She smiles. “You got it.” She pulls herself up and heads for the kitchen, which is about the size of a broom closet. Mom has a job at the library, but we still don’t have very much money. She spends one day a week tutoring women who can’t read, and she doesn’t get paid for that at all. Mom is really smart, and if she’d wanted to, I know she could have been a banker like her sister, my aunt Thelma. But Mom told me she and Thelma have different priorities. Which I think means that Aunt Thelma wanted to get rich and Mom didn’t.
I don’t care about the money most of the time. I don’t need fancy clothes or MP3 players or video games. But there’s one thing I really, really want: a computer. When I go over to see my friends the triplets, they let me use theirs.
Once, when we were all hanging out in Jerzey Mae’s room, I found a Web site that lists all sorts of fascinating diseases. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading the symptoms of beriberi aloud. Jerzey Mae got paler and paler as I read.
“My muscles ache,” she said. “I’m tired.” She sank back into a pile of puffy pink pillows.
“Are you irritable?” I asked.
“Yes, she is,” her sister JoAnn answered for her. Jerzey Mae smacked JoAnn with one of the pillows. “See?” said JoAnn.
