Cancel Everything
Annamaria had turned the big eighteen.
As it turned out, Carrie-Bri had opted not to visit Detroit that week. When she explained to Rochester on the phone that it wasn’t going to work out, she could hear Awesome in the background:
“It’s over! It’s all over! Cancel everything! It’s all dead! Everything’s dead!”
Then Carrie made them promise to come visit in May.
Over at the house on Wednesday morning, chins had come up in the conversation…
“I’m very sensitive about my chin,” said Carrie. “Those stitches could come out.”
“Ha ha!” Rose laughed at her.
“Don’t make fun of my handicap!” Carrie told her.
In the living room, Puck was racing around in his walker. Frances picked up his basketball and began playing catch with him.
“Hey, Collette, can we see if we can go on that cruise soon?” Linnea asked Collette. “I decided that I want to go on a Carnival cruise.”
“That’ll be a party boat,” Collette told her.
“Good,” Linnea grinned. “You’ll be there. Because every party needs a pooper.”
At church that night, while Denae kept an eye on the Puck at home, OLeif played his violin while Mom led the dance instructions for “Barberini’s Tambourine”. Sometime in the middle of it, when the chaos was a little too evident, Mom mentioned the performance.
“Are they going to be serving anything with alcohol?” So Rum asked quietly from their end of the line.
“Hush!” His wife laughed at him. “You’re an elder!”
Atticus and Roo McCrae, Joe, and Noel Chaumiere were having a little trouble with their set. There weren’t many collisions, but at one point things were messed up enough for Reuben Honey to laugh out loud from the sidelines.
“So that’s it? That’s the whole dance?” Scott Hamilton Pie asked at the end.
“It is,” said Mom, “but you keep repeating it.”
“And that’s why ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is five hours long,” said Carrie, just as Jimmy ran into the line and tackled Pablo.
On the way home, OLeif decided to run them by White Castle and Krispy Kreme.