My Brother Louis Measures Worms Read Online Free Page A

up the stairs. “Is there anyone else I should call?” he asked.
    â€œYou might call Frank.”
    â€œI was hoping there would be a husband I could notify.”
    â€œHe’s in jail,” Mother said. “I couldn’t tell you. You would have had a fit. You know you would. Did you reach Dr. Hildebrand?”
    â€œHe’s on his way. Also the ambulance. Didn’t you think I would catch on when this particular moment arrived?”
    â€œYes,” Mother said, “but this baby is five months early.” She did not add that this was Frank’s estimate.
    It was hours before the whole thing got straightened out, and in the meantime Juanita the cat escaped from the Slocums’ basement and disappeared, and all the neighborhood children (summoned by Maxine ringing the cowbell) ran up and down the street and in and out of everybody’s yards looking for her.
    Amid all the clamor Genevieve had an eight-and-a-half-pound boy upstairs in the bedroom. She did it all by herself because the ambulance arrived too late and Dr. Hildebrand was busy trying to improvise some kind of incubator for what he believed to be a dangerously premature birth for a seriously allergic mother. But then he got most of his information from my father, who was, in this case, the worse possible source.
    Eventually all the loose ends got tied up. Leroy Amos Fraley, Jr., being of great size and marked vigor, was obviously not even five minutes early, and Genevieve’s allergy was only a figment of my father’s misinformation.
    Ethel Fitch, on hearing the good news over the phone, said it was the end of all her hopes and dreams for Genevieve, which had involved a three-month course in beauty culture, to run from mid-June to mid-September (which took care of another loose end) and a subsequent career of styling hair in the front room of the Fitch house. Why else, Ethel wanted to know, did Mother think she had embarked on this painting-and-decorating project? She had done it, she said, all for Genevieve, who had repaid her by taking up with a convict.
    My father, trying hard to catch up, said that, crazy or not, Ethel had a point. “After all,” he said, “this Leroy is in jail, isn’t he?”
    â€œYes,” Mother said, “but only because Ethel lent him her car and then said he stole it.”
    At this point the ambulance, having shut its door and gone away, returned . . . with Juanita and four kittens.
    â€œDidn’t like to put ’em out in the street,” the driver said, “and we figured they must have come from somewhere around here.”
    â€œBring them right in,” my father said. “We seem to be in the business.”
    Juanita the cat hung around our house for two or three weeks, much to Maxine Slocum’s disgust; Louis and I got to keep one kitten, which we named Leroy in honor of the day’s events; and Genevieve and the baby stayed with us for four days until Leroy, who had been released from jail, arrived to take them away.
    We all stood around on the front porch watching them go, and my father said now that it was all over he felt like a man who had wandered into someone else’s home movie and then wandered out again without ever knowing what it was all about. Louis and I felt much the same way. While watching and waiting for Juanita to have kittens, we had missed the main event; had overlooked the forest for the trees, so to speak, and then missed the trees too.
    But, happily for us, there remained one final confusion.
    â€œWhat do you mean, Leroy is going to have kittens?” my father said the next spring. “How can a male cat have kittens?”
    â€œWell, we were wrong about that,” Mother told him. “And since all the children were so disappointed last year when Juanita ran away, I thought I might call just a very few mothers and see whether their children would like to come—”
    â€œNo,” my father said.