May 3

Lonnie was nine that day already.
The banquet was nice. Punch and jazz band at 6:30. Dinner at 7:00: chicken cordon bleu and dessert: cheesecake. Performances (two piano duets and a vocal solo) at 8:00.
The real entertainment of the evening, however, came during dinner at a table shared with Mom, Rose, the Cuppetts, Mr. and Mrs. English, and Annamaria. It was pretty much like the old days when Annamaria and Rose got together – the same two funny little girls deep down.
It began with Rose’s request to Giggles Milk that he bring Pepsi in a coffee carafe to their table. He immediately obliged. The girls passed around the carafe amongst themselves. Then Rose was suddenly given a eureka moment.
“Mom, want some coffee?”
“Well, no… well, maybe… oh, alright.”
Rose passed the carafe. She and Annamaria began to laugh.
“Are you laughing at us? What did I do?” asked Mom.
“Oh, Adelaide, we’re used to this by now. Our children laughing at our expense,” Mrs. English laughed.
The moms continued their conversation, and as had always been the case over the last 23 years, when they were involved in conversation, most things went unnoticed, including the fact that Mom had just poured Pepsi into her coffee cup.
“Care for some cream?” Rose asked, and passed it to her.
Mom poured in the cream, while the girls started to choke a little from laughing.
By the time Mom had asked for the sugar some time later, still not having tried her coffee, the girls were dying.
Some time later, Mom took her first sip.
“What!”
She immediately set the cup back down.
Rose was almost crying from laughter.
“It’s Pepsi!” she managed to get out, then congratulated herself on her prank.
Later, she and Annamaria reminisced on past adventures: Annamaria falling out of the weeping willow…
“That hurt!” she said.
Rose being dared by Curly to climb to the top of a tree and get a certain leaf…
“Then he told me to jump down, and I wanted to, but my hand wouldn’t let go of the branch.”
“…and that time we thought we were going to get in so much trouble,” said Annamaria, “when we found those pictures of soldiers in National Geographic…”
“Yeah, and they didn’t have their shirts on.”
“And then we hung them up on the walls in the barn.”
Then they discussed their senior road trip down Route 66, and of the bones they would find, and the animal skeletons they would name.