Hey, Dad

“Mom, can I call Dad?”

We had a few more minutes before we had to leave for school, so I let Puck place the call. I listened to the conversation roll over speakerphone while getting ready to go.

“Hey, Dad, do you think that by the time I’m in 4th grade we’ll have enough money to buy our underground house?”

“I’m not sure, son.”

“So it’s going to be like a mound of dirt? Mom says it only costs like a million dollars. So can we move soon?”

“I’m just not sure about that, son.”

“Well, Dad, I really want to move. See, our house, it’s just kind of small. I can walk around the whole upstairs in about 30 seconds.”

“I know, son.”

“So you think we could maybe move when I’m in 4th grade?”

After the call ended inconclusively – Puck pretty disappointed that Oxbear hadn’t given him an exact date and time for our departure – he moved on to me, next.

“So Dad makes like over $100 a day, so by the time I’m in 4th grade, we will have enough money to build that house and then we can move and it will only take like a few days to pack up the house and then we’ll move the next day.”

It was a cold, hard wind that morning. A little rain spitting us down the highway.

Yali spent his morning with Gloria while I worked at the school office for a couple of hours. When I returned, the kid was napping in the other room while Gloria prepared me a lunch plate of grass-fed beef and potatoes with grass-fed butter.

Late in the afternoon, Yali found other treats at home. While I got dinner ready, he pushed a chair over to the counter, picked up half a lime from the counter and walked around the house snacking on it, licking it like a lollipop, making faces at himself over the sourness.

Sometime after the meal, I sat down with Puck to review his math homework sheet.

“Puck, the perimeter of this rectangle is not 40 inches.”

“My teacher said it was the same number as the area.”

“Not this one, it isn’t.”

Puck stared at me for a second. “You went to the wrong school, lady.”