Being Teddy Roosevelt (3 page)

“That’s awful,” Riley said, so Erika would know that he didn’t agree with Queen Elizabeth’s father
at all
.

“Maybe you should have kept Florence Nightingale,” Grant suggested.

Ignoring Grant, Erika opened her book again.

“I guess she doesn’t think she should have kept Florence Nightingale,” Grant said.

“Be quiet,” Erika snapped at him. “I want to find out what happens next.”

“How’s Gandhi?” Riley whispered to Grant.

“He’s wearing normal clothes so far,” Grant whispered back.

Riley returned to reading. Teddy’s father told him that he would have to cure himself from being weak and sickly. He was going to have to
make
his body. So Teddy started lifting weights and pulling himself up on rings and bars. He asked to take boxing lessons and learned how to box.

Riley’s thoughts wandered. What if he had a father who said, “Riley, you must
make
yourself into a saxophone player!” Then his father would buy him a brand-new saxophone, the way Mr. Roosevelt had built Teddy his own private gym. Just as Teddy Roosevelt had asked his father for boxing lessons, Riley would ask his father for sax lessons.

“Sure, son,” he imagined his father saying with a proud grin. Riley practiced the proud grin.

“What are you smiling about?” Grant asked him.

The question pulled Riley back to reality.

“Nothing.” He had no father, no sax, no lessons, no proud grin.

Riley wondered what Teddy Roosevelt would have done if he hadn’t had a rich father who could give him anything he wanted. Riley was only up to page 19, but he already knew that if Teddy hadn’t been given a gym, he would have built himself one. If he hadn’t had weights to lift, he would have lifted chairs, or rocks, or bales of hay.

Unfortunately, there was no substitute for a saxophone. Teddy could lift anything and build strong muscles. Riley couldn’t blow into just anything and make music.

But still. If Teddy Roosevelt had wanted a saxophone, he would have gotten himself a saxophone. Somehow.

Riley read another few pages. Teddy Roosevelt’s father died! Riley felt sorry for Teddy Roosevelt even though he was just reading about him in a book. Teddy Roosevelt had been a real person, and everything in the book was true. Riley didn’t have a father, and now Teddy Roosevelt didn’t have a father, either. Riley and Teddy were the same.

Riley opened his language arts notebook—he had remembered to bring it to school that day!— and found a blank page halfway through.

Ways to Get a Saxophone
, he wrote at the top of the page.

But he couldn’t think of a single thing to write next.
Make one
. He couldn’t make a saxophone.
Find one
. Like where? And if he found one, it would probably belong to someone else. “Finders keepers” didn’t apply to saxophones.
Borrow one
. From whom?
Earn the money to get one
.

That idea didn’t seem as dumb as all the rest.

It might even be, as Teddy Roosevelt would have said, a
bully
idea. According to Riley’s book,
bully
meant “great, terrific, wonderful.”

Earn the money to get one
, Riley wrote on his page.

Of course, he didn’t know how much money he’d have to earn, or how a nine-year-old kid could possibly go about earning it. And even if he did, his mother had said he shouldn’t do instrumental music because he was having enough trouble getting his regular homework done.

Riley added to his list:
Do better on my homework so my mom will let me have one.

“All right, class!” Mrs. Harrow called out. “Reading time is over. Go back to your desks and get out your math books.”

Riley got off the couch. Erika shut her book with a bang. She must still be mad at Queen Elizabeth’s father.

At least Riley had started a list. Step one was making a list of what to do.

But the harder part was step two: doing it.

On Saturday morning, Riley settled down on the couch to watch cartoons. He knew he should be reading his Teddy Roosevelt book, but he could learn about Teddy Roosevelt later.

Riley’s mother clicked off the TV.

“Mom!”

She waved the newspaper at him. “We’re going to yard sales.”

Riley groaned, but his mother ignored him. She loved yard sales the way Grant loved video games, the way Mrs. Harrow loved biography teas. She loved yard sales the way Riley loved saxophones.

Reluctantly, Riley shoved his feet into his sneakers.

“We can look for items for your Teddy Roosevelt costume,” his mother said. “What did Teddy Roosevelt wear?”

Riley checked the cover of his book. “A fringed jacket, and boots, and a hat, and a bandanna, and these weird glasses that sort of stick on your nose, and a mustache.”

“Well, we can look, at least.”

Riley imagined the ad in the newspaper:

“Can Grant come, too?”

“I doubt Grant wants to spend his morning at yard sales.”

But when Riley called him, Grant did want to go. “Better yard sales than working on my report or trying to figure out how to play my trumpet.”

Grant’s parents had already bought him a brand-new trumpet for instrumental music. Sometimes Riley couldn’t help feeling jealous of Grant.

“Maybe we can find some great-looking loincloths,” Grant said.

Sometimes Riley
didn’t
feel jealous of Grant.

The first yard sale had lots of baby things: a crib, a stroller, piles of tiny clothes. It had adult clothes, too, but nothing Teddy Roosevelt or Mahatma Gandhi would have worn. No mustaches, no loincloths.

The next yard sale had a whole table full of used video games. Grant had them all. Riley didn’t have any of them. But he wasn’t going to spend his money on video games. Not if he could save it to buy himself a saxophone. He had five dollars and fifty cents crammed into his pocket right now.

The man at the third yard sale looked familiar. Riley was sure he was somebody’s dad from school. Then a woman came out of the house. It was Sophie’s mother.

“Let’s go,” Riley said. “There’s no good stuff here.”

“We haven’t even gotten out of the car yet!” Riley’s mom protested. “And look! There’s Sophie’s mom. You boys can chat with Sophie if you don’t see anything that interests you.”

Luckily, Sophie was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was at the library, filling out her seven hundredth note card on Helen Keller.

Riley and Grant started looking at the sale tables. Sophie had an older brother, so there might be something worth buying, after all. Grant found a video game he didn’t have and almost fainted with joy. Riley found a red bandanna that cost a quarter. Now all he needed was the jacket, the boots, the hat, the glasses, and the mustache.

Then, next to a stack of old
National Geographic
magazines, Riley found something that made his heart race. It was a book of music. Saxophone music. Alto saxophone music for the beginner.

Riley stared at the book.
Where there’s saxophone music, there must be a saxophone.

“Hi, Grant. Hi, Riley.” It was Sophie. Apparently her seven hundred index cards were filled out already.

Grant held up his video game. “Hey, Sophie, how come your brother turned out normal?”

Sophie didn’t react.

Grant tried again. “How come he turned out normal when you’re so strange?”

Sophie just smiled. Grant looked puzzled. Then Sophie pointed to her ears. “I have my earplugs in. I’m practicing being deaf today. So far it’s a lot easier than being blind. For one thing, I don’t have to listen to any dumb comments from boys.”

But how was Riley going to ask her about the saxophone if she couldn’t hear? Not that he had the nerve to ask.

Sophie’s mother came over to the table. “Are you boys finding anything?”

It was now or never. “Um.”

That was as far as Riley got. He pointed to the saxophone music.

“I think the price on that is marked. Yes, it’s twenty-five cents.”

Riley had a quarter. But what good was saxophone music without a saxophone?

“You don’t have … You aren’t selling …”

Grant drifted off to another table, and then Riley whispered, “A saxophone?”

Instantly Grant whirled around. “A saxophone? What do you want a saxophone for?”

Riley’s mother, browsing at the next table, gave him a worried look. “But, Riley, I thought we said …”

Sophie’s mother hesitated. “Jake isn’t playing his sax anymore. I’ll ask him if he wants to sell it.” She hurried inside.

“You
want
to do instrumental music?” Grant asked.

Riley nodded.

“What about your homework, Riley?” his mother asked gently. “We’ve already talked about this, remember?”

“If I can do saxophone, I’ll study harder. I’ll study three hours a day.”
Well, two
. “I’ll get all B’s.”
Well, C’s
. “I’ll do the best I can. I will. I promise.” That much was true.

Riley’s mom’s face softened. “Well,
if
it doesn’t cost too much, and
if
you truly promise to apply yourself to your schoolwork, I’ll let you do instrumental music.”

Sophie’s mother came back out of the house, carrying a saxophone case. She set it on the grass next to Riley. He wanted to reach down and touch it, but he didn’t.

“It’s practically brand-new,” Sophie’s mother said. “I could let you have it for …”

Five dollars! Five dollars and fifty cents!

“A hundred dollars, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” Riley’s mother said. She sounded sorry, too, sorrier than Riley had heard her sound about anything for a long time. “That’s too much for us right now.”

Riley wasn’t going to cry, he wasn’t. Teddy Roosevelt wouldn’t cry. Teddy’s first wife died, and he came in last in his election for mayor of New York City, but he didn’t cry. He kept on trying.

“Do you still want the sax music?” Sophie’s mother asked.

Riley almost shook his head.

Then slowly he pulled out his two quarters, one for the bandanna, one for the music book.

One bandanna didn’t make you Teddy Roosevelt.

One used music book didn’t make you a musician.

But at least it was a start.

“I need to go to the library again,” Riley told his mother the next Saturday.

“Oh, Riley, you didn’t lose that biography, did you?”

“No!” Riley said indignantly. He really was getting better. He had finished reading the whole entire biography of Teddy Roosevelt, and he had twenty index cards already.
And
he had found a great stick-on mustache at the downtown costume store for just seventy-nine cents.

That meant he had seventy-nine cents less in his saxophone fund. Maybe he could sell his mustache after the biography tea, if there was still enough sticky stuff left on the back.

“So why do you need to go to the library?” his mother asked.

“Mrs. Harrow wants us to look at three other sources for our report. Like encyclopedias. Or the Internet. I can take the bus if you don’t want to drive me.” The public bus ran every ten minutes between Riley’s house and downtown; kids under ten could ride for free.

His mother hesitated. She was curled up on the couch, reading the newspaper in her pajamas. “If Grant goes with you, I suppose you’ll be all right. Just pay attention to where your stop is. And check that you don’t leave anything on the bus.”

“Mom! I won’t leave anything. All I’m taking is my envelope of note cards.”

“It never hurts to check,” she said.

It was fun riding the bus with Grant, sitting in the backseat, arguing about who got to pull the cord when it was time to get off. When Riley pulled it at their stop, he felt grownup enough to be in middle school.

At the library, they saw lots of other kids from school: Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Louisa May Alcott—and Helen Keller.

“You’re not done with your note cards yet?” Grant asked. “I don’t believe it.”

Sophie smiled. Riley saw she was wearing her earplugs. Then she made strange motions with her hands. She must be learning sign language.