“I suppose it can be to some people. Not that it matters. Mary is so unspeakably picky that she will never find a mate that meets her standards, and so she is unfortunate enough to live with me.” Penny gave Mary a playful swat on the shoulder.
Mary smiled. “She speaks the truth. But sisters get along better than any husband and wife, so why not?”
After talking some more, they had a delicious dinner of pork roast, carrots, and rye bread. Nathan had formerly liked neither carrots nor rye bread, but he thoroughly enjoyed these. They ate, talked and laughed. Then Penny and Mary let Nathan read a book about a loving rabbit while they did the dishes.
Then they played card games. The sisters taught Nathan how to play Hearts, and he taught them how to play Exploding Nines, which he made up on the spot and which lacked a logical endgame but was a lot of fun for everybody.
They offered Nathan a bar of chocolate for dessert, but he declined.
He slept on the couch under a clean, thick blanket, feeling warm and happy.
Nathan woke up to the sound of a sizzling pan and the smell of eggs cooking in the kitchen. He immediately knew that it was going to be a wonderful morning, until he remembered that the sisters were going to send him away.
He didn’t want to leave. He liked it here.
He tried to think of ways to make them keep him around. Were there any handcuffs in the general vicinity? If so, he could handcuff himself to something, swallow the key, and they’d be forced to let him live with them at least through his next digestive cycle.
Or he could make an absolute pig out of himself at breakfast, eating so much that the sisters would be physically unable to lift him from the couch. Nathan wasn’t sure how many eggs were required for such a thing, but he was prepared to eat as many as it took.
Was he overthinking this? Maybe a good old fashioned temper tantrum was the answer. He could kick and scream and wail “No! No! I’m not leaving!” until they finally gave up and let him live with them forever.
Or he could just ask.
When should he do it? After breakfast? When would they be most receptive to having a child stay in their home? Should he do it right now, before he accidentally did something bad that might make them want to get rid of him?
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” said Mary, walking into the living room. “Admit it, that couch was more comfortable than the cold forest dirt, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do you like eggs?”
“Yes! Even when they’re cooked strangely.”
“Well, then, let’s have some eggs.”
Nathan ate enough eggs to exhaust two hens, along with some buttered toast and orange juice. And then without thinking about it much, he blurted out: “May I stay with you? Just for a while longer?”
Penny gave him a sorrowful look. “Is nobody worried about you?”
Nathan shook his head.
“If it were up to us, you could stay as long as you liked. But there are legal procedures that must be followed. We can’t just let a strange little boy live with us without first contacting the authorities. We could be arrested for kidnapping. And for all we know you have an aunt who has cried herself to sleep every night for the past year. You understand, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He understood. The sisters could not be expected to risk spending the rest of their lives in prison for him.
They assured him that everything was going to be all right, and then drove him into town. Nathan had only been in an automobile a couple of times, and never gone far, so the fourteen mile trip into town was filled with awe and wonder, and when they got out of the vehicle Nathan found himself making silly car noises as they walked into the police station.
They waited for nearly an hour before a uniformed police officer welcomed them back into his office. There were only two chairs, excluding the one that Officer Danbury sat on behind his desk, so Nathan stood.
Penny cleared her throat. “We’d like to report the finding of a Mr. Nathan Pepper.”
“Nathan Pepper, hmmm?” Officer Danbury looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer to his fleeting thought might be dancing around up there. “Name doesn’t sound familiar. How long was he missing?”
“About a year.”
“That long? I need to warn you, in missing child cases that take so long to resolve, the parents have often procreated a replacement. You’re not the jealous type, are you, Nathan?”
“No, sir.”
Officer Danbury opened a thick, dusty book and began to flip through the pages. “Let’s see…ah, look at this, I turned to it on the fourth try. Nathan Pepper. Apparently you’re dead.”
“But I’m not,” Nathan insisted.
“Well, you know that, and I knew that the moment you walked into my office, but according to my official Missing Children Cases logbook, you were reported as deceased by a Bernard Steamspell of Bernard Steamspell’s Home For Unfortunate Orphans. It lists your cause of death as ‘Eaten.’ I assume that was meant to indicate that you were eaten by some sort of animal, and not that anybody is confessing to cannibalism.”
“But I wasn’t eaten.”
“Obviously. I may not be the most perceptive cop in the department, and in fact I’ve been told time and again that my skills in that area are inadequate, and it tends to be a sticking point each year when it’s time for my performance review, which is frustrating because it has a negative impact on my pay raise, and even with a generous raise I’d still be just barely scraping by, what with my wife and three children, and though I try to raise my awareness of the world around me much of it remains a blur, something that actually got worse with medication, but despite this lack of perceptive abilities I can clearly see that you were not eaten.”
“Good.”
“Is it? When I was your age I would’ve loved to have everybody think I’d been eaten. I would have milked that for weeks. Then I would have twisted my arm behind my back and said ‘It’s okay, they only got one limb!’ Have you ever seen that trick where you can pretend to shove your thumb into the soft spot in the back of somebody’s head? Sorry, I’m getting off the subject. Look at that, you were from the
“The original orphanage?” asked Penny. “There are others?”
“Mr. Steamspell is the most successful owner of orphanages around! He opens a new one every month! If I knew the secret of his cost efficiency, I wouldn’t be working in this dump of a law enforcement station, I can tell you that much.”
“Is he a kind man?”
“Steamspell? I think the majority of his success comes from other attributes besides kindness, but you can’t argue with his results. You’re in luck. He has a brand-new facility not ten miles from here.”
Nathan felt as if he’d been gored in the stomach by a rhinoceros. The eggs he’d eaten for breakfast immediately threatened to spew from his body in a yellow-and-white waterfall of terror.
“Isn’t there another option?” asked Penny. “Foster care, perhaps?”
“No, ma’am. I’m afraid there isn’t.”
Penny looked over at Nathan. “I don’t think the orphanage is the most enriching environment for a boy like him.”
“I agree with you completely,” said Officer Danbury. “There are countless better places for a child to grow up, but the other options are all based on the assumption that the child’s parents aren’t dead. If one parent is alive, then the options increase by about fifty percent, but in this case there’s really nothing else we can do.”
“What if…” Penny cleared her throat again. “What if we wanted to keep him? Just for a short while?”
