Chapter Seventy-Two
The Bear arranged us around the table for “Family Worship” [I don’t know why that always sounds so pretentious, but it just does.] I was assigned the reading from Genesis 2. Puck stopped me quickly…
“I think you need a glass of water, Mom. Because your voice sounds kind of low.”
“I know. It’s because I have a cold.”
I got about half a verse further, and Puck rubbed his neck…
“I think I need a drink of water. Because my Adam’s apple isn’t working too properly.”
It was bitter. Bitter cold. While I waited for the car to warm up, I wondered if they ever canceled school in Alaska if the temperature dipped below 0.
Carrie had saved a homemade “cloud” cookie [meringue] for Puck. He examined it sort of skeptically…
“It might taste good, Sun…” Puck called back from the kitchen, trying to sound polite. “But it doesn’t look super good. I don’t know. It might be good, but it might not be super good.”
Slowly the family began emerging from the honeycomb of the house as the morning progressed…
“Grandma,” Puck announced. “I had a delicious meal for breakfast this morning. A delicious meal, I would call it.”
Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It serves. A blue tarp was stretched out over the living room floor. Mom and Carrie had brushed a rose-clustered tablecloth into an oil mat, or something you’d see in an historic reproduction house at Faust Park. Linnea was supposed to write an Hiawatha-esque saga for a literature assignment. Hair beads rattled into tin pans. Green and white.
“We’re going to make St. Patrick’s Day sun catchers,” Carrie told Puck.
Melting plastic fumes filled the air as Puck ran through the house throwing open doors and windows like an emergency smell sheriff. I guess it was pretty potent. Even for my half-busted sense. I braided Linnea’s hair, catching some of her Egyptology lecture from Super Star Teachers. It might be a dumb title, but I’m sucked in during those lectures pretty easily. The sun catchers were popped out of the pans. Puck loved them. He loves most things.
Mom rubbed at her sore neck; it’s been bothering her for a couple of months…
“Nothing else is sore in my whole body. Just this…” We tend to have neck problems. Long necks. Extra vertebrae. Not sure. Although I have to say, for a grandma, if that’s the only thing that bothers her at 53, not bad… I fried cheeseburgers for Francis, Linnea, and Puck. Leftover homemade sweet tomato soup by Carrie. Very good… The house was amazingly… quiet?… after two. So quiet I could hear the chick peas boiling on the stove. Or “garbanzo beans”, as Mom always calls them. Puck ran around the yard picking up sticks. Carrie made hummus and chopped up cucumbers into sticks. Snack. A 50-pound paper sack of dried maize and bean mix arrived from Wisconsin. And five pounds of raw cashews. Francis and Puck teamed up to move Shelley out of the mud patch, which… wasn’t working so well. Linnea wrote a good poem, sort of Silas Marner flavor. Joe had been looking a little pale lately. Carrie and I discussed it before asking….
“Are you sick?”
“Nope. Just been off coffee this week. I’m not drinking it anymore.”
Radical. Not that I promote coffee. I’ve never even had a cup. But cold turkey is a brave, brave de-drugger.
A few hours later Puck and Kirk were chasing each other around inside the church after their kids group. Games and laughing and things like that. Reverence, boys? I guess they do have plans to convert that sanctuary into gym sometime in the next 50 years. But still… Kirk would be gone for a week to Mexico or someplace like that anyway, so I guess they would be making up for lost time.