When Helping Doesn’t Help

I’m in trouble again, and I don’t really get how that happened.  This is one of those times when helping doesn’t help, and it doesn’t really matter that I wanted to help because what I did unhelped other people and made for way more work.

For one thing, remember last week when I borrowed some trowels and that small pail of already-made cement from the back of Roy’s truck?  I didn’t know that after he helped my mom that he was going over to somebody else’s place to help fix the crack ups on inside and outside of their basement.  When he got to their place, he couldn’t find the trowels or the already-made cement because I had them when I borrowed them out of the back of his truck.  He thought maybe somehow the trowels maybe fell out of his truck except that didn’t make sense to him because then the pail of already-made cement would have had to fall out, too.

So he drove all the way back across town to our house where he found his trowels, and that’s mostly because I was so excited Roy was back so I could show him that I was a good attention-payer and fixed a bunch of cement sidewalk cracks the same way he fixed the cracks at my mom’s house.  Except he wasn’t very happy that I did that even if I cleaned everything after I got finished with my helping work.

Then things got way worse because he was really mad at me for using up all the left-over already-made cement, and that was mostly because it wasn’t left-over already-made cement.  It was going-somewhere-else-already-made cement.  That meant Roy was going to have to go to the store and get more already-made cement to do the other job he was doing across town.

But then the worst thing happened!  He said that all my hard work wasn’t going to help anybody because if you want to fix cracks in the sidewalk, you have to do more than just splat the already-made cement down on top and smooth it out.  I didn’t know that.  The sidewalk looked really nice to me but he said when it rains, it’s going to make all the already-made cement go away.  He said that even if it doesn’t rain, he said it’s going to come up in great big chunks and maybe somebody could get hurt because of that.

And then I ran inside my house and all the way up to my bedroom and cried and cried and cried because I didn’t want to make things wrong, and I didn’t want to make Roy mad at me, and I didn’t do my helping so somebody could get hurt like the grandma lady with the cart on wheels that goes to the grocery store every day.