Chapter Sixty-Eight
6:06AM.
I knew it would be just too much temptation to stay in bed any longer. “Grandma’s House”, “Sun” just waiting to play Saturday morning games, the weather…
“It rained in the night, Mom!”
It was still raining, softly.
“I think there will be thunderstorms tonight, Mom.”
One could only hope… Carrie saw Joe’s eyeglasses lying on the kitchen table and tried them on again. We like to test them out sometimes when we see them sitting around. Sort of makes us feel a little like superheros, I guess. We think we’ve got pretty decent eyesight, and then everything is crisp and sharp like a microscope. But I figure I’ve got some time before biting that bullet… Francis’ alarm rang, shrilling, at least eleven consecutive times from the basement before he turned it off.
“That boy,” said Carrie. “Every morning he comes up and his hair’s sticking up on one side and his eyes are half-closed and he comes up with all these excuses for why he can’t start math yet. Like, ‘I didn’t take a shower last night so I have to go wash my hair to get all the chlorine out.’”
Sometimes I can’t tell if Francis is looking forward to going bald or if he’s really trying to hang on to all his brown locks. It’s hard to tell. We Snicketts will take things pretty far to remain true to the bloodline. And if that means going bald, well, so be it.
“You should have heard him the other day,” Carrie said. “Sometimes it’s just hilarious to hear the interactions of Mom calling down there to wake him up…”
Apparently one of the latest ones went like this…
“Francis!”
“What?”
“No. Ma’am.”
“Ham?!”
The Bear called me, headed for the Pacific, museums, mountains, something about archaeology and all kinds of other things. While Puck connected more orange drinking straws together in the living room, Dad jogged back from a few miles of cold rain. Francis and Linnea arrived at the St. Peters Police Department for their storm spotters class to find out they were a month late in an empty parking lot. Puck again laughed over his comic strips…
“You know, I never really did get into comic books,” Mom was saying.
“Didn’t you and Grandpa read the funnies?”
“No, we read the phonebook. We guffawed over them every Saturday morning while we watched cartoons.”
We crowded around my laptop to catch some views of the mountains later from The Bear, and then the beach where “The Rockford Files” was filmed. Sort of a spur of the moment when Francis realized The Bear was probably close to the site. Just a few miles out of the way. The beach, pier, the bluffs, and even the cafe where The Bear stopped in for breakfast: eggs benedict, bacon, and coffee on the beach… We all had something going on as the rain left and sun spread over the rattle of tree limb. Mom and Dad were purchasing and dropping off groceries for Grandma Snicketts and then visiting Kathy Dutchman at the hospital, still recovering from the stroke nearly two weeks ago. Carrie groaned about her afternoon, another handful of hours monitoring the bunny adoption – obnoxious children and parents squeezing the terrified bundles of fluff. Joe ran out the door to work, shelling out truffles. Carrie and I had consulted with Rose about her vacation. Now that Barcelona, Kauai, and Sydney had been considered, a South American cruise seemed to be the better option. I started a double cheeseburger for Francis in the skillet, braided Linnea’s hair, who was leaving to shop at the mall with a friend and then a basketball game. Puck got his hair shaved off to make his cheeks look extra chubby…
“Puck, if you come in here, we can watch Dragon Tales,” Linnea called to him.
“No. Arthur,” Francis protested from the stove.
“Dragon Tales is better.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You prefer an aardvark over a dragon?”
Yes, my sister is fifteen. And, yes, my brother is 18.
When Puck and I got back with five sacks of groceries, he was more than ready to attack an afternoon stuffed with sunshine, cool breezes, no winter coat, and a hair cut short enough to make him seem bald. Blonde hair, white skin. He careened up and down the driveway again on his strider, until he distracted himself with piles of dirty silt in the street. His big paws went to work hauling handfuls back and forth until he packed them into a sandwich bag and began the enthusiastic procedure of smashing the gravel within…
STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!
Images of Calvin & Hobbes flashed through my head as his rubber boots came pounding down on the bag of mud and rocks. This wasn’t good enough, though. He had to climb the tree a few times and throw it down from the branches, until… he distracted himself by washing the car. We definitely saw some good productivity. Anything active is productivity in my book. For a five year-old anyway… We hoped for storms.
