Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [55]
Knowing we’d continue to do most of the work on the house, our parents began giving us tools for Christmas. It was a way of killing two birds with one stone. Not only did we get something unexpected (how could I expect to receive a hammer for Christmas if I didn’t want one?), but they would save money at the same time. And it was much better than offering us weapons again. Late one Christmas morning, I sat beside Micah on the couch.
“What did you think of Christmas this year?” he asked.
“It was great,” I said, “for a carpenter.” I nodded toward my gifts. “What am I going to do with a dowel hammer? Do they want me to start building furniture next?”
Micah shook his head and sighed. “Yeah, I know what you mean. But at least you got a lot of them. I got a jigsaw. What is mom going to make me use that for? I wanted a pair of Levi’s, for God’s sake.”
We sat in silence.
“Our parents are weird, aren’t they?” I asked.
Micah didn’t answer. When I glanced at him, I saw him staring at the jigsaw.
“What?”
He shook his head, his brow furrowed. “Nothing really. It just says on the box here that this thing can cut through hardwood, like oak.”
“So.”
“Isn’t the hardwood in my bedroom oak?”
“I think so.”
He pondered the situation. “And wouldn’t you agree that our parents are a little heavy-handed?”
“Absolutely,” I agreed. “They’re like guards at the Gulag.”
He blinked as if suddenly in the presence of a Martian. “What are you talking about, Nick?”
“Never mind.”
“You’re weird sometimes, too.”
“I know.” I’d heard this before. “But what were you saying?”
“Well, what if we use this thing to our advantage?”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned in and whispered his plan, and I had to admit he was definitely on to something. And sure enough, as soon as my parents had left for work—we were still on school break—my brother used the jigsaw to cut a hole in his closet floor that led to the crawl space beneath the house. That way, after he’d supposedly gone to bed, he could sneak out at night via his bedroom without our parents ever knowing about it.
And, of course, he did.
It was around this time that my mom decided she was tired of working full-time, and doing all the cooking and cleaning around the house. My dad was thus drafted into becoming the chef.
I remember hearing about it when I got home from school one afternoon, and I honestly believed that my dad was excited about it. He told us that he was going to make one of his favorite meals, one that he used to eat when he was a kid. He forbade us from coming into the kitchen to see what he was preparing.
“It’s a surprise.”
Neither Micah, Dana, nor I knew what to make of it. The only thing our dad ever cooked on his own was chicken gizzards. Not wings, not legs or breasts, but gizzards. My dad simply loved those things. He would fry up a plateful, and while we eventually acquired a taste for them, it was obvious that gizzards wasn’t on the menu that night.
Frying gizzards—frying anything—made for a pleasant aroma in the kitchen. But all we could smell was something burned and scorchy—like flour that caught on fire—and more than once, I heard my dad yell, “Whoops!” and race to open the back slider, so the smoke could clear the kitchen. Then, popping his head back into the living room, he’d say, “You guys are going to love this!” or, “Cooking for you guys is going to be great! I can’t wait to share more of my childhood recipes. I’m really getting the hang of it now!”
Eventually, after three or four “Whoops!” he called us to the table. Mom wasn’t home from work yet, and we took our