Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas Sparks, Micah Sparks

three nice things that Micah did for you today.”
    This, I had to admit, was a little harder.
    “He didn’t do anything nice for me today.”
    “Think about it. It can be anything.”
    “He was mean all day.”
    “Didn’t he walk with you to school?”
    “Yes.”
    “So there’s one. Now think of two more.”
    “He didn’t punch me too hard when I knocked over his bike.”
    She wasn’t sure whether to take that one, but finally nodded. “There’s two.”
    “And . . .”
    I was stumped. There was nothing, absolutely nothing else to say. It took a long time for me to come up with something—and I have no idea what I eventually came up with. I think I resorted to making up something, but my mom accepted it and kissed me good night before moving to my sister’s bed. It took my sister no more than ten seconds to answer the same questions, and then my mom crept from the room.
    In the darkness, I was rolling over and closing my eyes when I heard Micah’s voice.
    “Nicky?”
    “What?”
    “I’m sorry about punching you today.”
    “It’s okay. And I’m sorry about knocking over your bike.”
    For a moment, there was silence, until Dana chimed in, “Now, don’t you both feel better?”
    Night after night, my mom had us name three nice things our siblings had done for us, and each night we were somehow able to come up with something.
    And to my surprise, my brother and I began to argue less and less.

    Perhaps it was too hard to make up things; after a while, it just seemed easier not only to be kinder, but to notice when another was being kind to you.
    We finished out the school year—I completed second grade, Micah third. In June, my grandfather decided to put a new roof on his house, an endeavor he decided Micah and I would help with. Our knowledge of roofing and experience with tools could be summed up in a single word— huh ?—but we quickly knew we wouldn’t let that stop us. It was, after all, something new, another adventure, and over the course of a couple of weeks, we learned the art of pounding nails until our hands and fingers blistered.
    We worked during one of the nastiest heat waves of our young lives. The temperature was close to a hundred degrees, the humidity unbearable. More than once we grew dizzy, sitting up on the roof of the baking house. My grandfather had no qualms about having us work right near the edge of the roof, and we, of course, had no qualms about it either.
    While I escaped unscathed, earning $7 for two weeks’ worth of work, my brother was less fortunate. One afternoon, while taking a break, he decided to move the ladder, since it seemed to be in the way. What he didn’t know was that a shingle cutter (a sharp, heavy, scissorslike tool) had been left on the uppermost rung. As he fumbled with the ladder, the shingle cutter was dislodged and came torpedoing down. It struck him an inch or so above his forehead. Within seconds, blood was gushing out of his head.
    He screamed and my grandfather hustled over.
    “That looks pretty deep,” he said, his face grim. After a moment, he nodded. “I’d better get the hose.”
    Soon, water was pouring through the hose over my brother’s head. That, by the way, was the sum total of his medical treatment that day. He wasn’t taken to the doctor or the hospital. Nor did Micah get the rest of the day off. I remember watching the water turn pink as it flowed over the wound, thankful that Micah had a “thick skull” like me.
    By the time school resumed in the fall, I’d finally become used to life in Nebraska. I was doing well in school—to that point, I’d never received a grade lower than an A—and had become friends with a few of the other kids in class. Afternoons were spent playing football, but as summer heat gradually began giving way to autumn chill, our life would be upended once more.
    “We’re moving back to California,” my mom informed us over dinner one night. “We’ll be leaving a couple of weeks before