Grief Girl

Grief Girl Read Free Page B

Book: Grief Girl Read Free
Author: Erin Vincent
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let us listen. She’s into ghosts and spirits as well.
    Dad doesn’t give two hoots about any of it. He says it’s all bullshit.

    Most days, Dad and I are up first. I love our mornings together. We both wake up all chipper and laughing away while Mum and Tracy lie in bed trying to “thaw out,” as they call it. I can tell Tracy likes being part of the thawing-out club the same way I like being part of the breakfast club.
    Unlike most kids, who have cereal and toast for breakfast, I eat in a five-star restaurant most mornings—if I close my eyes and don’t look at the laminated table and ugly brown and orange kitchen.
    This morning it’s melt-in-your-mouth sautéed beef strips and scrambled eggs. Dad whistles a happy tune as he tosses the beef in the wok and splashes in some sauce before flipping it onto our plates.
    We sit together and eat and ooh and ahh. “This is the life,” Dad says.
    â€œYou make the best stuff, Dad. Why aren’t you a chef?” I ask before thinking.
    Dad’s not smiling anymore. I was just trying to compliment him, but I’ve said the wrong thing. I do that a lot. Dad dreamed of being a chef, but his father said that was for poofters. So Dad works for a courier company.
    â€œUghh…” Mum and Tracy are up. After what I just said, I’m glad to see them.
    Dad smiles again as they groan their way into the kitchen. He and I are a lot alike. We both like to have fun as much as possible. Teasing Mum and Tracy by acting super happy and awake is especially entertaining.
    â€œHello, you bright sparks!” Dad says, winking at me. My ill-timed comment is forgotten. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    I overheard my parents talking about money and our lack of it this year. We’re
that
kind of family. One year we’re well off and the next we’re in the poorhouse. I think it has something to do with Dad’s schemes. Our fortune depends on which one he hits on and when. This year it was the gold-panning machine. For months Dad hid in his much-loved three-car (even though we only have one car) garage/workshop inventing a secret machine that would change our lives forever.
    â€œThis is going to be it, Bev, I can just feel it,” he says when he finally shows us a dark green metal contraption. It’s a rectangular box about the size of a sofa with a fat, ridged hose sticking out of one end and a funnel at the other.
    â€œWhat on earth is it?” Mum asks.
    â€œA gold-panning machine. It can pan in a day what it would take one person a month to pan,” he tells us. “The hose sucks up the dirt, which then gets sifted like flour, and any gold in there will come out the other end on the magnetic tray. It’s bloody beautiful!”
    Mum’s trying unsuccessfully to act excited, and I’m trying even harder. I’m thrilled that he might find gold. At the same time, I can’t help thinking I have the Nutty Professor for a dad, without the funny genius part. Tracy just says he’s a loser.
    Dad’s a fitter and turner by trade, whatever that is. I should ask him about it, but what if he just fits screws onto bolts and then turns them? A monkey could do that, and I don’t want to make him feel bad, because I know he’s really smart. Anyway, he hasn’t done that since Tracy was born, because he has more potential than that. That’s why he’s always inventing new ways to make his fortune.
    He acts like this is going to be different from the firewood-cutting business that left us with no income in the summer. Then there were the booze bus, which not even a drunk person wanted to ride in, and the under-eighteen disco that no teen in their right mind would be seen at. And the metal detector on the beach that turned up nothing better than a broken watch and a fancy hair clip.
    But this is it. This will change everything. No more getting

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