17 : Kill It
I looked over at Puck during the service. I’d given him a handful of markers/pens/highlighters before the sermon. He had the red marker tucked behind one ear and was very busy highlighting every single line of the bulletin in a methodical pattern of alternating ketchup and mustard colors.
On the other side of me Oxbear was busy drawing funny faces in blue ink on Yali’s open palm.
Yet, somehow, they were all listening.
“I was listening very intriguingly,” Puck explained to me later that afternoon, and proved it by expounding on an illustration from the sermon.
Carrie-Bri had a hot pot of pureed green apple soup – yes, green apple – on the stove waiting for us after church, bacon garnish included, and two glass pans of homemade cheese-topped yeast rolls.
While everyone half-napped off all that yeast before Carrie brought out the homemade pie and ice cream, everyone sat through a lengthy slideshow of the potential-house photos Oxbear had snapped Saturday afternoon.
At the end, we went back to the game, tied in Miami in the 8th. That’s when Irish walked through the living room with some live critter captured under a drinking glass, clawing wildly at the walls of its prison. First, she scared Thumper.
“IRISH! What is that?”
“A brown recluse.”
Not an uncommon surprise in that house.
“Kill it!”
The room all but chanted, “KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT!” as Irish hesitated.
“I’m just going to put it outside.”
“Irish,” Rose cut in, “trust me. Brown recluses have to die. They cannot be allowed to live. One time I caught all the spiders at work and put them in a bowl. And I was going to release them back into the wild. But the old shrively brown recluse I put in there killed all the other spiders first. So I squished him.”
“And that was the end of Rose’s ‘Spider Hamlet’,” Oxbear chuckled.
It was later in the evening after Puck got back from a swim at the local pool that Oxbear and I ended up at Longhorn Steakhouse for dinner. Sometimes we remember that dating still exists. That sit-down restaurants still exist. And that conversation without two Tasmanian Devils interjecting every other sentence with sonic boom yelling and laughter, still exists.