Why We Took the Car Read Online Free

can’t remember you.” The thing that most blew my mind was the long-distance boomerang. He’d developed it himself. It could fly for ages — and he had invented it. All over the world today, when someone throws a boomerang and it stays in the air for five minutes, setting some record, and a picture is taken of it, it’s always there: based on a design by Wilhelm Bretfeld . He’s world renowned, Bretfeld. And he was standing in the field behind our house last summer and showed me how to do it. A really good teacher. Though I never noticed it in elementary school.
    In any event, I spent the entire summer break sitting in the basement whittling. And it was a great summer break, much better than going somewhere on vacation. My parents were almost never home. My father drove around from creditor to creditor and my mother was at the beauty farm. And that’s what I wrote the assignment about: Mother and the Beauty Farm , a word prompt story by Mike Klingenberg.
    The next class, I got to read it aloud. Or I had to. I didn’t want to. Svenja was first up, and she had written one of those nonsense stories about the Côte d’Azur, which Schuermann thought was great. Then Kevin read basically the same story except that instead of the Côte d’Azur it was the Baltic coast. Then it was my turn. Mother at the beauty farm. It’s not really a beauty farm. Though my mother does always look better when she comes back from it. It’s actually a clinic. She’s an alcoholic. She’s drunk booze for as long as I can remember, but the difference is that it used to be funnier. Everyone is normally funny when they drink, but when a certain line is crossed people get tired or aggressive. And when my mother started walking around our place with a kitchen knife again, I was standing upstairs with my father as he called down, “How about another trip to the beauty farm?” That’s how the summer started at the end of sixth grade.
    I like my mother. I have to add that, because what I’m about to say might not cast her in the best light. But I always liked her, and still do. She’s not like other moms. That’s what I’ve always liked best about her. She can be really funny, for instance, and you can’t say that about most mothers. Calling the clinic the beauty farm was one of her jokes.
    My mother used to play a lot of tennis. My father too, but not very well. The ace in our family was my mother. When she was still in shape, she won the tennis club championship every year. She even won it with a bottle of vodka in her system, but that’s another story. Anyway, as a kid I was always at the courts with her. My mother sat on the terrace at the tennis club and drank cocktails with Frau Weber and Frau Osterthun and Herr Schuback and the rest of them. And I sat under the table and played with Matchbox cars as the sun shone down. In my mind the sun was always shining at the tennis club. I looked at the red clay dust on five sets of white tennis shoes and collected bottle caps — you could draw on the insides of the caps with a ballpoint pen. I was allowed to have five ice creams a day and ten cans of Coke and could just tell the waiter to add it to our tab. And then Frau Weber said, “Next week at seven again, Frau Klingenberg?”
    And my mother: “Sure.”
    And Frau Weber: “I’ll bring the balls next time.”
    My mother: “Sure.”
    And so on and so forth. Always the same conversation. Though the joke was that Frau Weber never brought balls — she was too cheap.
    Once in a while there was another version. It went like this:
    â€œAgain next Saturday, Frau Klingenberg?”
    â€œCan’t do it. I’ll be away.”
    â€œBut doesn’t your husband’s team have a league match?”
    â€œYes, but he’s not going to be away. I am.”
    â€œAha. Where are you going?”
    â€œTo the beauty