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‘We can swap it for that one.’ Mary points to the Lego space shuttle instruction booklet in my hands.
Placing the instructions down, I grab a clear, plastic bag of Legos from the box. ‘You have a penchant for arbitrarily selecting colors.’
‘What’s a pinch-ant?’
I pour out the bricks, making sure to keep the bag marked ‘one’ beneath it to keep the pieces organized. ‘A habit or tendency.’
Mary thinks this over while I begin sorting the pieces by color. ‘What’s ar-bi-tar-lee?’
I point to one of the many pictures she’s drawn – pink clouds, blue horses, purple houses. ‘Choosing colors for things that don’t match real life.’
She plucks the white piece from my hands and gives me the pink one in its place. ‘Yeah. That sounds like me.’
I stare long and hard at the pink brick, wondering why I’m not refusing its infiltration into the Lego build. Or that I’m helping at all.
I blame my mother calling me at work today, guilting me about working too much and ignoring my family. ‘Something your father would do.’
And as much as I wanted to refute it, to say, ‘They aren’t my real family,’ I couldn’t. So I agreed to leave work on time to stop further comparisons to the man I once looked up to and then incarcerated, so that Alice wouldn’t have to spend the evening alone with Mary while Mother cougared the night away with the sugar-baby version of the Big Lebowski.
Jesus. I rub the hand not holding a brick down my face.
A loud and obnoxious slurp draws Mary’s and my eyes to Mike, lounging on his cat condo behind my chair, leg up and licking himself.
Mary, in full dictator mode, puts her small fists on her waist. ‘Prince Michael, you know better than that.’ She shakes one finger at him. ‘Princes don’t slurp.’
To my surprise, the devil spawn listens, lowering his leg and stretching out on his high perch.
Mary smiles at me triumphantly. ‘I’ve been giving him eddy-cat lessons like Queenie said she had when she was little.’
I surprise myself by laughing, wondering what my brother would think about his hairless pussy learning etiquette.
Clearing my throat, I drop the pink brick into the pile and point to the instructions. ‘First, we need to build the astronauts.’
‘Oh!’ Mary jumps up and runs over to a different Lego build, this one a castle. It seems buying Alice work clothes was just the tip of the purchases Mother made on both Mary and Alice’s behalf. But whereas before I was bothered, today… I’m not.
‘Here.’ Mary hands me a mini-figure dressed in a medieval gown. ‘We’ll put a space helmet on her.’
‘That’s not the figure they outline in the instructions.’ I rifle through the pile, pulling out a pair of white legs and a torso with small blue and red patches. ‘This is the astronaut.’ I point to the stickers that mimic NASA patches. ‘See.’ I push more pieces around with my index finger until I find a yellow cylindrical head.
‘But that guy’s outfit is so boring.’
‘That’s what astronauts wear in real life.’
Mary takes apart the princess figurine, then reconstructs it. ‘Look.’ She’s attached a helmet in place of the side braid to the princess’s head and switched out the bodice for the NASA space suit top, leaving the bottom half of the gown in place. ‘A princess astronaut.’
My nostrils flare as I war between annoyance at being outmaneuvered and laughter. ‘Hmmm.’
I’m saved from further Lego set destruction when the oven timer goes off.
Alice’s voice calls down from the kitchen. ‘Dinner!’
Groaning as I get up from my seat on the floor, I promise myself to stretch more between workouts.
At least I’m not hindered by a fitted suit. Mary took one look at my outfit after I said I’d build with her and declared I needed to change into ‘play clothes’.
The child commander tugs on my arm. ‘Come on, Thomas. Dinner.’
‘So I heard.’ Finding out the hard way that stepping on Legos barefoot hurts like the devil, I carefully maneuver around my once spacious and tidy den now cluttered with toys – for both the feline albatross and Mary.
