“Would you like to buy an ink pen?”
“Not really. What organization are you selling them for?”
“We aren’t selling them for anyone but our family.”
Too proud to say my Dad’s been laid off, but I do if pushed. Even that doesn’t work. I imagine Mom will use the money to pay our utility bills. Six or eight in a box—blue or black?—the ink congealed. Some customers open and smell the packs, demand to try them, but the pens had to be scratched hard against paper to wake up. Some never did work and the ones we got started had to be pressed firm and some letters gone over twice.
Together, my brothers and I sold a few boxes of pens between us, over the span of several weeks of door to door pleas. As skinny as we were, what was a dollar to these stingy people who slammed so many heavy doors in our faces, laughed or attacked? I wanted so much to return home with a handful of one’s for mom. We compared notes, practiced pepping up our speeches, came with smiles, but the responses to us grew ever more hateful, to the point that I just knocked, looked at a bush—anything, but eyes, and waited for my rebuke.
We went home only after the sun went down, kitchen windows steamed with dinners, and father’s pointing out it was suppertime and not a time to knock. A hang-down-your-head-Tom-Dooley response of quiet “none’s” when mom yells over her own steaming pots, “How many did you sell?”
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