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

completely.”
    I considered this.
    â€œWell,” I said, turning back to my book. “That might be interesting.”
    What else might be interesting came to me then, too. If I went to Rome, then I could go talk to the Pope. I didn’t want to sound too excited so I said, “I’ll think about it.”
    â€œOh, yes,” my mother said, oh so smug, “there are so many saints in Italy. Catherine of Siena, Saint Claire, Saint Francis, Saint—”
    â€œI get it, okay?” I said. But I was, I admit, tingling with excitement.
    Of course, divorce changes a lot of things. For example, all of the stuff I was worried about while I prayed in church the day of the avalanche wound up happening anyway. My dad was okay, but no more ginger scones on the way to school. No more slow dancing in the kitchen. In Humanities class we learned about point of view. This is the way a writer tells a story. A point of view is very specific, and changes the way the character sees the world. Well, from my point of view my mother kept getting worse and worse. It wasn’t just the way she cried all the time, or made stupid decisions, or lost things, or even the way she stopped looking pretty. But she started to seem foolish. Her job seemed foolish. Her hairseemed foolish. The things she said seemed foolish. From my point of view, my mother was foolish.
    Once, a few months after my father moved out, I found a list she had made. She was seeing a therapist with the unbelievable name of Doctor Sane. Doctor Sane always had her do things like draw animals to represent her emotions and make memory boxes and other completely idiotic tasks. This one, written in my mother’s excellent penmanship instead of on the computer, said at the top:
    The good things in my life:
    1. The kids, of course.
    2. The house. Its wainscoting in every room. Its claw-foot tubs. The butler’s bell that still works. The only slightly chipped stained glass window in the front foyer. The maze of crooked stairs and multiple stairways that lead to each floor. The nicotiana that blooms beside the front porch and fills the evening air with its sweet smell. My bookshelf-lined office. The screened-in porch that inexplicably juts from that office, even though it’s on the second floor. The house is the kind of house I imagined myself in as a child growing upin a split ranch in Indiana. Of course, I also imagined a husband but I won’t go there.
    3. My monthly column “Food Is Fun!” in Family . My job is to create recipes that are healthy, interesting, and delicious. Nothing like creamed canned tuna on toast like my own mother used to make. Instead, I write about things like fun Asian food—cold noodles with peanut butter sauce, steamed dumplings, wilted bok choy. The kids hate this food I make for the column. They want what they call “real food”—macaroni and cheese from a box, chicken nuggets, fish sticks. Still, every Friday night, after a week of researching ideas and writing my column, we all sit down together and test my recipes. They grimace and gag and spit out my carefully rolled turkey meatballs, my tortellini with a creamy artichoke heart sauce, my delicate flan. “Kids love cream sauce,” I write later that night, after my own kids have gorged themselves on nacho cheese tortilla chips and gone to bed. “And they will take to artichoke hearts the way our generation took to SpaghettiO’s.”
    I like this column because I get to be creative, for one thing, and because I get to bring in $2500 a month, which makes me feel independent from my no-good, suddenlyincredibly wealthy, married to somebody else husband. I mean ex-husband. But I won’t go there.
    4. My cookbook, Cooking for Kids Is Fun! . It sold moderately well in big cities like Boston and Los Angeles and failed miserably in places like my own home state of Indiana. The book is filled with sidebars about things like the joys of