Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

My mother picked the paper up and beamed at it. “I bet all Babbington is talking about us this morning!” she said.

“I — um — well — I guess you’re probably right,” I said, but I couldn’t imagine that Babbington would be saying anything very flattering about us. Would the mayor’s wife be telling everyone what a wonderful time she had getting thrown into the bay?

“What we have to do this morning, first thing,” said my mother, flipping her pad to a clean sheet of paper, “is make a sober assessment of our first excursion. We’re going to do this every morning — take a cold, hard look at how well we did and think about what we can do to make the next night’s excursion even better. That way we’ll be getting a little bit better every time, and we’re sure to succeed.”

“Okay,” said Patti, and I nodded, though I wasn’t sure about “sure to succeed.”

“First, let’s look at how much money we took in.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, hating myself for having to say what I had to say. “We didn’t take in any money. Nobody paid anything. Everybody was an invited guest.”

“Yes, of course,” said my mother, “but let’s figure out how much we would have taken in if everybody had paid.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You silly!” said my mother, reverting, I think, to some slang from her teenage years. “Because that way we’ll know how much we will take in when the boat is as full as it was last night.”

“And people are paying,” Patti added.

“And people are paying,” my mother agreed, and both nodded their heads to make it clear that they understood each other perfectly.

“Okay,” I said.

So we went through it, all of it. We added up what would have been our gross, and we deducted the cost of food and drink, gasoline and oil, salaries for ourselves, and what seemed like reasonable payments for our investors. We had made a profit, a handsome profit.

“Wow, that sounds pretty good,” I said. I can see myself as I was then, at that moment. My eyes were wide and bright. I was running a series of mental multiplications, carrying the night’s profit out across the summer, all the summer nights, each a little better as word of mouth did its work, each enjoying an incremental increase, puffed up a bit by a factor that floated into the equation on a gentle zephyr from Shangri-la. I completed my calculations, and though I didn’t announce the astonishing figure, I did summarize the results, in this manner: “Wow! We’re gonna be rich!”

My father came into the room at that point. It was his habit to sleep late on weekends, and when he woke up he would walk with the dullness of sleep into the kitchen in his underwear and pour himself a cup of coffee. He winced when he heard my prediction, as if I’d foretold a disaster.

My mother smiled the smile that mothers use when they want to dampen but not douse their children’s exaggerated hopes, “If,” she said, and to emphasize it she said it again, “if — we can keep it going as well as it went last night.”

My father sighed. He turned toward us, opened his mouth, and stood there with it open. I know — and I knew even then — what was going through his mind. He was thinking of enumerating the very many ways in which “it” had not gone at all well last night. There was so much that he might have said that he didn’t know where to begin. Mentally he tried several beginnings and rejected them. Finally, exhausted by the attempt to begin, he gave up. But still he wanted to say something, to get himself on record, so that when my mother failed he would be able to say that he told her so that morning in the dining room after the opening night, when Peter predicted that we were going to be rich, and so he said:

“You can’t build a business on ifs, Ella.”

There was an awkward and painful silence.

Patti broke it: “Oh?” she said. “I think all the best businesses are built on ifs.”

“Oh, yeah?” said my father. “Name one.”

“The Studebaker Corporation,” said Patti.

“What?” said my father.

“Henry and Clem Studebaker went into business together on February 16, 1852, with no more capital than sixty-eight dollars and two sets of blacksmith tools,” she said, reciting a lesson that every Babbingtonian who had passed through Mrs. Tillnell’s civics class knew by heart, “and forty dollars of that they had borrowed from Henry’s wife. On their first day in business, they made twenty-five cents. Twenty-five cents! But did they give up? No, they did not. They said to themselves, ‘If we can just do ten percent better tomorrow, and ten percent better the day after that, and so on and so on — we’re gonna be rich!’ And just eight years later they were turning out thousands of the Conestoga wagons that carried hopeful settlers westward, looking for a place to plant their future, and today — well, you tell me, Mr. Leroy — is there a single working stiff in America who doesn’t dream of putting a Golden Hawk in the garage? I know my pop does.”

“Well,” said my father, rubbing the stubble on his chin, “maybe you’re right, but — ”

He paused, searching for some little thing that might reassure him that he, not she, was right, because he knew he must be right. He found it. I could see that he had found it.

“ — but if you want to sell excursions to the average working stiff, you’ve got to have the common touch.”

“The common touch?” said my mother, not quite gagging.

“Yeah. Your father may dream of driving a Hawk, Patti, but the last time I saw him, he was driving a Transtar Deluxe half-ton pickup. People may have their dreams, but they don’t buy dreams. They buy pickup trucks. You’re not selling pickup trucks,