Mick Harte Was Here Read Online Free

his shoelaces and open the bathroom door.
    He also taught her to wear a red cowboy hat. Which sounds stupid, I guess. But Wocket really came to love that hat. In the mornings she wouldn’t go outside until Mick put it on her head and pulled her ears through these special slits he had cut in the sides.
    It’s been over a year since we had to have her put to sleep. She had bone cancer, and she was in a lot of pain. So it’s not like we had a choice or anything.
    We all went to the vet with her that day. But Mick was the only one who went in the room with her when it happened. When he came out, his shirt was covered with Wocket’s fur from where he had been hugging her till the very end. He wasn’t crying, though. And I remember wonderinghow in the world he could stay so strong.
    The next afternoon after
Gilligan’s Island
, the clock in the living room started to chime and Mick automatically got off the couch to go fix Wocket her dinner.
    He was halfway to the kitchen before he remembered.
    He stopped real sudden in the hall and just stood there a second. Then he ran into the bathroom and threw up.
    My mother knocked on the door, but he told her to go away. As soon as she’d left, he went to his room and didn’t come out for hours.
    That night, Mick came to the dinner table wearing Wocket’s red cowboy hat on his head. It wasn’t on purpose, I don’t think. He’d been wearing it all afternoon and had just forgotten it was there.
    He talked about her the whole time we ate. Telling us his favorite Wocket stories and all. Then after dinner, he took me back to his room and showed me this little pile of her fur he had collected from off the rug and his shirt and other places. He’d put it in a baggie and had it on display on his bookshelf. It was just so touching, you know?
    A couple of minutes later, he caught a glimpseof himself in the mirror and realized he was still wearing her hat. His face went totally sad.
    “What if I forget her, Phoeb? If I forget her, it’ll be like she was never even here.”
    So that night, me and Mick went through all the family albums, finding pictures of Wocket and sticking them into the sides of his mirror to make sure he’d never forget.
    He didn’t either. From then on, whenever he went in his room, the first thing he’d do was look at his mirror.
    “Hiya, Wocket. How ya doin’, girl?” he’d say. “You doin’ okay today?”
    And I don’t think I ever loved my brother more than when I heard him talk to those pictures. I swear to God I don’t.
    I T’S WEIRD REMEMBERING that now. Because after the accident, I was never once tempted to look through our family album for pictures of Mick. In fact, looking at his picture made me feel sick inside.
    We didn’t tell our favorite Mick stories at dinner, either. We didn’t even eat dinner, really. None of us had an appetite. And besides, no one wanted to sit at the table with his empty chair right infront of our faces. So we mostly just ate cereal standing up if we got hungry. Which was never. So no problem.
    Our lives got simpler in other ways, too.
    Like we didn’t talk that much because nothing seemed important enough to say.
    And even though the TV was always on, we almost never sat down to watch it. Every show seemed stupid. Even the news seemed stupid.
    Pop and I did try to watch the Discovery Channel one night. But it was all about the Serengeti Plain in Africa, and every scene had some animal being killed by some other animal. We turned it off just as a cheetah was about to pounce on one of those springy little antelope things. I mean who needs to see that, you know?
    “The Serengeti sucks,” I said.
    Usually I don’t say “sucks” in front of my father. He thinks it’s crude. But this time he nodded and said, “Yeah. It does.”
    We both went to bed then.
    It was eight o’clock.
    My mother was already asleep, by the way. The pills the doctor had given her were still working their magic.
    By the third night, her