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39 Chapter Fourteen A Wise Investment After I waste that nickel on Donny’s penis, I know my grandpa is right. I don’t spend money sensibly. Donny’s penis looks like the neck of a dead chicken—limp, hanging out of his britches the way a tongue falls out of a panting dog’s mouth. “Hey, watch this!” Donny yells as he hoists his dangling chicken neck upward and pees on the bushes that separate his yard from the old folks who were my grandparent’s neighbors. “Looks like the Golden Arch, doesn’t it?” I am horrified. What if the old folks were sitting on their lawn? Worse yet, what if my grandparents were sitting with them and got peed on? I pull the bushes aside, relieved to find no one there. “What are you doing? Trying to see how far my pee went?” “If my grandpa saw you doing that, he’d whip my behind.” “What are you talking about? I’ve seen your grandpa take a leak in these bushes.” “You have not! He ain’t no animal.” “All of us men do it.” “Donny, I want my nickel back. You ain’t no man. You’re a pig!” “I gave you a bargain. Other girls pay a dime.” At eight, I don’t know how to argue with Donny. What if my grandpa peed on those same bushes? I always thought of my grandpa as being a gentleman. When he worked at the factory, he carried a lunch bucket and wore a hat, walking instead of using his car because he wanted the exercise. Grandpa looked dignified, not like a man who would pee on his neighbor’s bush. Most of the kids in our school are afraid of Donny because he is a bully. But he is different around my mother, always addressing her as “Mrs. Jones,” and making remarks about how nice she looks, how great her desserts are, anything to compliment her. My brother says Donny is the world’s greatest con artist. Still, I like Donny enough to bury money with him. Donny and I had been secretly burying our money beneath a maple tree on the school play- 40 Burning Tulips ground. Neither of us can save money at home since our parents are always borrowing it to buy cigarettes, bread, beer, and to pay off gambling debts. “I’m gonna buy a radio,” Donny tells me. “What are you saving your money for?” “I don’t know. I’m just saving it.” I don’t want Donny to know I’m saving money for my parent’s divorce. Mom says she’ll get a divorce if she has the five hundred dollars to cover attorney fees. To us, five hundred dollars is the same as a million. “If we don’t use an attorney, your dad will leave town, just like your uncles. We’ll never see him again or get any money from him,” Mom explains. “We don’t ever want to see him again. He don’t give us no money anyway.” “I need his health insurance,” Mom says, looking like she is about to cry. I don’t want to be poor all my life, so I pick blueberries in the summer. Working gets me out of the house and puts money in my pocket. I like riding in the back of the large truck that picks us up at the Civic Center and brings us to the field, but I don’t enjoy picking berries off a bush all day, tossing them into a coffee can, waiting for the berries to turn into money. I don’t have that kind of patience, nor do I trust the blueberry field owners. It takes me the entire summer to pick one hundred pounds, the amount the owners require before they’ll write a nine dollar check. Donny can pick one hundred pounds a day. If Donny is short a few pounds, he has ways to convince people to empty their coffee cans into his bucket. I enjoy looking like a migrant worker: dirty skin, thongs, the red bandanna on my head, tee-shirt rolled up and tied together above my navel, and cut-offs with a coffee can attached to the belt loops. I’m learning Spanish and playing with the migrant workers’ babies, the ones they have to leave lying in the dirt because there are no day care centers or spare money for baby-sitters...

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