My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson Page A

“I’m not crazy—you’re the one who’s supposed to be crazy!”
    At this point a neighbor, attracted by the noise, stuck her head out a window, saw the pile of baby equipment and caught disjointed, but arresting, scraps of the conversation. And of course this news, such as it was—either my mother or Aunt Rhoda or both were either pregnant or crazy or both—spread through the neighborhood with the speed and spark of electricity and kept everyone alert and interested for a long time.
    Mother refused to be embarrassed. She said it really didn’t have anything to do with her . . . that she had simply been the calm center around which all the high winds blew. Aunt Rhoda was pretty mad, but eventually she cooled off too. My father said it was a good lesson for Louis and me.
    â€œWhat did you learn from all this?” he asked.
    I hadn’t really learned anything except that Mother wasn’t crazy, which had never occurred to me in the first place, but I knew that wasn’t the right answer.
    â€œLouis?” My father looked at him. “What do you have to say?”
    Louis was ready. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave. . . .” he said.
    My father was absolutely delighted, but I was pretty sure that Louis didn’t know what he was talking about, and I was right.
    â€œWhat did I say?” he asked me later. “Dad loved it.”
    â€œIt was exactly right,” I told him. “It meant that if you tell lies, or don’t tell the truth, or make things up, you’ll get in a big mess. That was the lesson.”
    He frowned. “What about the other one?”
    â€œThere wasn’t any other lesson, Louis.”
    â€œSure, there was.”
    I could see that he meant it, that in all the confusion he had found some scrap of wisdom.
    â€œIf you’re lost,” he said, “find someone who isn’t, and follow them.”

The Adoption of Albert
    T here were so many children in our neighborhood that my mother was never surprised to find unfamiliar ones in the house, or in the backyard, or in my room, or in Louis’s room.
    â€œWell, who’s this?” she would say, and she would then go on to connect that child with whatever house or family he belonged to.
    But when Louis showed up with his new friend Albert, Mother had other things on her mind: the family reunion, which was two days away; the distant cousin who would be staying at our house; most of all, my Aunt Rhoda’s famous Family Reunion cake, which, in Aunt Rhoda’s absence, Mother felt obliged to provide.
    Aunt Rhoda’s absence, and the reason for it, were both first-time events: She had never before missed a family reunion, and neither she nor anyone else had ever before been called into court to testify about anything. Aunt Rhoda was to testify about an automobile accident she had witnessed—the only automobile accident in local memory, my father said, that did not involve Aunt Mildred.
    All in all, it was a complicated time for Mother—cake, cousins, company—and when Louis appeared at the kitchen door and said, “This is Albert,” she was too distracted to ask her usual questions.
    Nor did she ask them at suppertime. By then she was up to her elbows in cake batter and left the three of us to eat alone with my father, who also didn’t know Albert, but assumed that everyone else did.
    I didn’t know Albert either, but there was no reason why 1 should. He was Louis’s friend, he was Louis’s age, he even looked a lot like Louis—small and quiet and solemn—and it didn’t occur to me to find out any more about him. 1 did ask, “Where do you live, Albert?”; and when he said, “Here,” 1 just thought he meant here in the neighborhood instead of someplace else.
    Mother thought the same thing. “Where does that little boy live?” she asked me the next morning, and I said, “Here,” and she