Night Kites Read Online Free PDF

ran out. I paid for my own M.B.A. I took any part-time work I could get. That’s when I began to apply myself. Before that I didn’t have any discipline. I didn’t put any value on education until the money came out of my own pocket.”
    Pete and I called this rap Rap #2, the Pull Yourself Up by Your Own Bootstraps rap, twin to Rap #3, the Learn the Value of a Dollar rap. Rap #1 was The Family Is First.
    “Pete could still get his doctorate, couldn’t he?”
    “That’s what I tried to tell him last night.”
    “And wouldn’t you help him?”
    “Erick, Pete hasn’t even looked into it. Pete would rather chase off to Paris every summer.” Pete hardly ever stayed very long in Paris when he went abroad. He couldn’t afford it—he usually earned small grants to go. But Dad invariably described Pete’s trips that way, as though Pete was just living it up somewhere dazzling.
    “Maybe The Skids will bail Pete out,” I said.
    “Five chapters in nine years? What makes him think he’ll write screenplays any faster?” Dad said. “Sometimes I think your brother lives on a pink cloud. He has your mother’s cockeyed optimism. Why would he get himself involved in teaching that Great Writers’ Discussion Group, free of charge, when he needs money, and he needs time for his own writing?”
    “For charitable reasons, maybe? Rain does not fall on one roof alone,” I said. It was Mom’s favorite saying. It was her justification for being involved in enough good causes to qualify her for sainthood or a nervous breakdown, whichever came first.
    “What do you think your mother’s most known for around Seaville?” Dad asked me. “Not all the good works she’s organized, not any of them!”
    I knew what he was referring to, and I said, “She can’t help that.”
    “She’s most remembered for that fiasco: the Bill Ball!”
    She was. True. When her good friend Liz Gaelen’s husband got caught in some Wall Street swindle, and was almost indicted for embezzlement, Mom organized a Bill Ball. All the Gaelens’ bills were put into a fishbowl; anyone attending the ball had to pick out a bill and pay it, as the price of admission. Mom got the Seaville Tennis Club to donate the space for the ball. The Gaelens were bailed out of their immediate financial difficulties, but we never heard the end of it. For months letters to the editor in The Seaville Star complained that only the rich would dream up such a self-serving celebration.
    Dad turned onto School Street. “Pete gets his bleeding-heart ideas from your mother. You know how Pete always was. He was a one-man Salvation Army when he was a kid. Then dating that girl in a wheelchair!”
    “But what a girl, Dad! Belle Michelle!”
    “Pete was dating her because she was in a wheelchair. And I think Michelle was smart enough to know it. I think that’s why she threw Pete over … I like your loyalty to Pete, but don’t try to be Pete. This ambition of yours to be a writer—that’s Pete’s ambition. You don’t even read. I never see you with a book. At least Pete reads … always did.”
    I jumped at the chance to get Dad off that subject. “Look! Dill!”
    “I see her. You’ve been going with her most of high school, hmmm?”
    “I know what you’re going to say: Play the field more.”
    “I like Dill, But now’s the time to sow your wild oats. Why so serious with just one girl, Erick?”
    She was waiting for me on the front steps of school. She was in jeans, a white shirt, a baggy sweater with the shirt tails hanging out from under it, a loosely knotted tie blowing in the breeze.
    “And how do you tell her from a boy?” Dad said.
    “Oh, how do you think?” I said.
    When Dad laughed, I said, “Hey, Dad, what’s that sound you just made?”
    “I almost forgot how to make it, after I saw those S.A.T. scores of yours. I hope you’re studying those Barron review books I got for you.”
    “Not to worry, Dad,” I said as he stopped the car.
    “Not to worry,”