Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) Eric Kraft (beautiful books to read .TXT) 📖

“As far as I’m concerned, after owning Arcinella here, I couldn’t even imagine owning another boat.”

“She’s something, all right,” he said. “She sure is.”

With a sigh, I said, “I just wish I could keep her.”

“You can’t keep her?” he asked hopefully.

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “My girlfriend thinks I spend too much time with Arcinella and not enough with her.”

Patti jumped right in: “I said to him, I said, ‘Pete, you gotta choose. It’s that boat or me.’ ”

“Hey, if I was you,” said Mr. Yummy, giving me a wink and a nudge, “I’d sell the boat.”

“I — I — I just can’t,” I claimed.

“Why not?”

“Because she’s — she just means too much to me, that’s all.” I gave Arcinella a long appreciative look, then turned back to Mr. Yummy. “Isn’t she a beauty?” I asked. “Tell me — if she were yours and I came along and asked you to sell her to me, would you sell her?”

“Well,” he said, “in your position — ”

“Huh?” I said, as if I didn’t understand him.

He raised his eyebrows and nodded in Patti’s direction. Patti had folded her arms across her chest and was stamping her little foot on the deck.

“Oh,” I said. “I see what you mean.” To Patti I said, pleading, “Do I really have to sell her?”

Patti pouted and said, “I already told ya. It’s her or me.”

I thought that the pout brought her perilously close to overplaying it, but it didn’t really matter. I knew we had the hook in Mr. Yummy. All we had to do was reel him in, just the way Captain Macomangus had reeled us in, and we did.

WE WERE DOING SO WELL as we neared the end of our negotiations, when we came to the handshake that sealed the deal, that I hated to see it end — or maybe I wanted to show off for Patti. Whatever my motivation, I said to Mr. Yummy, “Of course, you’ll want to have her looked over by somebody who really knows boats — unless you really know boats yourself.” I think I expected him to bristle at the implied conclusion on my part — the conclusion of a kid so savvy about boats that he actually cleaned the inside of his boat’s hull — that a baked-goods deliveryman would not be a person who knew much about boats, however much he might know about baked goods, and to tell me that there wouldn’t be any need for him to bring in an expert since he actually knew quite a lot about boats himself.

Instead, he said, “Who me? All I know is bread and muffins! But don’t worry about that. I’ve got a couple of partners in this venture, and one of them really does know boats.”

“That’s swell,” I lied.

Chapter 52

Moderne Stylizing

“ALL I HAVE TO DO NOW,” I said to Patti, “is persuade my mother to abandon the one business in her whole life that was a success for her.”

“Let me do it,” she offered.

“I should be the one,” I said. “She’s my mother.”

“She’s my friend,” said Patti. “I wish you’d let me do it.”

“Okay,” I said. “You do it.”

We walked to my house, and Patti went to work as soon as we opened the kitchen door.

She sang out, “It was a great summer, wasn’t it, Ella?”

“Oh, yes, it was, it was,” said my mother.

“I wish every summer could be like that, don’t you?”

“Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“Yes, out on the bay every day, chugging from clam boat to clam boat in the morning, then chugging from pleasure boat to pleasure boat in the afternoon.”

My mother sighed.

“Day in and day out.”

My mother smiled.

“Day after day.”

My mother’s smile slipped a bit.

“Seven days a week.”

My mother’s brow furrowed, though she was still smiling.

“You know — I was just wondering on the way over here.”

“What’s that?” asked my mother.

“Now that you’re famous, I wonder if Ella’s Moderne Hair Stylizing wouldn’t succeed.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know,” said my mother.

“Just think about it for a minute,” said Patti. “Why did it fail?”

My mother cast her eyes downward. I could see that she would really rather not think about the failure of Moderne Stylizing.

“It was because nobody knew who you were,” said Patti. “You were nobody.”

I said, “Patti!”

She waved my objections away. “I mean in the eyes of the average Babbingtonian,” she said to my mother. “Nobody knew you. You were an unknown woman who launched a wonderful business, but it — ”

“Sank,” said my mother.

“Um — yeah,” said Patti. “It sank. But I think that if you had been well known in Babbington — as you are now — ”

“ — and I had launched that very same business, it would have been a howling success?” said my mother.

“I think so,” said Patti.

“I think she’s right,” I said.

“I’m sure I’m right,” said Patti. “I have some experience with the power of a reputation,” she added modestly, “and I think now that you’re the famous Ella, of Ella’s Lunch Launch, people would be falling over one another to get their hair done by you.”

“You mean that if I launched Ella’s Moderne Hair Stylizing all over again, now that people know me as Ella, of Ella’s Lunch Launch, instead of launching it as I did, anonymously, almost in the dark, that this time Moderne Stylizing would become a shimmering success because the sun of fame would shine on it?”

“Well,” said Patti, “something like that.”

“It would be an interesting experiment,” I said, and then added with a sigh, “Too bad we won’t have any time to try it.”

“Why not?” asked my mother, who had begun to sketch hairdos on her pad.

“Because we’ve got to keep the lunch launch going.”

“Oh, that. You know, I’ve been thinking about that. It was a great summer, it really was, out on the bay every day, but you have to ask yourself: is next year going to be as good? Think about it. Back and forth on the bay, every single day. Day