Peter walked into the kitchen and froze with a whistled wheeze. His arm dangled oddly in the air, aimed halfway toward the refrigerator. “Er, are you all right, a ghrá? You look…peaky.”
“Mmm,” June agreed. She let go of the spiral of frizzed hair she’d wrapped around her finger and looked up from her fixed gaze upon the countertop. “It’s been a day.”
“Ah…I thought you were spending time with my mother.” He busied himself with looking into the refrigerator. The clink of glass gave away his quest for Harp lager, and the rattle of metal in the drawer took longer than it should have. “I thought you liked my mother.”
“I do like your mother,” she replied gloomily. “And these croissants. It’s still been a day.”
Her boyfriend kept his head turned away. “Weren’t you having a relaxing spa day? Wasn’t that the plan?”
“It was a good plan.” The croissant crunched as her teeth sank into it. “Too bad no one followed it.”
Prudently, Peter stayed out of reach, across the kitchen island. He took a sip of his drink. “So what happened?”
“The spa started doing homeopathic remedies.”
He let out a groan. “Mum critiqued them, didn’t she?”
“She did indeed.” Another slow bite of croissant, and June wiped her mouth as flakes of buttery pastry shattered in flakes onto the granite countertop. “So we went to a bookstore instead.”
“That sounds safe.” Her son sounded cautious in his assessment.
“Doesn’t it?” Silence filled the kitchen as June stared into empty air, glassy-eyed and vacant.
He banged down the bottle. “Well, what happened, then?”
“They had an early display for St. Patrick’s Day. And got the leprechauns wrong.”
Peter drained the beer and went back to the refrigerator for another. “They always do.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she agreed, and her foot slipped off the kitchen barstool. “Grab me one of those, will you? My foot’s asleep. I think I’ve been here for too long.”
“So you went somewhere else,” he prompted. “Just not recently.”
June nodded. “There was a craft store across the street.”
“You didn’t.”
“We did.”
There was a long, poignant moment of silence before June raised her glass to his. The bottles clinked merrily.
“And then?”
She looked up, her eyes widening in surprise. “How did you know there was more?”
“You’re eating a croissant like it tried to steal your land.”
June didn’t know if he felt safe enough to edge around the countertop for a gentle hip bump, or if the beer had kicked in too fast. She ticked off the list on her fingers. “So there was the writing group at the coffeeshop where the bully left in tears and your mother left literally on everyone else’s shoulders, the painting class with wine in the middle of the day – which at that point I’m not ashamed to say I needed, and the zoo where the baby red pandas escaped.”
“Still not croissants.”
She ignored the commentary. “Your mother rescued the red pandas, of course, and then led a flock of flamingos – which she plucked for quills, mind you, and they still flocked with her – and then somehow we were at your parents’, not writing letters with our new flamingo quills but making croissants, because she was bored. Or she was making them, and I’m pretty sure I spent the time hallucinating that I helped. You know I can’t cook.”
“Bake,” he corrected. “Pastry is baking.”
June shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I think I need a nap.”
“That’s more believable than you cooking,” he muttered, but the room was already empty.
***
This week, nother Mike challenged me to consider the plans no one followed, while my prompt went to Leigh Kimmel to explore moving tattoos.
