Chapter One Hundred Six
We were in for rain most of the week. And we weren’t complaining. Except that it fueled the front green yard-jungle, which I once called a “lawn” in front of my mother-in-law, and she laughed. It’s pretty ratty.
Anyway, the alarm didn’t go off this morning, so we somehow slept in till eight o’clock, which is ridiculous, unless you’re The Bear who’s trying to pack ten thousand lentils into a pocket-watch. I don’t know why that particular word picture came into my head. But I guess it applies to his current life situation.
“Emails make me feel good for some reason.”
“What’s that, bud?”
“I don’t know,” Puck said again, bobbing his big blonde head and squinting his eyes a little at the same time with a small smile like he does a lot when trying to explain something different, or difficult, with good will. “I just hear the word ’email’ and it makes me feel good for some reason.”
He shuffled through a deck of old photos from our wedding. Duplicates. Half his oatmeal was done.
“Could I use this, Mom?”
Puck took the three hole-punch from the stack of notebooks beside me. Because sometimes I keep the hole punch on the kitchen table.
“Sure, man.”
I guess I must have accidentally answered his next question without paying attention, because I looked up and realized that he was punching holes into the wedding photos. C’est la vie. After all, they were duplicates. After Puck had spilled one cup of 2%, he adjourned to the living room with a refill to process and relax after breakfast. He set the cup carefully on a stack of books and, following in my fashion, balanced a book flat across the top to avoid a Crackers-intrusion.
Thunk.
“Mom, aren’t you glad the book fell down instead of the MILK? Thank you, Lord, for that present!”
I, too, was glad not to address another cold white puddle that morning.
Rumble, rumble.
Even as we concluded Puck’s first lesson of the morning, the storms had returned. Subtle. And brief. But alive. We read more from Prince Caspian. The kid rivets himself into stories. Hooks attached; won’t let go.
Puck’s post-lunch pit stop was taking way too long…
“Puck?…”
“Mom, I’m just sitting in here for awhile. I want a little naked time, OK?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just like to be NAKED SOMETIMES!”
I checked out his pad in the bathroom. He had arranged two bath towels in the tub to shield his bum from the cold. Crackers was snuggled on top of the towels, purring. Sometimes I get the idea Puck can think more freely the more freed he is from his clothes. It’s sort of like his personal think tank. But the chill of the afternoon proved to be too much and exiled him back into plaid shorts.
I prepped quesadillas for dinner. I was even adding on there. Green onion and paprika, just to stir the bucket. And canned steak soup for Puck. Canned soup sometimes resembles more an archaeological trash pit than a bowl of fresh garden items. But Puck didn’t mind. He slurped the broth then mashed the vegetables into a gourmet Kindergarten-worthy puree. My son, my son. Chasing it all down with the duo-colored ripe pear he had eagerly picked out at the grocery store last week.
Paper dots peppered the linoleum, remnants of Puck’s breakfast project. I had already done one sweep-up. Puck was irritatingly slowly finishing his dinner while he put both his feet into one of his super socks for no apparent reason whatsoever. I think I say to him about two dozen times at every meal…
“Come on, Puck. Finish your food.”
He just gets so ridiculously distracted.
“Right now, I don’t like onion,” he replied. “And I take that seriously.”
“Just eat it, man.”
“Ok! WE ARE ONE!”
