Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [54]
The following year, Micah started high school and we were separated again, both during and after school. By then, I’d grown used to doing my own thing.
Halfway through my eighth-grade year, in 1978, we moved to the first and only house my parents would ever own.
We handled the move ourselves. Who needs to pay a moving company when there are a couple of strong boys and a Volkswagen van on hand? So day after day, we loaded everything from the house into the back of the van and hauled it to the new home.
But Volkswagens aren’t really designed for exceptionally heavy loads, and my brother and I didn’t care how much we loaded into ours. We would fill the back of the van with my dad’s books until there wasn’t an inch to spare. It probably weighed half a ton, and the van was riding exceptionally low in the rear. Meanwhile, the nose of the vehicle actually pointed upward, like someone eyeing a distant horizon.
“We got it all loaded in, Mom.”
Mom stared at the van. “It looks like it’s just about to pop a wheelie.”
“That’s just because it’s heavy in the back. It’ll straighten out when we unload it.”
“You think it’s safe to drive?” she asked. Why she asked us, I’ll never know. Neither Micah nor I even had our license.
“Of course it’s safe. Why wouldn’t it be?”
The good news was that the van made it to the new house. The bad news was that—even after unloading all the books—the van didn’t level out. At all. We’d crushed whatever support there had been in the rear.
“Is the front still pointing toward the sky, or is it just me?” mom finally asked.
“Maybe we’re looking at it crooked. Or the street’s not level.”
We tilted our heads, checking the van, looking up and down the road.
“I think you broke something,” mom finally said.
“Nah,” we said, “it’ll be fine. Give it time—it’ll go back to normal.”
“Your dad’s going to be mad.”
“He won’t even notice,” we reassured her. “But even if he does, he won’t care.”
Of course my dad noticed, and the DEFCON countdown started after he got home, though we were smart enough to be long gone by then. Thankfully, by the time we got home, he had calmed down, since the van seemed to run fine, despite the crazy way it looked. And if it ran fine, that meant there was really no reason to fix it. That would be spending money we didn’t have. So in the end, the van was never repaired, and for the next three years—until we traded it in for the new, improved Volkswagen van—we drove around town looking as if we were hauling baby whales to the zoo.
Our new house was small. A single-story ranch with a converted garage, it had four bedrooms, an office, a living room, and a kitchen. Two of the rooms (the office and master bedroom) had been converted from the garage. The house was twenty-five years old and in dire need of repairs. Even with the garage conversion, it was less than 1,300 square feet.
But to us, it was awesome. My brother, sister, and I each had our own room for the first time in our lives, and we all took time decorating them in our own style. My mom was tremendously proud to finally have a home she could call her own, and she spent much of the next few years fixing the place up and adding her own splashes of personality. There were sixteen walls all painted in different colors—my mom changed wall paint more often than some people change their toothbrushes—and every weekend, Micah and I had to finish our mother’s “list” before we could head off to play. We spent our Saturday mornings building fences, painting walls over and over, planting bushes and trees, sanding kitchen cabinets, and executing whatever plan she happened to come up with while at work.
Because the family had little extra money to spend on such things, it was a slow process. To build the fence, for instance, my mom would buy a dozen planks of wood every week, all she