Lottery Read Online Free Page B

hard work, but cool to see how beautiful they look when they are done. We make boats look very good. Keith says we bring them back from the dead.
    “We bring them back, Per! They’d be dumped or sunk. We are defenders of a lost art. Look at those new boats, Per. No character! Not one piece of teak. What a waste.” A lost art means we are the only ones doing the work. No character means easy to take care of.
    When this boat goes into the water, it will be moved into a slip and tied up. The owner says he is going to put the varnish on his rail himself and save money.
    “That’s what they all say, Per!” Keith chortles. “Twenty minutes into the job, he’ll be back here bellyaching about it being too hot or too cold or too hard on his knees, and you and I will have another thousand bucks under the table.”
    The first time I heard under the table, I thought it meant hide. I had to ask Keith for sure.
    “It means we get to keep all the money ourselves instead of giving some of it to the government.” When Keith talks into my ear, he gets it all wet. I hate that.
    “You mean cheat?” I do not want to go to jail.
    “No. No. It’s okay, Per. We don’t owe them a dime! They didn’t do any of the work, did they? They didn’t help us one bit. Just don’t tell anybody, okay?”
    Under the table is okay if you don’t tell anybody. Keith and I make a lot of money under the table sanding and varnishing for people who are too lazy to do it themselves.
    The boat we are working on is called Playboy II. People have no imagination, Keith says.
    “No fucking imagination. You know how many Playboy s there are, Per?” He does not wait for me to answer. “About a gazillion!” He says this about every boat name.
    “You know how many My Prozac s there are?”
    “You know how many Sea Dream s there are?”
    People sometimes hook together the first two letters of their wife and kids’ names for their boat. This really annoys Keith.
    “ Jo-bo-ha-ga-li? What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Per? They’re just lazy. That’s what they are. Just fucking lazy!”
    People either lack imagination or are lazy, according to Keith. He says the F-word more than anybody else I know. I do not say the F-word.
    Keith has to drink beer and watch me work while he tells me about his adventures. He was a ferry captain until he ran his boat into a terminal. He told me the true story. It was not his fault. It was a passenger with really big tits.
    “Tits so big, Per, they were more than boobs. They were tatas. They were jugs. They were so big, the end of the world could come and you wouldn’t even notice.” His eyes are very round and do not blink when he tells me this. “It was not my fault.”
    That is another thing people say when they make a mistake. Not their fault. It is like rethink.
    “Well worth it, Per. Well worth it. Big. Big. Tits.” Keith makes his hands look like he is itching somebody’s back. Then he farts and laughs.
    “Just doin’ my part as a loyal citizen of Everett,” he says.

5
    Every morning I get up, go to the bathroom, shave, and comb my hair. I wear jeans and a flannel shirt with an undershirt.
    "You have an undershirt on, Perry?” Gram asks.
    “Yeah.”
    “You sure?”
    I lift up my shirt and check.
    “Yeah, I’m sure.”
    Gram says only low-class people go without undershirts. I definitely like undershirts. Everett is too cold to be naked under a shirt anytime of the year even with a jacket.
    I am a good cook. I make oatmeal and other stuff too, like macaroni and cheese, hamburger casserole, and toasted tuna sandwiches. Gram used to do all the cooking, but now she sits at the kitchen table, works on her crossword puzzle, and tells me what to do. She likes me to stretch. That means try new things.
    “Don’t get in a rut, Perry. Stretch yourself. Do something new,” she says.
    When she told me to make stew for dinner, I cut the meat in long strips. I never made stew before.
    “Cut them up smaller.