And Pop said to Mom with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “May I take my pie and go outdoors and eat it upside-down on top of our grape arbor?”
Mom looked up at him with a sort of quizzical expression on her face. There was also a twinkle in her eye that seemed funny to Pop, but not to me. Then she said, “Certainly you can do that while Bill and I do the dishes.”
Pop said, “Thank you,” and took his one-sixth of a pie in his big, hard, sun-tanned farmer hand, slipped out of his chair and outdoors fast, letting the screen slam hard behind him like I sometimes do—and shouldn’t. Outside he let out a blood-curdling war whoop and I heard his footsteps running toward the grape arbor.
A second later I was outdoors too.
Say, if there is anything that looks ridiculous, it is a boy’s long-legged, red-haired, bushy-eyebrowed father grunting himself into an upside-down knot and out of it again while he climbs up onto a high grape arbor.
A jiffy later there was Pop up there where I should have been, with his heavy work shoes on his large feet swinging, and eating his pie upside-down and panting for breath from all the unnecessary exercise. It was fun to Pop, but to me it looked silly so I sat down on the porch with my back to him and ate my pie right side up and for some reason it didn’t taste very good.
It was a scorching hot day and I began to feel a little better there in the shade, when all of a sudden Mom said from inside the house, using a very cheerful voice, “O. K. Bill. The dishes are all ready for you.”
I always know when Mom calls me cheerfully like that that she’s trying to make me want to come.
But say, Pop turned out to be a really swell Pop after all, or else he was trying to give me a free education. It seemed like he was still pretending to be me up there on that grape arbor so when he heard Mom say, “dishes,” he called out cheerfully, “Coming,” and swung around quick and down off the grape arbor and hurried into the house like he would rather dry the Collins family dinner dishes than do anything else in the whole world.
He got stopped at the door by Mom though, who was maybe trying to play the game with him, and she said, “Wipe that dirt off your shoes on the mat there”—which she tells me about thirty-seven times a day—sometimes even while I am already doing it, having thought of it first myself. Say, I looked at Pop’s feet and they did have dirt on them—a yellowish-brown dirt on the sides of the soles and heels!