“We made enough money to buy a bike. A good bike, even. Shlomo’s going to love it”
Eli is wrong, by the way, which might be a first. There’s no rain on Sunday, though there are warnings that the edge of the hurricane might hit their neighborhood on Monday. And Nellie has her camp on Sunday morning, like she’d wanted to, while Eli is at school and can’t see every little thing that she hasn’t planned ahead.
It feels wrong, somehow, wanting to do something without Eli. Sure, they go to different schools and have different friends and interests. But at home, they’ve always been a team. Nellie can’t stop thinking about all the ways that Eli could have been there at her backyard camp. There’s one little boy who keeps crying, and Nellie just knows that Eli would have been great with him. The kids ruin two of the arts-and-crafts sets and leave them short one, and Nellie can imagine exactly how Eli would have convinced two of the kids to share. They’d have liked his bike tricks, too.
But Eli isn’t there, and Nellie is right about how much money she’ll make with it. The envelope of bike money is thick now, full of nearly enough for the bike — no, more than enough, she realizes a moment later, because Eli must have raked another two backyards and added the money to it without telling her.
They can finally buy Shlomo a bike.
Yes! Nellie does a little spin, then jumps into the air and lands in a perfect split. “We did it!” But there is no one in the room to laugh at her antics, no Eli to cheer with her. Nellie gets up again and trudges outside.
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