“Buzz is one crazy broad.” That’s what Dad has always said about my aunt.
“Buzz rocks.” That’s what Sarah and Daniel and I think.
No one’s sure what Mom thinks. But she must like having her sister around, or she wouldn’t have offered to let her move in above our garage. My aunt has lived there as long as I can remember.
When I got home after school, I decided to see if Auntie Buzz had any advice on how to get Tina to realize how incredibly perfect I would be as a boyfriend. Because if anyone knows about relationships, it’s Buzz. She’s been married three and a half times. The half comes from a spring-break marriage in Cancún when she was in college. “It probably wasn’t even legal in the first place, so it only counts as a halfsie,” she told me once.
Auntie Buzz is very high-energy. The double shot of espresso at the coffee shop across the street from her office is called the Buzz in her honor. Dad watched her knock back a few espressos once and muttered to me, “That kind of energy must have been hard on all those husbands.”
Sarah and I work for Buzz on weekends and during school vacations, carrying boxes of swatches and tassels and paint chips and tile samples and carpet books from her office to her work van and back again. Decorating is a heavy business.
She hires Daniel and his hockey team to move furniture. They work dirt cheap and don’t, Auntie Buzz says with a happy smile, belong to a union. Plus they work overtime for pizza and doughnuts and that’s the kind of payment Auntie Buzz can afford. “I’m not good with money, and my projects always go over budget,” she explained.
Auntie Buzz was sitting at our table when I walked into the kitchen, tapping away on her laptop. Mom had a late meeting, Dad was on Generic Business Trip Number Infinity and Beyond, Daniel had practice and Sarah was working, so I had privacy to bring up the Tina thing with Buzz.
“Hi, Buzz.”
“Hiya, Kev.”
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Putting together a demo reel so that I can be hired as the host of a network television show. Or cable, I don’t really care. Just so long as it’s national and pays well. I’ll do any kind of show.”
“Uh, why?” Even though I was dying to ask her about Tina, a person doesn’t just ignore this kind of information.
“When you work for and by yourself on commission and the government is sending you registered letters, you need to get creative about your income stream.”
“I didn’t know you were getting registered letters.”
“It’s a recent development.”
“So … how much trouble are you in?”
She shrugged and then scowled in the direction of a canvas bag near her feet. It was filled with a ton of unopened envelopes. Some of them had green Registered Mail stickers on them and were from the Internal Revenue Service. I’m only fourteen, but those people scare me. Tax time each year at our house is not pretty—Mom and Dad drag out shoe boxes full of receipts and take over the kitchen table for days on end, and there’s a lot of sighing and frowning and clickety-click-clicking of the calculator.
Adults, I’ve noticed, are usually terrible with money. I thought about the sock full of cash I have hidden in my pajama drawer. I’m an excellent saver.
“How much do you owe?”
“I’m not going to open the bills until I have the money to pay everything.” She looked more jittery than normal.
“Do you want me to find out for you?”
“You’re only fourteen years old—exposure to that kind of stress might kill you or make you sterile, and I don’t want to be responsible for you not being able to have children someday.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen if I read a few—twenty-seven—letters.” I hunched down and thumbed through the stack of envelopes.
“Can you put them in chronological order for me? I’ll find an accountant to deal with everything first thing on Monday.”
Monday is always Auntie Buzz’s favorite time to handle a problem.
“Do you have any plans for, uh, solving your financial … situation other than getting your own television show?”
“Why should I? I’d be a natural on TV, and the network—or the cable companies—would be crazy not to hire me.”
Buzz and I were more alike than I’d suspected; that was exactly the way I think. Self-confidence is everything for military geniuses, liars like me, and decorators in trouble with the government. All of a sudden, I felt warmly toward my aunt—a little parental, even.
When Sarah and Daniel and I run through our allowances and ask to borrow money from our folks, we get a huge lecture, and then they make it a teachable moment. No one ever gets punished in this house, because Mom says we should “experience the consequences” of our actions so that we can “benefit from the learning opportunity.”
I thought Buzz could get a lot out of a teachable moment. And I was just the person to teach her. I was the answer to her prayers—she just didn’t know it yet.
She was in a lot more trouble than Sarah or Daniel or I ever were, so she’d need more help and a bigger moment of teachabilityness, and if that isn’t a word, it should be.
She didn’t even notice when I took the bag to my room. I sat on the floor and separated the invoices from the checks. Then I went downstairs to the family computer in the basement and sorted through the boxes of software until I found the bookkeeping program Mom uses for her store. On the way back to my room, while Buzz was still on her laptop, I quietly rooted though her purse and grabbed her checkbook. I could have shaved her head for all she would have noticed. She was typing away, and her fingers must have been breaking land-speed records. I saw an empty coffeepot on the table next to her.
I took the disk to my room, installed the program on my laptop and whizzed through the tutorial, and in no time flat, I was entering debits and listing credits. I was so glad we’d done an accounting section in math a couple of weeks ago or none of this would have made any sense to me.
About an hour later, I’d balanced Buzz’s checkbook and discovered that she had a ton of money. She just never recorded the deposits. By the time I’d set up a bill-paying system and gotten everything entered and paid, Auntie Buzz had turned a nice profit in the past quarter.
I felt a little drunk with success, so I read the letters from the tax folks. I didn’t know what she was so freaked out about. The letters told her to call the 800 number and set up a payment schedule. I grabbed the phone and called the number and, deepening my voice a little, had a friendly conversation with a lady named Ms. Young who was completely understanding about Buzz’s dilemma in these tough economic times and suggested a monthly repayment plan. I read the number of Auntie Buzz’s checking account to Ms. Young, who said she would send Buzz the paperwork right away.
I could have told Auntie Buzz that her problems had been solved, but what kind of lesson would that have taught her?
I heard Auntie Buzz make a fresh pot of coffee and introduce herself for about the twelfth time to the webcam on her computer so that the network—or the cable companies—could see what a great personality she had on camera.
I had second thoughts about asking her for advice on Tina when I heard her pretend to banter with her imaginary cohost (“Well, Chuck, you would say that, hahaha”). One. Crazy. Broad.
I went downstairs to check my email. I sent a long note to Connie that I cut and pasted from the town council’s monthly minutes, throwing in a lot of heretofores and therewiths. Then I emailed Katie that I’d just gotten back from a lab draw and—good news!—my white blood cell count was down. I said yes to a request from Markie’s parents to babysit the next day, and I IM’d JonPaul to see how he was feeling. My buddies had sent me homework from the classes I’d missed, so I started to tackle that pile of mindlessness.
Truth be told, as much as I liked looking at Tina and devoting all my time and energy during all my free hours to thinking about making her crazy about me, it was already Wednesday and I still hadn’t come up with any brainstorms to get her to like me.
A few more pointless days like this and I was just going to lie to her. This truthfulness thing was a whole lot harder than my spur-of-the-moment inventions.