Death in a Budapest Butterfly by Julia Buckley

Author:Julia Buckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Mrs. Sarka’s Brother

Before I went home, I stopped at my grandmother’s house, where I found my grandfather reading a spy novel and drinking a beer. He took one look at me and said, “Oh-ho! Who made you mad, my little ice queen? My little Zsa Zsa?”

I flounced into a chair. “I’m not mad.”

“Yah. Like you weren’t angry when your dad threw out the ice.”

I shook my head, dismissing this. Family legend had it that I had done something at the age of almost three that convinced Grandpa that I would be tempestuous all my life. As it happened, I was a toddler who loved ice cubes. I loved to feel them, play with them, chew on them, even talk to them. I made up little stories populated with ice cube men, and if they melted I replaced them with new reserves.

This greatly amused my family, but one day my father, not knowing that a glass full of ice on the table was filled with my imaginary ice people, dumped it unceremoniously into the sink, crunching the ice in the disposal. I marched in and demanded to know, in a tiny but imperious voice, the whereabouts of the cubes. My father, seeing that he was in trouble with his two-foot offspring, meekly said that he had thrown it out. Without a word, I turned and went to my room, where I packed a Barbie and five minuscule pairs of underwear in a Curious George backpack and demanded that my father open the front door. I was, I told him, leaving home.

Figuring that I wouldn’t go far, my father opened the door, and I walked down the stairs with a very queenly bearing, my father assures me now. In the yard my grandfather was helping my mother plant some perennials. He took one look at my angry face as I glided determinedly down the walkway and burst out laughing. “Who made her mad?” he asked. “You don’t cross a Hungarian woman, Jack! Didn’t you know that?” Grandpa’s laughter followed me all the way down the sidewalk, because he was, in fact, walking right behind me. He finally scooped me up in his arms and asked me what was wrong, whereupon I began to sob out my story of the lost ice family.

“My Hana will have all the ice in the world,” he told me. He drove me to the grocery store and bought me a ten-pound bag of ice, then to the Dairy Queen, where he bought me ice cream. They tell me that I was pleased with the compromise, and that in my ice cream–inspired generosity I even forgave my father for his cruel act. That had been more than twenty-four years ago, but Grandpa had called me ice queen ever since as a joke, and sometimes he compared me to Zsa Zsa Gabor, legendary for her excess of husbands, her love of fame and money, and her Hungarian temper.

“That was different,” I said. “I was two. And the ice cubes were my friends.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.