“He conveniently forgot about it at the store, but my mom brought some in her cooler.”
Ulric blinked a few times as we stopped at the top of the stairs before drawing out his words. “She…brought some…in her…cooler?”
I laughed. “Yeah, I’ll explain later.”
The blaring TV assaulted my eardrums before I even hit the ground floor. I made my way to the makeshift lounge and found my dad in his designated chair, his arm on the armrest, the remote in his hand. The man on the screen was casting a fishing lure into a calm lake while expounding on the best lures for big-mouth bass.
“Hey, Dad, everything good?” I asked.
“Heh?” He turned in his chair to look over his shoulder, and then turned down the TV. “Oh. Hi. Late one last night, huh?”
I moved so it was a little easier for him to see me. “Yeah, kinda. You good?”
He grunted and turned back to the TV. “Quite a setup you’ve got here. Lots of sitting rooms. How many sitting rooms does one house need? Although, if the house is this big, what else are you going to put in it, I suppose. There was an orange rug in my room. Did you decorate this place?”
“No. It came furnished. Mostly.”
He grunted again. “Well, I don’t know about the orange. That was a big thing in the seventies, that rusted orange color.”
“Yeah. You guys should’ve brought the color palette from your house. I could’ve closed my eyes and picked at random. What do you bet I’d land on brown?”
He scratched his stomach. “Nice, big house, though. Lots of room. I had to turn the TV up so I could hear it, it’s so far away. Least I can see it. I should get a new TV. What’s this picture? A bunch of pixels, right?”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Yes. Lots of pixels, you’ve got it.”
“Yeah. We still got that old one you gave us. It’s not as clear as this one.”
“Put it on your Christmas list. Do you need anything in here? We’ve got a big garden if you want to check that out. There’s even a hedge maze.”
“A what?” He muted the TV. “A hedge maze? What is that?”
“A big maze made out of…hedges. They’re like thick bushes but really tall, and they’re used to form the walls of a maze.” His blank stare said he still wasn’t getting it. “A corn maze, like in pumpkin patches, but made out of bushes and in my backyard.”
“You have a nice garden, huh?”
Clearly he wasn’t interested in discussing backyard mazes. It was probably a little too weird for his taste.
“Yes. Nice, big garden,” I said, just trying to go with the flow.
“That bed is awfully soft, the one in the guest room? I’m not used to soft beds. I kept waking up. Or maybe it was the thumping above me. Probably a rat. Old houses like this have lots of vermin. Our house had a mouse problem a while back. I’ll set some traps, don’t you worry. If there is one thing I know how to do, it’s how to get rid of vermin.”
“Oh no, no, that’s okay, Dad. Thanks. We don’t have rats. That might’ve been Mr. Tom, the butler. He was probably—”
His finger hovered over the remote, about to unmute the TV. “Is it Tom or Edgar?”
“Mr. Tom is the butler, and Edgar is the gardener. Remember the guy with the dentures?” Given Edgar’s issue with retracting his fangs, we’d called them out as malfunctioning dentures when he’d come in yesterday afternoon to meet the folks. Thankfully he hadn’t said much, keeping those chompers mostly under wraps.
“Oh yeah, the balding guy with dandruff. I use Head & Shoulders. Got rid of that problem. I told him so.” He snapped. “Earl. Irish lady called your butler Earl.”
“Yeah, Mr. Tom is kind of a nickname. He’d like it if you used that.”
My dad’s brows knitted together. He unmuted the TV and turned back to the fishing program. Apparently that didn’t make much sense to him, and now he planned to ignore it and the hedge maze both. Hopefully he did that for all the weird stuff he was bound to run into.
“Okay, well, let me know if you need anything,” I said.
My mother was in the kitchen, her half-moon glasses perched on the edge of her nose as she looked up at the top oven, the house having two stacked on top of each other.
“Hey, Mom.”
She glanced over, smiled, and then returned to studying the buttons. “You had a late one, huh? I’m just trying to figure out how to do the warm setting. Do you want some breakfast? I made enough for your butler and gardener and the Irish rock thrower, too, but the butler hasn’t come in since I started making breakfast, and none of the others have stopped by. How about your friend from last night? The big, burly man. He’s certainly handsome. Are you two dating?”