Help Wanted (5 page)

Javier was immediately pulled into the debate. "You can't do that," he argued.

"Yeah, you can. I'm going to New Mexico to get my license. That's where my dad lives. He says you can get a driver's license when you're fifteen."

Javier bit the inside of his tongue as he almost cried out,
Liar.

"My dad has a farm there. He said that we can race tractors if we want. He has three of them. On the farm he has room to land his plane."

"No way," Javier blurted. He slapped his hand over his mouth and through his fingers uttered a muffled "Sorry." He didn't wish to be rude.

"Yeah, it's true. His farm is really big. It would be bigger except he had to sell some of it because someone wanted to drill an oil well on it."

Javier wished she would go away. But he let her talk as she described the kind of car she was going to get—a convertible Audi TT. He let her babble as his interest grew in the racetrack wreck and the driver they were pulling out of the race car. His head hung limply.
Is he alive?
Javier wondered.

Aunt Marta came out of the house. She was no longer wearing her robe, slippers, or curler as she had prepared herself for the day as a merchant. She wore a sweater with an Easter bunny stitched on the front. Its tail was a fuzzy pom-pom.

"Thank you," Veronica said when she took the root beer from his aunt. "Root beer is my favorite. In fact, I used to make root beer at home."

"Oh, how nice," Aunt Marta remarked lightly.

"It's really easy, except when you try to get the fizz to stay." Veronica took a sip. "You need really good corks. Plus the bottles can't be too big. The fizz goes out of them if they are."

Javier took a long swig and then—he couldn't help himself—burped.

Aunt Marta frowned at Javier.

"My dad lives in New Mexico," Veronica continued. "He used to make root beer, but now he farms onions. I like onion rings with mustard. I know it's weird, but I like 'em that way." She went on to say that her father had a helicopter that he used to patrol his ranch, which was different from the farm. The ranch had cattle and some wild mustangs. She said that he would use his jet, except that it went too fast to count his herds.

Aunt Marta's smile weakened.

Javier swiveled away from the last big fat lie. He grimaced as he wished that he could jump into the television and do something useful, like help the hurt race car driver. When Veronica began to explain the three tractors—the two that ran, the one rusting by the barn where they kept root beer bottles just in case—Javier excused himself and went inside. He said he had to go to the restroom and hurried up the steps as if he really had to go.

"Don't let Chalupa out!" Aunt Marta yelled. Chalupa was her Chihuahua, a spoiled dog that wore a tiny raincoat on cold days. On really cold days, when ice blanketed the lawn, his aunt attached a hand warmer inside the raincoat. Javier had yet to figure out why the dog never started smoking and caught on fire.

From inside, Javier peered out the front window.

"Dang!" he yelled. "What is she doing here?" He punched a pillow.

Chalupa rounded the corner from the kitchen. He was dressed in a pink sweater.

"Hey, dog," Javier said by way of greeting as he wiggled his fingers at Chalupa. But Chalupa, rolling up his tongue that disappeared into his mouth, wouldn't come. "Forget you, then!"

Javier waited for Veronica to leave. But she remained on the front lawn, picking among the yard-sale items, and finally left only after Javier really had to go to the bathroom. When he returned from the bathroom and peered out the front window, where Chalupa had left his nose print, he squeezed his hands into fists and cheered, "Great!" He went outside. His grumbling aunt wouldn't look directly at him. Then she asked, "How do you know that girl?"

"I don't know her," Javier argued.

"She said you do. She just talks and talks."

"Tía, really—I don't know her! Why do you think I went inside?"

"Did you jiggle the handle on the toilet? It'll run if you don't." She picked at the pom-pom absently. "
Pues,
at least she bought something."

Javier scanned the things on the front lawn. "What did she buy?"

"The helmet."

"The football helmet! It was mine!" He stabbed a finger at his chest.

"I didn't know that," Aunt Marta explained innocently. "It was on the lawn,
qué no?
" She licked her lips as she searched for an excuse. "She bought it for three dollars. How 'bout if I get to keep just a dollar for me?"

When Javier got home, his mother screamed from the kitchen that he had gotten a phone call.

"Who was it?" Javier asked as he went into the kitchen.

His mother was seated at the kitchen table. Her elbows were propped in lemon halves. His mother believed that the acid helped dissolve the discolored skin on her elbows. Javier had tried that process, too, but all he got was sticky elbows. And Javier was suspicious of his mother's other home remedies. Sometimes she would rest on the couch with slices of cucumber over her eyes. If she had a headache, she would place cool sheets of lettuce on her forehead.

"I don't know," she answered. She turned a page of
National Enquirer
magazine. His mother was reading an article about an obese woman who lived on tomato juice for two weeks. By the end of that time, she could slip back into the bikini she wore in high school. As proof, there were "before" and "after" pictures.

Javier got himself a glass of water. He sat down with his mother and they read the article together—that one and one about a man who fell from a plane and lived to tell his story.

"See," his mother said.

Javier was about to ask, "See what?" when the cordless telephone on the kitchen counter rang. He picked up, and before he could say hello, a girl on the other end related in a rapid-fire voice, "Your football helmet, the one I bought, used to belong to Jeff Garcia."

It was Veronica. He hurried from the kitchen.

"I bet it's worth about three hundred dollars," Veronica said. "Maybe more."

Although he knew who was on the line, he asked, "Who's this?" He pictured her in a frilly bedroom where a wall was lined with those Kens she had spoken about.

"It's me, silly—Veronica." Veronica said she had placed the helmet on sale on eBay and that if she sold it, she'd give him half of the money.

Javier's tongue couldn't move. He presumed the football helmet was just some thing that some old jock had thrown away. But an authentic 49ers helmet worn by Jeff Garcia! His tongue finally moved. "How do you know it's really real?"

"His signature. It's on the inside of the helmet."

"But it could be a fake."

"No, I don't think so," she sang. She explained that she had looked up his signature on the Internet, and his looping script matched the name inside the helmet.

Javier's tongue died again. He didn't know how to respond when she said she had sold a lot of things on
eBay. If he wanted, he could look under "charming-girl," the account she and her father shared.

"The onion farmer with a helicopter?" asked Javier snidely.

Veronica chuckled. "That's right. But let's not forget the cattle and horses he owns. Plus the vineyard in Napa. My dad is flying in to see me this weekend."

Javier fumed. He hung up as she was asking if she could call him later. He returned to the kitchen to read the
National Enquirer.
He and his mother read about a sixty-nine-year-old grandmother who had entered a bodybuilding contest and took second place.

"Wow!" Javier said, impressed.

But Javier's mother noticed the grandmother's dark elbows. What she needed was a single hour of her elbows set in lemon halves in order to come out as top dog.

Javier got it into his head that he could hold a yard sale. True, it wasn't eBay, but with a week off for spring break, he had to do something. He looked under his bed and in the garage for stuff to sell. He brought out to the yard old clothes, a Monopoly game, a broken Nintendo, a tricycle, a tarnished teapot, and his army men. He also set out a computer and a plastic guitar his father had given him. Javier posted a sign on the telephone pole on the corner. The sign read:
YARD SAIL.

He sat in a chair and waited for the hordes. When
no one came except his cat, sniffing each and every sale item, he set up the Monopoly set and played against himself. He chose the iron as his marker and played against the horse. He was mad when the horse began to pile up all the hotels and five-hundred-dollar bills. The iron was luckless.

"Dang," Javier moaned when he landed on Park Place and had to pay up a thousand dollars he didn't have. He considered cheating. There was no one around to see him steal the horse's five-hundred-dollar bills. Instead, he swiped his hand over the hotels, ending the game. Javier sighed as he lay back, hands behind his head. His head immediately heated up. The shade had moved and then he found himself—and all his yard-sale stuff—sitting in direct sun. As he got up to move his stuff, he heard someone call, "Javier, look at this."

Javier turned and saw Veronica coming up the sidewalk on a dirt bike. She skidded to a halt, her ponytail whipping about her face.

Javier approached Veronica. "What?"

"Guess!"

Javier didn't like the game.

"I don't wanna guess."

Veronica begged him by pouting and stomping her foot. "Please, pretty pleeeease!"

Javier didn't like the "pretty please" stuff. What did she mean with that? It struck him that maybe she was
flirting. The only thing he liked about her at that moment was her dirt bike. He was envious of her ride, while his own bike had been put together by an uncle who had stolen most of the parts.

"Veronica, I don't understand you."

Veronica smiled. "That's cute I That's the first time you called me Veronica. Do you know what that means?"

Javier was clueless.

"It means—" Veronica stopped. She said that she would e-mail him what it meant.

He lied and said that he didn't have e-mail.

"You got to get with it, then," she sang.

Stupid me,
Javier thought.
If I hadn't put this stuff out for a yard sale, she wouldn't have ever shown up.
She was a pest, or worse, a pest who thought they were friends. But suddenly his tune changed when Veronica pulled out some hundred-dollar bills. His nostrils flared at the sight of those bills; yes, they smelled like real money, not like the Monopoly money on the lawn.

"I sold the Jeff Garcia helmet on eBay." She reminded him that her account was "charminggirl."

"No way," he remarked after she had stopped jabbering. "You sold it?"

"Yeah, and the buyer lives right in town. He drove over this morning and paid in cash. He loves the 49ers. He went to college in San Francisco—that's why."

But what does this mean for me?
Javier wondered.

"And I love..." Veronica's eyes became shiny. She moved her bike a few inches closer to Javier. The front tire touched his knee.

Oh god, no,
Javier thought as he took a step back.
She likes me.

"And I would love to give you fifty-fifty. Like two hundred and fifty dollars." She said that it was really his helmet, and she couldn't possibly live with herself if she kept all the money. She handed Javier two one-hundred-dollar bills and said that they would have to cash the last bill to make it fair.

"No, th-that's okay," Javier stuttered. He was glad to slip the two hundred dollars into his front pocket. His eyes fell on the stuff on the lawn and the Monopoly money that began to blow away. His belongings looked pathetic, like stuff that falls from the back of a pickup truck on the freeway.

"Oh, that's pretty," Veronica said of the tarnished teapot. "How much is it?"

That piece of junk,
Javier thought. It had been in the garage for years and years, or since he was a kid when he first made mud cakes in the backyard. He had used the teapot to mix mud. It was nothing to him. His instinct was to give it away, but he remembered the football helmet. Perhaps the teapot was worth something. "How about thirty dollars?" he braved.

Veronica opened and closed the top of the teapot and rubbed it like a magic lamp. She agreed to the
price, which made Javier wonder if he should have charged more.

"But I need to break this hundred," she said, snapping the bill between her fingers. "I need to pay you fifty, plus thirty for the teapot." Her eyes twinkled. "How 'bout I let you keep all of the hundred if you ... god, I'm shameless." She waved a hand in front of her reddening face and completed her sentence. "You can keep it all if you take me out for a smoothie."

Javier swallowed as he did his math. He figured that he would have to treat her to a smoothie, and what would that cost but two dollars? But he was aware that he was walking on eggshells—he looked down at his feet—no, Monopoly money. He was smothering a pile of twenty-dollar bills.

"Come on," Veronica pleaded.

He nearly grimaced at the thought of listening to an hour or so of lies about her mother's Ferrari and her dad's farm and helicopter and stuff. Still, he felt it was a business call. He took a step, and a twenty-dollar bill of Monopoly money stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He shook the bill from his sole and coolly accepted the hundred dollars from Veronica.

"Where do you wanna go?"

They rode their bikes down to the Ice Cream Palace, where Javier had a hard time breaking the hundred-dollar bill. The pimply high school student behind the
counter complained that he didn't have any change and that the only way he could break the bill was if Javier bought a twenty-dollar gift certificate. Javier considered the proposition. He remembered his mother's birthday was coming up. He could get a certificate for her and—he felt a little ashamed as he licked his lips—was aware that she probably would take him along to the Ice Cream Palace. He would get some of his money back in ice cream.

"Okay," Javier agreed.

The counter boy fixed their order in minutes. They sat on tall stools by the window so that they could watch their bikes. Veronica giggled for no reason and swung her legs.