Chapter Thirty-Five
Sometimes The Bear and Puck swap goods – papers, folders, cards, etc. Today, Puck accidentally got his hands on a shooting range membership license, and thought twice about it…
“Here, Dad,” he said, handing it back to him. “I have no right to keep this.”
The sirens droned about three minutes into the cross-patched sky of blue, dirty white, and peach.
“Mom,” Puck looked carefully at me, calm. “Is this a real attack?”
Yesterday at church he walked up to me with two handfuls thick with pens.
“Puck?… You didn’t take all those out from the backs of the chairs, did you?”
“Yes, I did, Mom.”
Apparently some of the ladies in the foyer had been looking for pens, probably for the small group fair sign-up, and Puck had made himself helpful.
“We should put him on the greeting team,” said one of the ladies. “He just loves to help so much.”
Crackers sat hooked under Puck’s arm in the kitchen, completely grumpy, as she usually is. Puck tossed a large air-ball to her between reading lessons. She pounced on it, canine-like…
“Hmm, Mom. This is a very weird cat. I think she thinks she is a dog! We have to tell Onion about that.”
Drip, drip. Already the snow was half-gone, wasting away under almost full sun and temperatures scaling up to the upper 30’s. Not to mention that the snow-pounding, relatively speaking, of late Saturday night had gone almost entirely unpredicted, from local reports. Crackers spun herself around the basement, her head lost inside the almost-empty food bag. Mischief and grumps. The combination only Rose could have groomed in a cat, and be proud of it in the process. Puck’s Angry Birds “hanitizer” swung from his corduroys while he administered snacks to Crackers in the basement. We had a little while to muck up the snow in the backyard before lunch. So we put all our gear on and chased each other around with snowballs. Puck just laughed every time he got me in the back. We shaped a four-piece snowman. I passed a small handful of raisins through the door to his socked hands for a face. We were out of carrots. Lunch saw Puck spill about his sixth drink or equivalent thereof in the past 36 hours. He just can’t seem to find that fine line between stable and precarious. Just one more splash to clean up.
“I did not mean to do it, Mom!” is his line of protocol as he marches to the linen closet for another towel.
The sky had switched full blue by this time, and the yard was all but completely melted. Puck sorted his toolbox of matchbox cars during Quiet Hour, examining details of certain models while watching the snow disappear. Now all but the shaded part of the backyard was gone too. The only part of our snowman still remaining was the “feet”. Chalk that up to a twenty degree temperature increase since the middle of the morning. So much for the carrots I put on the grocery list. They’d find a happier home in Puck’s stomach. He was busy in another world of Odyssey, balancing a tuna sandwich on one knee and half a box of cars on the other, asking countless questions about the world and why things mean things and what they do and where they go and what things come from what things. The Bear hired a developer at work. I guess it was the first “hire” he had ever done. The kid in question, who taught guitar some evenings, had already offered a round of celebration drinks. Tasha dropped in around three. She was overwhelmed with junk to clear out of her house, funeral arrangements, picking up her brother and his wife from the airport, several days of plans and sorting through everything…
“I’m tired,” she said to me, gray sweatshirt, her hair piled in back of her head as usual. “It’s time they pitch in, too.”
Tasha doesn’t pull punches, as they say. The sun was slanting deep now. Winter has that way of making you feel a lot smaller. I didn’t realize it before, but time feels different somewhere in October through March. As Puck wrote his words at the kitchen table, he announced to himself…
“I am a warrior. I am a warrior.”
Then he concentrated over a stack of pennies, clicking noises from his mouth stained with black pen and orange pepper while he walked himself methodically through basic addition. He loves it. I can tell by those tongue clicks that he’s happy and feels important. I got him showered before dinner. I knew there wouldn’t be time on Tuesday. I pulled a pot of stew on the stove and carved up the bread loaf for mini grilled cheese.
“I want lots of meat in my stew, Mom,” Puck requested.
Grandma Combs left a message for me to call her. She had found out where Stan Musial was to be buried after all. Blue and pale violet – Crackers watched the birds under those evening skies. Bunched up, all four appendages slipped under her warm stomach on her condo. I think that may be one of the best purchases ever made.
“Why did the baby have to be naked on ‘Little House on the Prairie’?” Puck was asking.
“Babies are born naked, bud.”
“But not in real life, right?”
“Well, I mean, the baby wasn’t really born on the show… Is that what you mean?”
“Yeah, but why was the baby naked on the show then?”
“Well, I guess they wanted it to be realistic or something. She was in a cloth though…”
“But… the baby was still naked underneath…”
Clearly this idea was not settling well with him. Nor was the fact that I had to put him down to bed without a nightly reading of the Happy Hollisters as a method of discipline for the last ornery stunts of the day. Hey, I wanted to learn more about the Nevada ranch mystery just as much as he did, but a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do… Still, I can’t stay irritated for long. I walked back into the kitchen a little while after he had fallen asleep and saw that little patch of star moss in the apple green bowl, melting in a puddle of cold, clear water. It still lives after the last three and a half weeks. He thinks of me often, he thinks of everyone often. The Bear drove back with the usual Monday sacks of groceries – jam, avocados, cat food, etc. – hungry for more steak and veggie stew with fries. He also added a box of hot Culver’s cheese curds, which I had forgotten that he had promised. He cracked open the ten-pound Greek dictionary. Carrie texted me; the test results for Grewe’s mom had come back fine. There was some good news…