Book 7: Naysayer's Revenge
Beverly smiled at Jimmy as she leaned over to see inside the Mustang. Susanna gave her the front passenger seat and climbed into the back. Mr. and Mrs. Carter made Jimmy drive Susanna to school, but he chose to drive Beverly. They had been going steady for almost six months.
Beverly had just returned from a spring vacation to Acapulco. She had told Jimmy about the trip during a marathon phone call, but he hadn’t told Susanna anything, and she wanted to know everything. “What’s it like? Where’d you stay? What’d you do?”
Before Beverly could answer Jimmy cut in. “Tell her about the parasail.” From his perspective that had been the only interesting part of her trip.
“What’s a parasail?” Susanna asked.
“It’s a parachute tied to the back of a boat with a long rope. They strap you into the harness while you’re standing on the beach, and then a boat pulls you out over the ocean. When it does, the parachute fills with air and floats you into the sky.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“They wouldn’t let you do it if it was dangerous. Besides you’d fall in the water if anything went wrong.”
“I’m going to do that,” Jimmy declared.
“Sure,” Susanna mocked him. “When’s your next trip to Acapulco?” She and Jimmy had lived their whole lives in Amarillo, Texas. Neither had been anywhere exotic, and neither held an expectation they would. Mr. and Mrs. Carter didn’t waste money on frivolous things like family vacations.
“I don’t have to go to Acapulco. I can parasail at the lake.”
“You don’t have a parachute, and you don’t have a boat.”
“Jeff has a boat, and I’ll get a parachute.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked sarcastically. “Make one?”
When they were children Jimmy had easily enticed Susanna to assist with his fantastically marvelous and ultimately doomed projects, but over the years successive disappointments had extinguished her expectations. Skepticism had replaced optimism, and concerns for his welfare had converted her into a naysayer. She disliked the job but routinely shouldered the burden.
She punched Beverly. “Did he tell you about the time he climbed on top of our two story house with a parachute he made out of a bed sheet?”
Beverly looked at him sideways. “Is that true?”
He grinned. “That wasn’t my best project, but I was only eleven.”
Susanna interjected, “He’d be dead or crippled if our mother hadn’t gotten home when she did. Every kid in the neighborhood was standing outside in our yard watching while the wind whipped the sheet back and forth. They chanted, ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’”
“Did you try to stop him?”
“Of course.”
“What’d your mother do?”
“Not much,” Jimmy said. “When I saw her car drive up, I got down. By the time she got into the house the whole thing was over.”
Susanna added a postscript. “I pulled him inside through the window.”
