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lugging my entire office into my bedroom. If you
want your own room, you’ll have to make some concessions.”
    I knew the kind of concessions she was
talking about were not the kind that sold hot dogs at baseball
games. She meant I had to let Kirk have his own way before he even
asked for it. It seemed like Kirk always got his own way.
    “Kirk should decorate his room with stuff he
likes,” I said. “Something with cowboys or astronauts or
trains.”
    Mom poured the dish soap into its tray and
snapped the lid shut. “Kirk does like trains,” she said. “Maybe
he’d like that even better than staying in your room with the
baseball players.” She straightened up, then surveyed the table to
make sure I’d done a good enough job. It must have passed her
review, because she took the dishcloth instead of handing it back
to me. As she wiped off the counters, she called, “Kirk!” A few
moments later he trotted in.
    Mom put on the overly happy face she always
uses to try and get Kirk excited about something. “Hey sweetheart,
I was just thinking about how much you like trains, and I thought
maybe you’d like to spend more time with some trains.”
    “Are we going someplace?” Kirk asked
hopefully.
    “Well, no. I was just thinking maybe we could
decorate the office with train things. Would you like that?”
    “Yeah,” Kirk said slowly, as though he knew
there was a catch but wasn’t sure where.
    “Maybe you could even pretend it was your own
private train compartment.”
    “Yeah,” Kirk said with more enthusiasm. “And
I could take suitcases.”
    “And wouldn’t it be fun to move your bed in
with all of the train things?”
    “No!” His face scrunched up, and he put his
hands on his hips. “I’m not moving to the office. I want to sleep
in my baseball room.” He stomped off, hands still on his hips.
    Mom didn’t call him back. She sighed and
wiped the counters for a minute longer. “We’ll give him a little
time to adjust to the idea.”
    I figured he could adjust while I moved his
things out, but I didn’t say so. I was being a model child.
    Still, later that night as I as I lay in bed,
I stared at the ceiling and wondered whether I’d be like my dad and
have to share my room until I left home. Then I thought about my
dad’s job, and ROs, and how much extra money my parents would need
to buy a bigger house.
    Were there really secrets to selling things,
like Tony had said? Would they work on selling anything? And if so,
could Tony’s dad teach them to my dad?
    I didn’t imagine my dad would want to go over
to the Manetti’s house for salesman lessons, but maybe Tony’s dad
could tell me the secrets. Once I’d shown my dad how easy it was to
sell things, he’d change his mind about being a salesman. Maybe
he’d become really good at it. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about
money anymore, and my parents would never again argue about the
credit card bills, or where we went on vacation, or whether it was
okay to buy juice boxes for our school lunches. Maybe someday we’d
even own a BMW like the Manettis.
    All I needed to do was learn the secrets.
    * * *
    The next day before I went to school, I
searched through the filing cabinet where Dad kept his paperwork
for his job. After a few minutes I found a brochure on Hendricks
reverse osmosis systems. It didn’t look very interesting. Mostly it
was stuff about filters and workmanship. Still, I shoved it in my
backpack to study later. Before I finished shoving, I noticed the
price for the system. Six hundred and ninety-nine dollars.
    I almost gave up any idea of salesmanship
right then.
    Six hundred and ninety nine dollars? For
something that just gave you water? Who’d buy that?
    But I knew the answer. Tons of people. You
only had to take one taste of the tap water to convince yourself
you wanted to get your drinking water from somewhere else. So you
could either buy a reverse osmosis system that filtered out
whatever it was that caused the bad