Jackie's Jokes Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wicket, or even the Monster with a Thousand Heads, which was usually Petal's biggest nightmare.
    "So what do we do?" Jackie asked.
    "We all need to remain calm," Pete said.
    Easy for him to say. He wasn't the one who needed to keep Petal from spinning herself off into outer space. At that moment, that was a job for Annie, Durinda, Georgia, Marcia, Rebecca, and Zinnia. Really, right then it was taking all six of them.
    "First," Pete said, "you need to locate your parents' tax info, and then you need to make an appointment to see this CPA person and take it all to him."
    "That sounds rather involved," Jackie said. "You know, we are all just still seven years old."
    "When has that ever stopped you lot from doing anything?" Pete said with a laugh.
    That laugh did a lot to lift our spirits. So long as someone could still make jokes, we could tell ourselves that the world wasn't really as scary a place as it seemed.
    "Now then," Pete said, his voice turning all businesslike. "I know your dad pretty well. You know, I am the man who works on his cars. And I can tell you this: Robert Huit is a very organized man."
    Huh. And here we always thought that the most organized person in our house was Mommy. She was the scientist, after all.
    "I'll bet anything," Pete said, "that your dad's just like me."
    "But Daddy would never be caught dead wearing a navy blue T-shirt," Zinnia said, but she said it softly so Pete wouldn't hear. Zinnia never liked to offend anybody, except maybe Rebecca. And Georgia.
    "And if Daddy did wear a navy blue T-shirt," Georgia said, not bothering to keep her voice low, "he'd find a way to make it look stylish."
    Thankfully, if Pete had heard what some of us were saying, he either didn't care or was ignoring it.
    "What I mean," Pete said, "is that your dad no doubt has a nice, neat file somewhere, probably marked Taxes with maybe even the year on it—in this case, you'd be looking for last year's file, 2007—in which he stores all his information."
    "And where do you think I'd find such a file?" Jackie asked.
    "Two places come to mind," Pete said. "Either in a regular file cabinet or in a file stored in a computer."
    We didn't like going near the computer. One, Mommy didn't particularly like them, which we now thought for the first time was kind of odd, given her profession; and two, technology tended to scare us—there was just so much that could go wrong with it!
    "I think we'll start with the regular files first," Jackie said.
    "Good choice. Okay then," Pete said. "You've got your assignment. Ring me back as soon as you find what you're looking for, and we'll take it from there."
    "But don't you have work you have to do?" Jackie asked. "You know, cars to fix?"
    "Course I do," Pete said then added, "but nothing's more important than you lot."
    Pete may have been a man in a navy blue T-shirt, but he was the best man in a navy blue T-shirt in the entire world.
    ***
    "Sometimes," Annie said, "I wonder if we rely on Pete too much. I think maybe we shouldn't."
    "Why's that?" Marcia asked.
    "You don't think Pete's evil, do you?" Petal said with a gulp.
    "Of course he's not," Durinda said sharply, in a tone she almost never used with Petal. "He's a mechanic and he's our friend."
    "I just mean," Annie said, "that I don't think it's good for us to rely on any one person too much. We need to learn to stand on our own two feet."
    "Sixteen feet, you mean," Marcia corrected. Good math was very important to Marcia.
    "Annie may be right," Jackie said, "and one day we'll have to stand on our own. But that day isn't this day, and now we'd better hunt for the file."
    So that's what we did.
    The only problem was, the file we were looking for was nowhere to be found. We looked in every file cabinet in the house, we looked in those kitchen cabinets we hardly ever used, we even asked robot Betty if she knew where the tax file might be hiding itself. But if Betty knew anything, she wasn't talking.
    By the time we finished tossing the