The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp (Alfred Kropp 1)
Page 2
“What do you miss most about her?”
“She was a great cook.”
“Really? You miss her cooking the most?”
“Well, I don’t know. You asked what I missed most and that’s the first thing that popped into my head. Maybe because it’s almost dinnertime. Also, Uncle Farrell can’t cook. I mean, he cooks, but what he cooks I wouldn’t feed to a starving dog. Mostly we have frozen dinners and stuff out of a can.”
She scribbled for a minute in her little notebook.
“But your mother—she was a good cook?”
“She was a great cook.”
She sighed heavily. Maybe I wasn’t giving the kind of answers she was looking for. “Do you hate her sometimes?”
“Hate her for what?”
“Do you hate your mother for dying?”
“Oh, jeez, that wasn’t her fault.”
“But you get mad at her sometimes, right? For leaving you?”
“I get mad at the
cancer for killing her. I get mad at the doctors and . . . you know, how it’s been around for centuries and we still can’t get rid of it. Cancer, I mean. And I think, what if we put all the money we spend on these wasteful government projects toward cancer research. You know, stuff like that.”
“What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“Do you hate him?”
“I don’t even know him.”
“Do you hate him for leaving you and your mom?”
She was making me feel freaky, like she was trying to get me to hate my father, a guy I didn’t even know, and even like she was trying to get me to hate my dead mother.
“I guess so, but I don’t know all the facts,” I said.
“Your mother didn’t tell you?”
“She just said he couldn’t commit.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Like he didn’t want a kid.”
“Like he didn’t want—who?”
“Me. Me, I guess. Of course me.”
I wondered what the next thing I was supposed to hate was.
“How do you like school?”
“I hate it.”