Chapter Thirty-Four
A familiar roll of rubber and metal on rubbly ice rumbles by the windows around six. I know that sound. Haven’t heard it in awhile though…
“We’ll need to get going earlier,” I mumble to The Bear. “Sounds like something happened.”
Four inches.
That’s the estimate. The Bear picks Puck out of bed, plucks him like a peach, and carries him to the window to see the blue light of an early morning. Puck opens sleepy eyes, his arms wrapped around The Bear’s neck…
“It’s just snow, Dad.”
He goes back to bed, but it doesn’t matter, because once he processes what’s actually just happened, he’s popped out to the windows again waiting for his first crack at the perfect white. While The Bear warms the car for church, I slice up some colby jack for breakfast. It looks like Ohio.
Joe has been out skidding the Fit in the snow already.
“He crashed it,” Carrie informed.
“I did not. I tapped the curb.”
“Tapped? It didn’t look like that on the video you showed me.”
Joe just grins.
“Then Francis Sea Star…” Carrie continues, “decided to take the green van up there, too.”
“Yeah, we didn’t know he had Shelly up there.”
“So there’s all these guys in Camaros just laughing at him trying to skid around in that thing.”
Rose marches through the door to join us for the hot dogs out of the toaster oven. Carrie-Bri switches on the Bob Hope comedy hour…
“What a dumb-looking face.”
A palpable summary. But even Dad gets some smile lines over the ridiculous scripting.
“Did you see the label on this mustard?” Joe asks loudly walking into the living room. “It says – ‘40% MORE! …than our 14 ounce’. This is the best label I’ve ever seen all day!”
Still, we’re all laughing at the black and white screen now as a buck-toothed comedy singing lady hustles around on the stage screaming at the audience about things no one even knows because they’re too distracted by the bizarre faces she’s toothing at the camera.
“This is the scariest thing ever,” Joe stares, dazed.
Equally frightening is the silent Jell-O breakfast pudding drowning cartoon figure ad… So it’s two days before Dad’s birthday, but because it’s Sunday and we’re all together, we’re going to celebrate. Puck is ready for snow, though. I strap him into his snow suit and he shovels the yard. Joe hustles through the living room…
“Oop, Joe’s naked,” The Bear announces.
“Halfway.”
“He’s doing his annual snow dive.”
Puck is busy kicking all the perfectly squared snow off the picnic tables and throwing snowballs at the patio doors, giggling behind his sunnies.
“Hey,” says The Bear to me, turning around from his studies. “Do you think Amish people are opposed to highlighters because they’re so… bright and… gaudy? Hey. Don’t laugh at me.”
“Dad made Linnea cry the other night,” Carrie is saying. “She still has those five baby teeth you know. So Dad was like, ‘Give me your x-rays, Linnea. I’m going to pull them all out right now!’ So Dad was chasing her around, cracking up, and Linnea thought he was serious. And Linnea just said, ‘They’ll come out when they’re ready! I’m working on them!’”
Carrie tries to bribe some hugs from Puck, which works for about six seconds, until he tries to battle his way out of it. Carrie buys a few seconds by telling him secrets…
“She said you have stinky feet, Rose!”
Then Bonnie bites Rose on the rear end. Rose is not happy. She switches on some 80’s glam just as Grandma Combs drives up with a little bottle of angry birds hand sanitizer for Puck to clip to his belt. She also has a plan to teach the cats how to switch off a light bulb, Pavlov style. And the congregation is formed. Dad singing to Rose’s guess-the-music-selection-on-my-iPhone, including and the groaning tuba in “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and Desi Arnaz. Even Dad agrees that he was a “tremendous drummer”. Snowballs in the yard for the boys… Puck decides to try Joe’s snowboard. He’s pretty good at it, a slow descent, arms out. Linnea is napping…
“Oh, no. Someone needs to wake her up,” says Mom.
“I’ll do it,” Joe declares.
He easily convinces Puck to join him loudly singing in her room. There might be a few booms, too. We discuss Lucy and Desi Arnaz, Sophia Loren. I like to think about people like that sometimes. Sort of like walking through the art museum, thinking about the lives and souls of the people who crafted all these arts. The sad part is pondering the souls. Joe and Puck throw snowballs at the GoPro. Carrie and Mom set out pork – the kind you don’t need steak knives for, homemade mashed potatoes, candied carrots, salad, and the Hawai’ian rolls. Joe lights the candles for Mom, while Francis blows them out. Arguments about whether Joe actually crashed his car while drifting…
“It wasn’t a crash.”
“It was!”
“No!”
“If you said I crashed the car when I did it, then you did, too.”
Mention of Francis not falling asleep during Sunday School…
“Yeah, he was staring at me with his eyes as wide as they could go,” says The Bear. “So he wouldn’t fall asleep.”
“Like a deer in headlights?” Mom laughed.
Dessert was administered in the form of homemade key lime pie and three sparkler candles. Joe took a dainty bite of his slice as the homemade whipped cream slid onto the fork…
“Hmmm… I sense… some lemon tones?”
“What paint did you use?” Francis asks, watching the white pool slip across the crust…
“Let me tell you somethin’,” Grandma scolds Francis first, pausing her story of a long-ago trip to Panama City, Florida, and the boats stacked up on the beach – refugees from Cuba. “You are just like the Badlands. You’d better say your prayers now for the girls who end up marrying you.”
“I’ll just give both those girls cast iron skillets,” Mom says. “Knock some sense into them.”
“Oh ho ho!” Puck laughs aloud.
“Yeah!” Joe grins. “Then they can cook eggs for us.”
He slaps high fives with Francis across the table.
“Hey, Grandma, where were your prayers for Mom?” Carrie teases.
Dad belly-laughs, and is next pleased to inherit a water pick teeth cleaner, fancy shampoo, Andy Williams DVD, fat chocolate-covered raisins, Chick-fil-A gift card, and two dozen professionally baked ginger snaps. Then he shows us the first part of “Brian’s Song”, more belly laughs.