Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Francis. You look miserable.”
He squinted his eyes in the still-early light…
“That’s because I keep beating myself up.”
He held out his thumb…
“I jammed this at the Y. And then my nose during the life guard tests going down the slide…”
It looked just like someone had stamped a red circle with a rubber stamp, right around the tip of his nose.
“Isn’t it funny?” Carrie said, with much sympathy.
“It’s embarrassing is what it is,” Francis waved her off.
Puck walked out from Mom’s and Dad’s room with a practice kid shaving set – foam and plastic razor. I could tell that he felt older already, and proud, if not slightly embarrassed. Carrie held out a hand to display the seven dollar Afghani lapis and silver ring she had ordered off an eBay jewelry store. Linnea sat in a tumble of blankets on the love seat, getting ready to watch “Return of the Jedi” for school. Yes. For school. “Literature”, says the program in question. I wouldn’t be complaining if I was her. Nor would I be complaining about her 48 lectures of The Teaching Company’s Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy-seems-alike Egyptology professor. Not at all. Sarcasm not intended. Joe walked up the stairs in scrubby light-beard for a bowl of Life. We had all had ours already.
“Hmm…” said Puck, one hand resting against his chin. “I think I’ll go shave.”
Puck’s anti-stubble wasn’t the only think being shaved. I caught up on Cardinals news – Chris Carpenter likely out for the season. One by one, out into oblivion. Linnea shouted Francis up from the basement to hook up the Blueray to the television.
“Wait. Let me see the back of your head,” she said.
“What? Am I getting pretty bad back there?”
The male Snicketts thin-out. It was only a matter of time. Francis forgot about his hair and instead talked about “situations” at work…
“One guy came in drunk…”
“Drunk?!” Puck squeaked. “Drunk what?”
“Uh…”
“The pool? Drunk the pool?”
“Yeah. He drank the pool.”
“Yeah! Why did he drink that? There are bare feet in there! Did you hear that, Mom? And he even drunk feet water. Even baby feet water. In front of every kid. It might give them ideas. Don’t get involved with this. It’s yucky. And they even drunk baby feet water. Isn’t that disgusting? Yuck… Yuck.”
“Ug. Can someone give me a neck massage?” Linnea asked.
“I’ll give you a neck massage,” Puck immediately offered.
A few moments of quiet…
“Want a head massage, too?”
Star Wars was commencing…
“There’s Dark Vader,” Puck announced.
Mom pulled out the jumbo leftover rectangle chocolate chip cookie dusted in sugar, reading – “Live Long and Prosper”. Carrie’s doing, of course. Puck strapped on an apron patterned in roses, thinking he would assist with the grilled sandwiches for lunch. The apron draped almost to his ankles…
“But this is a girl apron, isn’t it?” he asked skeptically.
So everyone was in the living room watching “Return of the Jedi”, after all that. A large box from UPS produced Carrie’s special aviator glasses to prevent eye cancers and similar atrocities. Joe went for a jog. Puck tagged along with Carrie to build a bunny tornado shelter out in the garage. I could hear the electric saw screeching. Somehow Puck then found a silver auto windshield cover, which I later saw attached to his back as he marched around the yard in yellow boots and the rose apron…
“I’m Superman. Oh, yeah… Superman…”
We called to check in on Rose, who thought she was recovering from the flu. Fever broke. Working from home watching old Westerns with Stinkerbelle, the violent cat. Linnea sipped a goblet of cappuccino while we worked algebra. Joe walked up the stairs with a CO2 can for his laptop. He sprayed it into Linnea’s hair bun.
“Joe!”
“Here, let me see,” said Francis. “Let’s freeze her hair!”
“No, no, no, just get the bun.”
“Stop freezing your sister’s hair!” Mom demanded.
“Hey, Joe, can I borrow a shirt?” Francis called up from the basement.
“Five bucks!”
And Puck was wearing a pop-bead beard after dinner. The sun was setting faster than I wanted already. I had just punched out the final draft of the genealogy, formatted it in hardbound and paperback, emailed it out to the family, and finally…
Done.
Absolutely done. This project needed its own mini fanfare. Or at least a full isolated line to its credit. Maybe two or three.
Carrie stared over her dinner plate across from Puck. Everyone else had sort of straggled off into their respective evening enterprises…
“I feel like…” Carrie thought aloud, “going on a date with Elvis to A&W… And then a jukebox bar.”
“You and Elvis would have gotten along really well…”
“Yes… we would have.”
The Bear picked up his enthusiastic son steeped in cups of colorful plastic beads – orange, yellow, green, and blue stars, sparkly pink, yellow, orange, and purple or green, orange, red, and white hair beads, and paper valentines at seven, munching a bag of corn nuts. We listened to traditional Ukrainian music on the way home from the missionary family. As we whirled through the round-about, Puck said…
“I never get to get out here and walk around, Mom.”
“Right here?”
“Yeah. I mean, I never get to get out in this spot and walk around and touch things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like signs and stuff.”
A box of Warby Parker eyewear had arrived in the mail for The Bear to test. Five tries. Keep the one he wanted. He paraded the lenses for opinion. I also checked into some copper/green Arizona turquoise earrings from Carrie’s eBay store, just for grins. Oh, Korean dramas, you amuse me…