to make his spinach linguini and tomato spaghetti and saffron fettuccini without my help. Occasionally he’d shoot me a look, something like an exaggerated pout, but I’d turn the other way. It wasn’t the worst thing, I figured, letting him miss me a little.
    My frequent visits to the Dumpster produced nothing other than a spectacular waste of perfectly good garbage bags.Emmett wasn’t hanging out in the alley, he wasn’t waiting for food, and he certainly wasn’t waiting for me. Yet everything we left out back at closing disappeared by morning, so I guessed he still came by the shop after hours.
    Since I’d patched the hole in my backpack and rewired the latch on Hum’s cage, I had no reason to return to the alley at dusk. Even if I could have manufactured a reason, there was the problem of Mom, and sneaking out of the house unnoticed, because for the next several days after my visit to the alley, Mom came home and stayed.
    I still had no answer to the mystery of the silver car. When she walked into our kitchen late the night I met Emmett, I took the casual approach. I knew from my own experience, and from the habits of my rat, that nobody likes to be backed into a corner.
    “How was work?” I asked.
    “You know,” she