“Is it thickening yet?”
“I don’t know!”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I don’t know mom! I’m vegan!”
“So you lost your eyes with your taste buds?”
A collective eye-rolling ensues.
Even young little Henry has perplexed eyebrows, but he is actually using all of his brainpower to figure out how to make it under the couch.
“Can you take care of this death broth please?”
Margo waves the wooden spoon at her brother, creating a mud-colored rainbow that splatters in brown micro craters on the floor.
“What the frack Margo! Watch out!”
“Did you know –”
“Yeah, fracking’s bad. Gimme that spoon.”
“Is it thickening or not?!?”
“NO MOM!”
“Don’t talk to me that way Nick.”
He ducks his head. Then remembers he’s 39. No slipper is headed his way anymore.
“Yeah, sorry mom.”
Margo peeks out of the kitchen.
“What’s my nephew doing? Is it like a development thing? He looks like a demented hippo trying to get into a fox’s den.”
“Margo, what the fudge?!”
“I’ve got nothing against fudge, Nicky-Poo, go ahead.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
He always says that. But he can.
Since their father died, he’s been doing it.
He has tried to embody the old man to the best of his ability, but their father was an idiosyncratic fake Christmas lover who pontificated on Marxism and the abolition of private property but then threatened to exile anyone who touched his handmade garland or the nativity scene he’d built with wood stolen from the neighbor’s stack.
They were supposed to be Catholics by descent, but God had never dared step foot in that house.
Every Christmas their mother spent two or three hours explaining why the whole virgin thing was kind of a scam. Citing historians. To children who had only asked who Santa was.
And now here they are, thickening the gravy for the roast, one Henry gone, one Henry more, not a communist.
Yet.
“No, seriously Nicky-Poo, what is he doing?”
“Exploring I guess. Beats me. Mom?! Can you come and see if this is how you like it?”
“Coming! But it’s not how I like it, it’s how you guys like it.”
“I don’t like it mom, it’s –”
“Yeah, Margo, carcass juice. We know. For frump’s sake.”
Little Henry flattens his spine like a cat but his head is still too big. Turns out, his arm is long enough and he triumphantly grabs the object of his desire.
He wobbles up and turns the pages with his sticky fingers.
“What you got there little dude?”
Margo goes there. She erupts. Booming. Thundering.
Their mother gets there too, pot in hand.
Santa Baby: The 2024 Ladies Edition.
“Mom?” whispers Nick.
“Well, they sure are ladies. Good job mom!”
Isadora snatches the magazine from Henry’s hands, throws it on the floor and pours the gravy on it.
The Santa hats gurgle a bit.
INSTANT NOODLES 