Crunch
It had been a long time since Collette had met Ivy for lunch, so while Mom kept an eye on the bouncing Puck at the house, Collette drove over to Chevy’s for grilled fish tacos and fried bread drizzled with honey and cinnamon to visit with Ivy for three hours. As always, it was good to hear how life was going for her and the family.
Earlier, Puck had been rummaging in Mom’s cupboard for mixing spoons. He usually settled on the smooth wooden spoon set which Joe had brought back from Hawaii. Linnea played with him, rolling a coiled whisk up and down his back.
“Massage,” she grinned.
Before that, Puck had been chasing Linnea around the house after the cream cheese bagel she held in her hand. He licked his lips after getting a taste, then was distracted by basketball with Linnea and then their own form of hide and seek around his cardboard toy box, a pile of pillows, and the coffee table.
Upon returning home, tt was nice enough for Puck to have his first walk of the year around the neighborhood in his stroller in the late afternoon sunshine and winds.
When OLeif arrived home from work, he and Puck got a little wound up. OLeif picked him and Collette up in a giant bear hug. Then after putting Collette back down on the floor, he and the Puck sat down with a heavy boom on the red couch.
CRACK!
OLeif had broken their one year-old couch. Collette sighed a little, with a shake of the head, and a half-smile. It felt like she was smiling a half-smile anyway.
“I don’t know if the warranty is good anymore.”
OLeif turned the couch on its side and used the light on his cell phone to look for the fissure in the wood. It was definitely cracked, and cracked good.
“We’ll just put a stack of books under it until I can fix it,” he said.
The other morning, Collette’s favorite orange glass had been sitting on the counter.
“Uh oh,” Collette heard him say.
“What?”
“It was just sitting there. All I did was pick it up.”
The glass had somehow magically cracked exactly in half around its chubby middle. Sometimes OLeif went on breaking sprees. Unintentionally, of course. But it occasionally wrought havoc on their earthly possessions.