The Eighty Dollar Ring
While I got things ready for church that morning, Puck was busy attaching thumbtacks to mini Nerf gun darts. I could hear the experiment taking place in the other room.
“Puck,” Oxbear warned him, “don’t shoot the walls with that thing.”
“Okay, I…”
POP!
“OOPS!”
“What happened, Puck?”
“I SHOT THE CEILING!”
“Why did you do that, Puck?”
I walked into the kitchen to find Puck standing on a chair, loosening the dart from the ceiling.
“But, Dad, the ceiling’s white so it won’t show holes as much!”
While I took my Yali’s-being-too-loud-in-church-and-needs-to-be-removed shift in the little conference room that morning, I later learned that Puck had passed Communion Week Two with flying colors. Grape juice all the way.
It was a lazy sort of Sunday afternoon. With lunch finished, Mom napping, half the kids gone to Pere Marquette, work, or Home Depot for rubber band gun supplies, it was just Carrie-Bri, Rose, and myself sitting around the living room waiting for the game in San Diego to start.
“Wow, Rose, our skin tones are way different,” Carrie noticed in the lull of the moment. “You have tons of freckles.”
“Yes, but I have very geometric freckles,” she pointed to her left arm. “Exhibit A: The Big Dipper.”
Meanwhile, Elmer and Francis had removed two more studs in the basement for some final crack repairs. Then Francis fell asleep somewhere. And Carrie sprayed all the flower bushes with milk and water to dispel the little green worms intent on sabotaging spring.
As we drove home late that afternoon, Oxbear turned to me and said, “Did I ever tell you the story of how I found your engagement ring?”
“Nope.”
“Well, back when I worked at Stallone’s Formalwear, I learned that as soon as you attach the word ‘wedding’ to anything, it runs the price up hundreds, thousands of dollars. And I knew you wanted a sapphire. So I looked for non-wedding sapphire rings and bought one for about eighty bucks.”
“And that’s how we could afford the honeymo… wait a minute, I bought the honeymoon, didn’t I?”
“Yup, I had nothin’.” Then he grinned, “Except for those three camels I gave your dad.”
I definitely went for humor over money.