How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) Read Online Free PDF

day,” I said. That was not a zinger. That was sarcasm, which is even harder.
    â€œThank you for the beauty advice, Madeline,” she said. She didn’t sound upbeat anymore. I smiled at her and she smiled back, both of us sarcastic. “Now tell me what you think about our trip to Italy.”
    I said, “I don’t want to go.”
    Outside, it was still winter, a rainy gray winter. The streets of Providence were like an obstacle course of puddles and slush and old snow that had gone dirty and hard.
    â€œOf course you want to go to Italy,” my mother said. “Everybody wants to go to Italy. It’s something people want.”
    â€œWell, I want to go to New York City and spend the summer with Daddy. He said he’ll take me to the ballet. He said he’ll take me to Queens where there’s a painting of a saint that weeps. Real tears,” I added because I could read my mother’s mind and knew she was thinking it was a hoax.
    Then, to be good and rude, I opened up the book The Song of Bernadette about how a peasant girl in France saw the Virgin Mary and got all of these orders from her, like to build a church in a particular place and have sick people come and bathe in water from the spring. Bernadette became a saint. I was keeping a list of what I had in common with other saints, and number one on my list was that I was a peasant, too. It looked like rich people never got to be saints, so that eliminated Sophie.
    â€œBesides,” I said to my mother, “I thought we didn’t have any money. I thought we were peasants. How can a bunch of peasants afford to go to Italy?” We had read about peasants in school, too. Peasants tilled the land, we learned. They were poor, but they were good, hardworking people.
    â€œPeasants!” my mother shrieked.
    â€œPeasants helped people,” I told her. “In World War Two. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
    â€œWhat has gotten into you?” she mumbled under her breath.
    I knew what she was thinking. She talked about it with Mrs. Harrison all the time.
    They were embarrassing, those talks. And she and Mrs. Harrison had them right in front of me, as if I were invisible. “It’s those teen years I read about when she was tiny,” my mother said. “They seemed so far away, so unlikely then.” Just yesterday, when Mrs. Harrison came to pick me up for school and I refused to wear the silly, bright yellow slicker and matching boots my mother had bought me as if I were a baby duckling instead of a twelve-year-old—a miracle worker, a soon-to-be saint—she shouted from the porch to Mrs. Harrison, “She still wears flowered underpants but these are too babyish.” So now the whole world knows about my underpants. Mrs. Harrison gave my mother a big sympathetic look. Then when I got in her ridiculously humongous SUV she said, “Madeline, why can’t you try to help your mother?”
    I watched over the top of The Song of Bernadette while my mother sat staring at all her stupid books and maps. My father never uses guidebooks. He just goes places. He explores. He has adventures. Even in the days when they were married and supposedly happy, they would argue over traveling techniques, my mother reading from a guidebook and my father ignoring her.
    â€œTrust me on this, Madeline,” she said suddenly, brightly, in a way that made me immediately suspicious. “You are going to love this trip. We’ll go to Italy and you can go to churches where there are saints’ actual bodies right there.”
    â€œLike who?” I said.
    â€œSaint Agatha,” my mother said.
    â€œSaint Agatha?”
    â€œOnly thirteen years old and the emperor made her stand naked in public because she rejected some guy’s advances. So she’s standing there naked and miraculously her hair starts to grow. And it grows and grows until it covers her nakedness