Chapter Nine
A smokey haze of cloud padded the sunrise this morning. Mist in the fields, stretching parallel to cords of ruby-lights traffic. I turned around in my seat to check on Puck. Whenever it’s too quiet back there…
“Puck? What are you doing?”
Instead of the upper body of my son, I saw a red cloth McDonald’s tote. He’s been semi-attached to this item the past few days. Unfortunately he resembled an Iraqi hostage, which I wasn’t sure would settle so well with early Wednesday morning motorists…
“Take that off, man. People are going to think we kidnapped you or something.”
“Dad said I could wear it, Mom.”
A white Victorian ceiling grate sat on the floor. Renovations were in tall order lately, including tearing up the basement and cleaning out the clutter. Clutter. A word I’ve heard in my life more than “breakfast”. Francis walked up the stairs, eyes tired, two fists full of trash from the basement, ready for the wood stove. A row had started in the kitchen between Carrie and Francis, which lasted until Mom sat down to consult Carrie with the grocery list…
“Lots of red pasta sauce…” Carrie added, glaring at Francis.
Francis just grinned, pretending that he doesn’t hate red sauce. Still, I fired up the stove for Francis’ usual, both sides buttered and grilled while he sat down to algebra and taunting Snuggles with a glass of milk too thin and deep for his face to fit. Fortunately for all of us, the Snicketts idea of revenge usually equates to something like… pouring milk into a flower-print mug for the male offender in question. Francis was on Linnea’s bad side, too. She unloaded an armful of almonds, raisins, and chia seeds next to her mathematics station. Puck had found the crutches, which Francis confiscated due to the amount of glass and porcelain displayed around the house.
“Do you like lentils?” Linnea asked Francis.
“No.”
“They’re healthy. Do you like coconut?”
“No.”
“They’re healthy. Do you like lettuce?”
“No.”
“That’s healthy. Do you like butt meat? Wait! What? I meant buckwheat!”
I tried to stem the avalanche of walking through the food dictionary, but it was too late. The conversation had already deteriorated anyway.
“I like those… what are they, tree things?” Francis offered.
“Broccoli?”
“Yeah, I like that stuff with cheese.”
The most adventurous project of the morning began when Francis was dispatched to the hallway attic opening to remove the ceiling fan grate. These projects always take much longer, and requirer more preparation, than initially anticipated. Francis stared into the mountains of cold fiberglass almost certainly riddled with dead mice nests.
“Gosh dang it, Carrie. I don’t want to go up there.”
“Stop being a wuss.”
She duct taped trash bags up to Francis’ knees, and handed him a painter’s mask and pair of yellow dish gloves. Francis ascended into the beyond. In the end, splinters of wood and nails littered the living room floor. And Francis, whose services were no longer required, apparently found it terribly enlightening and hilarious to instead read the stash of my old “love letters”, which were more like Colonial email schedules. Francis enjoyed taunting me.
“At least I didn’t send 7,000 text messages one week,” I retorted.
“At least I didn’t write a Jane Austen novel.”
The basement was full of surprises. Puck found his own treasures, too. My first violin…
“Here, Mom. I wanted you to see your own violin,” he handed it to me carefully. “The beauty of it.”
Then a manger scene with plastic figures and a wood stable. He cleaned that stable for at least an hour, solid, sitting on the couch with a damp cloth, soaking in a little PBS while I gutted the few storage containers in the basement. Carrie sat on the ladder and brushed black paint onto the beams just inside the gaping hole in the ceiling. I crown-wrapped Linnea’s hair in a braid with descending tail, leaving her like a Mongolian plains girl.
“Come paint with me, Mom!”
Puck waited anxiously by a china bowl which Puck had been squirting apple red paint into. The stable had been completely cleaned, and he fancied a new color. Then it was a four-person job to attach the grate to the ceiling, which may or may not have involved toothpaste… Even Francis had to admit it looked pretty good. So Puck was completely entertained the whole day. Ladders, attics, things dropping out of the ceiling, paint, a full circus show. By the time I shelled a clementine ten minutes till four o’clock for Puck – who decided not to eat it because it had holes in it from where I pulled out the seeds – I was running on two fat spoons of creamy peanut butter, and grateful that I didn’t have to chase kids around all night. Then Dad walked in the door…
“What the… No, no, no! You can’t have a vent without flaps in the ceiling! What’s going on in here?”
Apparently there had been a large element of miscommunication. To be sorted out later. I guess Dad isn’t as interested in Victorian air vent grates as some of the family. And after all, it was time for church after a glass pan of pasta, a side of salad, and happy faces and all that.