“Holly, thank you for everything. Sharon is just overwhelmed. And wait, I have to give you money. Do you have receipts?”
“Forget it, Archie. Call it a wedding gift. Let me know if I can do anything, okay?”
I left and closed the door quietly behind me. I didn’t even make eye contact with him. My intention was to leave them alone until they came to me. There was no more reason for me to cook for them or to do much else for the boys unless asked. And I felt like they probably needed some time alone to adjust to living together. It sure didn’t look like they were off to a great start.
Well, it didn’t take twenty-four hours for the boys to come banging on our door. They must’ve just come home from school.
“Hi guys! What’s up?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” Tyler said.
“Yeah, you’re not going to believe this,” Hunter said.
“Well, come on in and tell me what I’m not going to believe,” I said. “There’s a lot in this world that’s hard to believe.”
They followed me to, where else, the kitchen.
“Anybody want cookies?”
“Sure!” they said. “Thanks!”
I poured two glasses of milk without asking and put a half dozen Oreos on the table.
“You have permission to dunk, sirs,” I said and gave them a little salute.
“So,” Tyler said, “last night I was taking a shower.”
“We’re taking showers now?” I said. “No more baths?”
“Sharon says baths are for babies,” Hunter said.
“Oh? She does?”
“Yeah, she says that they’re not sanitary because you sit in your own filth,” Tyler said.
“Well, you could rinse off at the end, but what do I know?” I said.
“Exactly!” Tyler said and Hunter bobbed his head in agreement. “So, I’m in the dumb shower and she sticks her hand in the bathroom and turns off the light! She says something like, ‘You’ve been in there long enough! You’re wasting all the hot water!’ I was like, are you kidding me?”
“Seems excessive to me,” I said. “Did you tell your daddy?”
“Of course! You know what he said? He said, ‘If Sharon says you’ve been in there too long, you probably were.’ ”
“Well, parents are supposed to support each other when it comes to the kids,” I said.
Momma came into the room.
“What’s new, boys?”
They repeated the story for her. I must say, she was filled with disgust.
She said, “What did I tell you? She’s taking over.” She poured herself a glass of tea and sat down at the table with us. “But turning off the lights when someone’s in the shower doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do. What if you fell? You could really get hurt!”
My ears perked up. Nice thing to do? Suddenly, Momma was concerned with niceness?
“Look,” I said, “you see how Hunter has dissolved his whole cookie in his milk?”
The boys giggled.
“Well,” I continued, “that’s kind of an odd way to eat a cookie. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “It’s disgusting.”
“Okay,” I said, bringing this argument to a close, “you’ve got your deal with cookies and she’s got a thing about showers. I’ll admit, it’s an odd battle to pick. But who knows? Maybe she never had enough hot water when she was a kid or something like that.”
“Yeah, maybe it’s something like that,” Tyler said.
“She did it to me, too,” Hunter said.
“Well, so now you know one more thing about her,” Momma said. “Just don’t stay in the shower so long.”
“If it happens again, ask her to set the kitchen timer for you to what she thinks is a fair amount of time,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” Tyler said. “This isn’t about water. This is because she doesn’t like us.”
“Come on, now,” Momma said. “Didn’t y’all promise to try really hard to give her a chance?”
“I guess so. Anyway, we’ve got homework. She’s coming home early to help us, so I guess we’d better go.”
“She is the cat’s mother,” Momma said.
“Huh?” Hunter said.
“You shouldn’t call her ‘she.’ By the way, what are you calling her?”
“Oh! Listen to this! Did we tell you she said we should call her ‘Mother’?”
“Yes, I was standing there. Remember?” I said.
“Oh, that’s right,” Hunter said, looking to Momma to explain. “I said we couldn’t call her that because she wasn’t our mother, that our mother was in heaven with the angels. She went nuts on us!”
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “She did.”
“It was awkward,” I said.
“Oh, dear,” Momma said. “I think it’s going to take her a little more time to feel comfortable.”