Page 66 - To Family with Love

agreed right away. She loved big words and long sentences that seemed smart and that she didn’t understand, and this was a sen- tence no one understood and the longest one I ever came up with, and it even looked three times longer as I stuttered it. At least some good came out of stuttering. In addition, her female intu- ition led her to the conclusion that all of that was some kind of juicy gossip, and we all know how girls like people spilling the beans. Her eyes shone with happiness and excitement when she realized she would find out some sort of secret, which would make her practice crossing her heart and swearing to God and what not, without any real intention of keeping it to herself. Cross my heart is the nonsense you say before you find out something, but afterwards, you are bound to break your word by spilling the beans to everyone.
− What happened?
− My old lady is screwing around.
− Dear Lord, I can’t believe it, how is that possible? And
what now?
− Now we’re going to scare off that jerk of hers so bad that
he’ll forget about my ma forever.
− And how do you think you and I can scare him?
− By writing him a threatening letter that will scare him
stiff.
− And how do you know he’ll get scared of the letter?
− Because he’s a total wuss. He talks about the war all the
time and how he would sort it all out in one afternoon if they let him or if they asked him to, but they aren’t letting him and they aren’t asking him anything, and I know that he pulled all sorts of strings and bribed everyone there was to bribe so as not to be drafted into the army. And besides, according to my ma, it seems that he suffers from letterophobia, and he probably got that vi- cious disease from dirty hands when he was messing around with some letters. It was back in the old days when everyone lived
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