Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [57]
“I think there might be enough for one last bowl,” Micah said.
“I know. I was just thinking about that.”
“Should we leave it for Dana?”
“No. Definitely not. She ate the last bowl last time.”
“That’s what I was thinking. But I’m so full. I can’t eat another bite.”
We tried to get comfortable as we shifted around. Finally, Micah turned to me.
“Want to split it? Go half and half?”
“Okay.”
My dad, too, had a sweet tooth. He always kept a stash of Oreos in the house, but knowing us, he would hide them in his office.
This led us to ransack his office in search of them. Usually, we’d find them after a few minutes, and we’d each sneak one or two, so that he wouldn’t notice any were missing. We’d then go back a second and third time, always rearranging the remaining Oreos in the hope that the pack would look as if it hadn’t been disturbed. By the time my dad got home from work, there’d only be a couple of broken cookies left.
Holding the mostly empty bag in front of him, he’d eye the crumbs, his eyes bulging.
“Vultures! My kids are G-D-N vultures!” he’d scream, and we’d hear him searching for his keys. Once he found them, he’d get in the car and drive to the store to buy another pack of Oreos. From his office, he’d give us the evil eye all night.
The next day, the search for the bag of cookies would begin again. And once we found them, we’d eat them compulsively, until only one or two broken cookies were left.
“Vultures!” we’d hear him scream. “You’re all a bunch of G-D-N VULTURES!”
CHAPTER 10
Rarotonga, Cook Islands
January 31
On our final morning on Easter Island, we rose early for breakfast and finished just as the sun was rising.
Early mornings had become typical on our trip. Usually, breakfast began at 6:30, and we’d assemble in the lobby before 8:00 to start visits to the sites. It took hours to move our group anywhere; with nearly ninety people and two hundred bags of luggage, we were more like a slow-moving caravan than a quick-strike task force. Departure time for the plane was usually around 10:00 A.M.; by that time, we’d usually been up for five hours with little to show for it.
These early mornings, late dinners, long days at the sites, and extensive travel in the previous seven days had added up; by the end of our time on Easter Island, most everyone looked tired. Yet we were only a third of the way through the trip.
The flight to Rarotonga, the main island in the cluster of South Pacific Islands known as the Cook Islands, was seven hours; we made up some of those hours on the way west, and arrived in the early afternoon. No tours were scheduled; instead, we’d be on our own for the rest of the day and would depart for Australia in the morning. We were stopping on Rarotonga to break up the fourteen-hour flight between Easter Island and Ayers Rock.
Rarotonga was steamy when we stepped off the plane, and far warmer than Easter Island had been. It was a typical island day; blue skies crowded with dense puffy clouds that portended late afternoon showers, high humidity, and a light, constant breeze. The island itself was beautiful; the main road circled the island, and the central peaks were shrouded in clouds and thick with island vegetation. Like Easter Island, it had been originally settled by Polynesians, but was probably most famous because of Captain Bligh and the mutineers of the Bounty, who were marooned on the islands in the late eighteenth century.
When we arrived at the hotel, the group dispersed. Some went to lunch, others retreated to nap in their rooms. Still others went