Sunny Days Inside by Caroline Adderson

Author:Caroline Adderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Published: 2021-07-27T16:54:44+00:00

6

The Two Harriets

They — Jessica, her teenaged brother Jacob and their parents, Nancy and Alan — baked bread. The first batch didn’t rise, so they rolled it out flat and baked accidental crackers instead.

A lot of accidental crackers.

They cleaned everything, even the light fixtures. Alan stood on a chair, unscrewed each globe and passed it down to Jacob, who shook the dead flies onto a sheet of newspaper.

Jacob kept the flies. He transferred them to a cigar box that he kept on the dresser in the room he shared with Jessica, a curtain separating their two sides. When Jessica asked what he planned to do with the flies, he said, “Eat them, of course.”

He lived to gross her out.

They learned to play the one musical instrument they had in the apartment — a plastic recorder. Jacob refused because he said spit collected inside it and could transmit the virus. Instead, he assembled a drum set from pots and pans and bowls. Then they recorded themselves playing and singing “Oh, Susanna!” to send to Jessica and Jacob’s grandparents.

They got a big shock when they played it back. It sounded like a garbage truck backing over a trio of howler monkeys.

They — just Jessica and her parents this time — learned to crochet. Together they made half an afghan, which they abandoned when the weather warmed up and they ran out of yarn.

Jacob wouldn’t crochet, or give them a reason why not. He said it was “obvious.”

“Are you gender-stereotyping, young man?” Nancy asked.

They finished a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the night sky. Jacob worked on Orion’s belt. So his pants wouldn’t fall down, he said.

They drew pictures and because none of them was a very good artist (Alan’s people had no necks), they reused the paper when they taught themselves origami.

They reread all the books in the apartment. They didn’t actually own that many books, being not only avid library users, but four people working and “going to school” in a two-bedroom apartment where shelf space was limited. Jessica still had a few treasured favorites: Frog and Toad, Charlotte’s Web, Harriet the Spy. Jacob: One Hundred Best Fart Jokes.

They could borrow ebooks from the library, of course, but the point of these activities according to Nancy and Alan was to keep their kids, and themselves, off their computer and phones for at least part of the day. But as those days got longer and their tempers shorter (Jacob’s, mainly), Nancy and Alan gave up trying to force their kids to do offline things. Also, there were so many wonderful activities, like square dancing and yoga (Jacob: “Kill me now!”) that they could only do watching YouTube videos.

“We should all learn a language,” Nancy suggested at dinner one night. They were having Jessica’s favorite: Moroccan chicken with raisins.

“What language?” Alan asked, passing around the bottomless basket of hard, half-burnt crackers.

“How about Mandarin?”

“Seriously?” Jacob said. “That’s, like, the hardest language in the world.”

“Maybe,” Nancy said. “That’s why I think we should all learn it together.

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