Prodigal 4: What Happened to the Potatoes
<- 3: Pieces from the Void 5: Toumb of Lost Souls ->
The house tour apparently concluded with my room, though from Leah’s stories we had yet to see everything. Within a few moments, the rest of the family had left us be, and the only noise that I heard was an occasional computer-like beeping from down the hall, which I assumed was coming from Tess’ room. Leah sat on my bed, and now that I had stopped the urge to babble about how much I loved the room and how generous everyone was and how they shouldn’t have done it, it was quiet.
“Don’t thank them,” she had told me while my eyes teared up, “they’ve wanted an excuse to fill another of these rooms for ages. Besides, if you’re going to be travelling with me, you shouldn’t have to use some random room where they’ve been stashing whatever they yank out of the void for two decades. If you kept coming back to that, you’d be ready to go home within a week.”
Leah’s instructions not to bring more than I could comfortably carry had meant that there were a lot of things that I had left behind. I’d packed some clothes, of course, and other things that I couldn’t do without. A fresh and empty journal was in my bag, since I had left the other one behind with my old life, and I took it out and put it on the desk, trying out pens on the notepad. There were certainly a variety of them, both the calligraphy pens that you have to dip in ink, cheap ballpoint pens, a handful of felt-tips, gel pens in every color but orange, and one of those four-color pens where a click changes the ink over from red to green to blue to black. It looked like the lost-and-found for pens from a hundred schools.
I said something with that embarrassing simile attached, and Leah attempted, once more, to explain.
“You’d be surprised how well small, heavily-used items retain their identity within the void,” she said. “And people lose pens everywhere, so when the void began to collect matter, a few missing pens were some of the first things in an area to go. They also fall into pocket worlds a lot, which explains why people are always losing them so mysteriously. Paperclips and rubber bands are a different story - they fall into pocket worlds a lot, but they don’t really have identities, so they end up as just aggregate matter for the migratory worms and beetles trapped in the pocket world to stumble over.”
“Pocket worlds?” I asked, since they were another thing she’d never explained fully to me. Doubtless her father had an ancient metaphor for them.
“Well, they’re really small. They get ambient light that filters through from other worlds, mostly, and they start out when a little bit of matter gets through a slightly weak barrier between worlds… I told you this part already, didn’t I?”
“During a particularly boring physics lecture last winter,” I confirmed, “Though I have to say that listening to the idea and wrapping my brain around it are two completely different things.”
“Well, we can’t all be naturals at physics,” Leah said, and I aimed a swat at her with the pair of jeans I was putting away in my dresser. I missed and had to fold the jeans again.
“I understand the concept, I just can’t do the math or work out why it works,” I told her. “Anyhow, what’s the difference between a pocket world and this void that you keep talking about? And isn’t this island just a really large pocket world?”
“In essence, yes,” Leah said, after a moment of seeming to consider it. She drew her feet up so that she could sit cross-legged on my bed, obviously determined to be of no help in my unpacking. “Though most pocket worlds would never get this big. Pocket worlds tend to accumulate more matter when they have more matter, but after a certain point they pull themselves away from the worlds that have been feeding them matter and exist in a certain bubble, which isn’t large enough to be sustained and eventually fails, returning matter or energy to the system at large.”
“So it’s a little bubble that breaks off from a big bubble?” I asked, stuffing socks in a drawer.
“Kind of.”
“How come this one’s different, then?”
Leah chewed on her lip a little while she thought.
“Well, to start with, there was once a world, which mom and dad think was actually quite similar to this one, more or less right here.”
“More or less?”
“Quantnum uncertainty.” I threw a sock at Leah’s smirk. It missed.
“To the point then, this world split into three at some point in time. Since the worlds had once been one, the barriers between them were quite weak and it was still possible for people - okay, magicians and people who were either really lucky or really unlucky, depending on how you think about it - to travel between them. Possible, though not easy.
“Anyhow, this world had been huge, because there was enough stuff that the three worlds were pretty decently sized worlds of their own. And each of them was like the original world, but not exactly, and after an amount of time that no living being seriously wants to think about, each one was pretty distinct.”
“Just to clarify,” I asked, “Is this an amount of time on a geologic scale, or do you just refuse to retain historical dates if they occurred before you were born?” I got the sock thrown back at me, and it hit me in the back of the head and fell into the drawer. Making fun of Leah’s shaky grasp of history was an old tradition, though admittedly it had started in days when I didn’t know why she had seemingly never taken a history class in her life.
“It’s not important for a traveler between worlds,” she insisted.
“Sure. You know what they say about those who don’t learn from history.”
“Hush. I was telling a story.”
“Then tell it.”
“Fine.” She paused before resuming anyway, probably deliberately. “Anyhow, the problem came because these three worlds weren’t split apart all the way. In the process of splitting them, there was a bit leftover, and it was a decently-sized bit of what had once been the original world.”
“This island, you mean?”
“No, let me finish, Ellie. Not this island - or not really. It didn’t have much of an identity anymore, but it was there, not really matter or energy as you might think about it -”
“Antimatter?”
“You know I hated chemistry, Ellie, now shush. The problem was that it had no identity, and so it kept swallowing bits of the other three worlds that had identity. Maybe it started with pens.” She gave a sly grin as she looked at my desk. “Especially it started swallowing matter that passed between worlds. Including people. The thing is that living things have a lot more identity than other bits of matter - oh don’t make that face at me Ellie, you know that from a scientific perspective we’re only so many chemicals and electrical impulses - and people have more than most. There were people living on this island from time to time, and enough of them were competent enough magicians that they made a start on creating some order in here. They all died, eventually, and their spirits were trapped here, but the thing about people is that they help give everything else identity, so it’s actually their life and death that slowed down the progress of the void.”
I shivered at the thought, certain that I would be visited by ghosts in my sleep. Leah, of course, remained entirely unconcerned.
“Anyhow, long story short, after a while people stopped traveling between the worlds. The void kept claiming matter at a steady rate, and eventually the identity-less matter was large enough that the rate increased, though there was a kernel of identity within it. By the time Mom and Dad arrived in one of the worlds during their travels, you could literally walk up to the edge of the world and pitch yourself into the void - sorry,” she said as I winced, “but it’s true. Anyhow, the Void was consuming everything, and it looked like it was headed for consuming all three worlds, and everything in them. Even though the matter would still be intact, it was very unusual that anything making the passage would survive, either arriving here in the kernel or at one of the other worlds. There were some interesting things going on due to it: there’s one woman who got too close to the edge of the void and somehow got triplicated, which was a really one in a million chance and she’s lucky to retain as much memory as she did - okay, the three of her did - but overall it was just bad news.”
“Three of her?” I repeated a little faintly, but Leah waved it away with airy unconcern.
“She’s as well as can be expected for three amnesiacs, and happy enough in her current life. She has no idea why she keeps calling her children by names that she decided on in a different world, though, or why she keeps waking up thinking she’s in the wrong place. Two of her know what happened, more or less, though mom thought it was kinder not to tell the part that stayed in her original world, so she could just get on with her life as planned and get her original memories back.”
“That’s… um… great,” I managed, before Leah plowed me over with the rest of the story.
“Mom and Dad did several very brave and stupid things, and they succeeded in giving a large part of the void some identity,” she concluded, “as a sort of barrier and conduit between the three worlds. Brilliant, of course, but they nearly died handling that much power, and there’s always the chance that any chance encounters with additional stuff will cause the void to start slowly growing again, at which point it will probably finish the job of destroying all three worlds. So they spend quite a bit of time pulling stuff that still has identity out of the void before it decays or shaping bits of void into things that are actually useful. The plan is that eventually, the void will be sub-critical again, and the kernel will hold it together, meaning that life in the three worlds will have a chance to die out on its own before the void completely consumes it.
“And that,” Leah concluded cheerfully, “Is the story of why we have so much random stuff.”
I looked at the pens on my desk with faint horror and swallowed a few times.
“Do you ever pull out a… I mean, someone who…” I couldn’t say it. Fortunately, Leah can at times read my mind, in a strictly non-literal sense, and she said it for me.
“You mean, a corpse?”
I nodded.
“Not as such, no,” she said gently. “Living things have a lot of identity, but it doesn’t stay with the body after death in the way that identity sticks to an inanimate object. And soft organic matter with no measures taken to preserve it decays quite quickly. I’ve only ever once found a bone, and it was a fossil. We do have a tomb to all of the lost souls, though, where the travelers who lived and died here are buried.”
Once more, I nodded, bewildered at all of the distant death in such a lovely place, as if I had encountered a flower that was poisonous to the touch. It made me wonder again how people could live with the weight of history upon them in places such as ancient battlefields and cities that had been destroyed and then raised from their own ashes once more. If I had any doubts about it after having met Sabarin the necromancress, it would have been enough to make me believe in ghosts.
“All right, enough morbid talk,” Leah said decisively, “It’s nearly five thirty, so let’s go pry Tess out of her latest experiment and head down for dinner, because otherwise she’ll forget to eat and I’ll never hear the end of it from Mom or Rhian.”
I followed her quite quietly down the hall.
Dinner was yet another thing beyond my experience.
I’m not entirely sure whether it turned out to be a success or a dismal failure, though it had moments of both. The food was good.
Leah’s oldest sister was deep enough in whatever she was working on, which appeared to involve several dissected computers, a lot of chalk diagrams on the floor, six potatoes and a Bunsen burner, that her response to Leah popping her head in the door progressed from ‘go away’ to ‘I don’t have time for you,’ within the first minute. After several creative threats on Leah’s part about what she would do to her elder sister if she continued on a path to unintentional starvation, and several threats of creative retaliation sent right back should she follow through, mixed in with several casual insults, the Bunsen burner went out and Tess grudgingly accompanied us down towards the dining room.
Well, accompanied Leah, because she was pretending not to notice either of us, but it was towards Leah that she was offering a cold shoulder. She just failed to notice me. Unless I said something to her, in which case she deliberately ignored me if at all possible.
There was a smell of roast coming from a dining room which looked much like the rest of the house - a strangely fitting collage of what I now understood was the mix and match remains of three worlds - and we must have arrived just in time, because Rhian came through the door, smacked a bunch of forks and napkins into Tess’ hands, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Help me carry this, Leah,” she said, and a moment later the two of them appeared once more carrying a platter with a roast on it and an enormous glass bowl of salad, while a basket of rolls followed them obediently at about eye level. It was tailed by a doggedly wobbling butter dish.
“Don’t levitate the china!” their mother yelled after them, “Who knows when I’ll be able to find another good plate!”
“It’s just the rolls, mom!” Leah bellowed back, but she reached up with her free hand and snagged the butter dish out of the air anyway.
“Because of course you should never have to do any of the heavy work around here,” Tess grumbled from the end of the table. I was standing awkwardly, not having been given any job to do, but she deliberately looked past me and directed her comment at Leah.
“Next time you want to patch the storeroom roof by magic, be my guest,” Leah hissed back, attempting to balance the roast and the butter dish at the same time while keeping the basket of rolls in the air, “You and all your dainty little calculations.”
“Leah.” Their father had emerged from the kitchen with a pitcher of water and the carving knife, which he put down on the platter holding the roast.
“What?” she asked, trying and failing to look innocent as the basket of rolls settled to the tabletop next to the salad as quickly as was possible without tipping over.
“You know what. You haven’t stopped fighting with your sister since you arrived.”
“I’m getting along with Rhian just fine.” Rhian herself rolled her eyes as she went to the cabinet and pulled down a stack of plates and began to place them.
“Leah…”
As a witness to that somewhat embarrassing exchange, I was at a loose end until Rhian noticed me once more.
“Ellie, you can sit right here, next to Leah,” she said, and at that moment their mother came in bearing a platter of baked potatoes, steaming and already sprinkled with parsley and a bit of salt. Everyone scrambled to their seats, and I noticed that not only had I been placed on Leah’s left hand side, I was also next to her father and across from Rhian, while her mother was on the other end, presumably to prevent the glaring that was going on between Tess and Leah from escalating.
It was with a mulish look on her face that Leah started pouring the water by levitating the pitcher, and it probably wasn’t a complete accident that she poured Tess’ first, a little too fast, splashing her and her plate and placemat.
“Whoops,” she said, while Tess scowled.
“Whatever happened to no magic at the dinner table?” their mother wondered aloud.
“The fact that four out of five of us can’t resist,” her husband answered from where he was simultaneously carving the roast and buttering himself a roll. The butter knife was moving in exactly the same pattern as the carving knife, but I was somewhat relieved all the same that the knife which wasn’t directly under the visible control of a human being was the blunt one.
“Not so much butter dear.”
“I like butter.”
“Yeah, but Da, your heart doesn’t,” Rhian interjected, helping herself to a roll. “You know what the doctor said.”
“After everything I’ve done in my life, I seriously doubt that butter on a roll is going to kill me, Sabarin. And Rhian, the doctor only said that he’d start to worry if my cholesterol level rose.”
“Wait, when was this?” Leah asked, “No one told me about this.”
“It was -” Rhia started to explain.
“Not a big deal,” her father cut in, “nothing to worry about.” He continued to serve the roast, finishing up with Rhian’s plate, and since everyone had passed the potatoes, salad and rolls by now, we all started eating.
“Your father had a few tests done,” their mother explained, “it turns out he, and therefore you girls, have a genetic predisposition for having high levels of cholesterol.”
“Not high enough to worry about though.”
“High enough to start eating less of it.”
“When was this?” Leah demanded of her sisters as their parents settled into what appeared to be a comfortable argument. Rhian opened her mouth to explain, but Tess, unexpectedly, beat her to it.
“The October before last,” she said, “Mom finally dragged Dad into the doctors’ so that they could examine his heart.”
Leah’s fork clattered on her plate. I seriously considered the fact that if I were her, with the ability to spontaneously travel to another world, and with the look of complete and utter regret on her face, I would have been long gone, especially now that everyone in the room was looking at her.
“He started showing some symptoms after you left Avarin,” Tess said to Leah in a conversational tone that nonetheless seemed to have a devastating effect. If I had to guess at Leah’s emotions, she was warring between some sort of guilt and the desire to punch her older sister.
There was quiet in the room for a moment.
“It was nothing to worry about,” their father said, “I’m just not as young as I once was, and I don’t mind admitting it. After all, I have three beautiful grown-up daughters, and I earned every single one of these grey hairs.”
“That you did, Landon,” their mother agreed, too quickly, “Though only half of them are from the girls. Do you remember that time in Lycea…?”
And before I knew it, the conversation had resumed again, everyone eating and laughing as the two adults traded telling wild tales of the magic and magicians of worlds that passed me by in a blur of unanchored names, some of which were so well-known that the girls all chimed in with the funny or exciting bits. I couldn’t help but loose myself in them, especially relieved that no one in this unknown and somewhat intimidating house required me to participate in the conversation except as an attentive listener, and before long I’d heard about giant centipedes in a world without a name, an exploding steamboat, how to ride a camel, and the incomprehensible accent of a magician named Gvarrhin, which had caused the delivery of a hundred jars of pickled eels.
Just as I was laughing over the mental image of pickled eels to a magician desperate for a specific type of wheel, I glanced over at Leah. She was picking at her plate, biting her lip, and generally advertizing to everyone who knew her as well as I did that something was wrong. I gave her a nudge with my knee under the table, as Rhian finally stopped laughing over the eels and launched into a discussion of something that had happened at her school with her parents, about which her mother was horrified and her father slightly amused.
“It’s all right, mom,” she insisted, “they shouldn’t have to put me in just because of who you are.”
“Yes, but they’re singling you out unfairly…”
“Everything all right?” I asked Leah, under cover of their conversation. “You look like…” I didn’t finish the sentence, because in truth I didn’t know exactly what she looked like, but I let it trail away gently into the potato she was crushing with undue force.
“No, I’m fine,” she lied, looking up at me briefly and not meeting my eyes, “maybe a little tired. And I had forgotten that Rhian always burns the potatoes.”
“I did not!” Rhian exclaimed, seemingly eager to switch conversations, since her mother was wearing a frown that was a universal property of all mothers who are making up their minds to do something. “Ellie, did you get a burnt potato?”
“No,” I replied, “they were delicious.”
“See?” she said triumphantly, “I don’t know how you found her, Leah, but I think we ought to keep her. At least someone around here is capable of appreciating someone else’s cooking.”
I didn’t know if her target for the last comment was Leah or Tess, who hadn’t touched her potato in the least, and had only eaten about half of her roast, most of a roll, and some salad, and was scribbling busily on a napkin with the pen that she had conjured from somewhere, possibly in the most literal sense of the word.
Tess looked up distractedly. “I ate it.”
“About a third of it.”
“Tess, please eat something before you start in on another experiment,” their mother interrupted, “Do you want another roll? Some salad? Roast?”
It appeared as if Tess had only just now realized that her plate wasn’t empty. “I just thought of something,” she offered as an explanation. She cut a chunk off of her now-cold roast and put it in her mouth obediently, before setting the fork down again and halting with her scribbled-on napkin halfway to her mouth. Rhian passed her a fresh one automatically and rescued the pen from ending up in the butter dish.
“She still writing on napkins?” Leah asked of her younger sister, pointedly ignoring Tess, and Rhian rolled her eyes.
“Just because your thoughts pass through your mind at the speed of glaciers doesn’t mean that the rest of us can wait until a geologic age has passed.”
“Your attention span has a half life of a nanosecond.”
“If the two of you don’t shut up for five minutes I’m dumping the salad dressing on you.” This last was Rhian. “Honestly, what are you, twelve?”
“Fourteen,” Tess replied, and Leah’s face darkened a bit. I suspected that anything that came out of Tess’ mouth was only going to serve to wind her up for the rest of the night, since I didn’t see what was so bad about a simple number.
“No salad dressing dumping will be necessary,” their mother said. “Leah, why don’t you start clearing plates - no, not that way,” she amended as several of the plates on the table immediately rose into the air, and Rhian’s almost clipped her on the chin, “and Rhian can bring in the dessert.”
Their father perked up at the mention of desert, while a scowling Leah started stacking plates by hand.
“It’s made mostly of yogurt, Dad,” Rhian said, patting him on the shoulder as she dropped another sliver of roast on Tess’ plate, for which she received a peeved look that she paid no attention to, and headed into the kitchen with the leftover roast. Leah levitated the empty breadbasket behind her on her way out with the plates, just as their father was about to reach for another roll. I made a move to help with the clearing up, but both of Leah’s parents had turned to me in the absence of two thirds of their daughters, and I suddenly felt quite trapped.
“So,” Leah’s mother said with a smile that I classified under politely scary, though probably not intentionally so, “We’ve heard a lot about you this last year.”
“Um… Good things, I hope?” My sense of humor was going to get kicked to the curb if it kept bringing out such trite phrases to break the ice with these people. They were Leah’s family, so of course I wanted to like them, and for them to like me, but you have to admit it’s hard to face down a necromancress and an archmage in their own dining room and treat them like a normal pair of parents. Also, the fact that they were working together, very subtly, to observe and investigate me was something I hadn’t had a lot of experience with.
“I’ll just take my plate in and go back upstairs.” Tess unwittingly provided me with an escape from her curious parents as she made as if to rise from the table.
“But you’ve barely touched your roast.”
Tess shrugged. “I’ve got an experiment all ready to go upstairs and I need to adjust the current to the potatoes.”
“So that’s where all the potatoes went!” Rhian exclaimed as she headed back in with six dainty bowls of something white and orange. The salad bowl passed sneakily behind her, four feet off the ground, chased by the butter dish, and I could only assume that Leah couldn’t be bothered to come in and stack those like a normal person.
“Not all of them.”
“And here I thought that for once in your life, you realized you were hungry and had gotten a snack…” Rhian shook her head.
Tess made a face. “Thank you, mom. Get off my case.”
“Tessandra, it really wouldn’t hurt for you to eat a little more,” their father put in, hoping to quell what was likely to become an argument between his daughters. He dropped his knife and dirty napkin on the potato platter as it crept past, settling heavily down towards the floor and then scooting through to the kitchen at a height of about six inches. “You’re going to need the energy when you want to do any major spells.”
“I’ll eat then,” she replied, “Not when I’m busy.”
“No you won’t, you’ll be preparing all your diagrams for it,” Rhian contradicted her. “And it’s your fault if you don’t like the food when you’ve let it go cold.”
“Hey, I know,” Leah said brightly from the doorway, where she had apparently finished clearing plates, “Why don’t we take all the fattening food out of Dad’s diet and feed it to Tess?”
I wasn’t sure which of the two looked more alarmed at the suggestion.
“I don’t have time for…” Tess protested immediately.
“Yes, you do. Finish at least something on that plate,” her mother instructed. “Whatever it is you’re trying to discover will be as available in half an hour as it is right now. And do remember to dispose of those potatoes when you’re done with them.”
“Last thing we want is moldy half-animated potatoes running around the house,” Leah agreed blithely, and I wasn’t entirely sure how much of that was meant to be taken literally. I really shouldn’t be surprised at all anymore.
“Thank you for that charming reminder of the fact that you increase this house’s chaos tenfold,” Rhian said airily. “And for that disturbing mental image that is likely to cause me never to look at those leftover potatoes the same way again.”
“I can’t help it if they already have eyes…”
“Right. Start shoveling your dessert in your face and never say that again.”
I looked around the whole table and saw that everyone was taking this in stride. Leah smirked at me as she watched out of the corner of my eye.
“Mom’s a necromancress,” she reminded me, snickering. “Anything you hear about has probably already happened, and if it didn’t it probably will.”
“…Potatoes?” I said, not entirely sure that I even wanted to know.
“Generally harmless,” her father said, “Except the one time when the girls built a potato gun and continued cannoning the house with spuds until they broke a window. I see that Leah likes to wind you up as well as everyone else.”
I blushed, and Rhian and Tess laughed while Leah looked entirely unrepentant. And here I thought I had a handle on when she was lying.
Everyone dug in on a silence that was significantly less tense than it had been mere moments ago.
“This is good,” Leah’s father said to Rhian, “what is it?”
“Caramel oranges,” she replied, “It’s new in Dalsten, and it’s really not hard to make at all. You could put it in the blender and make a smoothie, but I kind of like it this way.”
“You made this?” I asked politely.
“Yup. That and the rolls and potatoes,” Rhian replied, “I do a lot of cooking around here, since Leah and Tess are more or less banned from the kitchen.”
“Banned from the kitchen?” I asked, sensing a story of the kind that Leah would probably never be persuaded to tell me on her own. “Why?”
“Well, Tess because of a string of incidents that started with what we like to call ‘tail of newt soup’ and -”
“It was a salamander.”
“- ending with the fact that no one cares if it was in the name of science, no person should be expected to put up with finding dead frogs in the freezer on top of their lemon pops. Especially not at the age of six.”
“The process of mummification -”
“Has already been thoroughly researched by someone else in a proper laboratory, Tess. Not in an otherwise sanitary kitchen and most definitely not in the orange juice, salted or not.”
I made a mental note never to drink the orange juice in this house regardless. It just wasn’t worth it.
“Don’t forget the pasta,” Leah put in quickly, and Rhian groaned theatrically.
“That one you had to see to believe,” she told me, “I found linguine on the ceiling a month later. Tess’ sins against the culinary world are too many to name.”
Tess was scowling at her caramel oranges. “I’m not the one who makes trouble in the kitchen, Leah is,” she grumbled.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, I haven’t forgotten Leah,” Rhian said with a big grin. Her mother and father were suppressing laughter at this point, so I assumed they already knew what was coming. And Rhian was hamming it up. “Have you ever seen Leah cook, Ellie?”
I had to admit that I hadn’t, because sandwiches didn’t exactly count and neither did microwave oatmeal or ramen.
“Would she still be sitting here if she had?” Tess asked.
“The problem with putting Leah in the kitchen,” Rhian continued over her sister, “is that she is the single most impatient person in the universe, and she’s a mage. Naturally, something that takes about ten minutes to make is fine and good, but if you have to heat something for longer than twenty minutes - say, if you’re baking…”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Leah said defensively, “and it was for a good cause.”
“Yeah, a lovely birthday for mom, cleaning that up.”
“If flour and powdered sugar are that flammable, they should come with a warning label.”
“Most things are flammable,” Tess said in a superior voice, “eventually.”
“How was I to know?”
“What,” I asked, finally tired of all the allusions, “actually happened?”
Rhian’s grin would not have been out of place on the Cheshire Cat. Or a shark.
“Three words,” she said, “exploding Bundt cake.”
It was at this point that everyone in the room besides me finally cracked and burst out laughing. Tess was snickering, Leah was struggling to keep her mask of disgruntlement intact, and Rhian and their father were practically falling out of their chairs, while their mother shook her head, chuckling. The mental image that inevitably formed - that of a very angry young Leah covered in cake - filtered through my brain and settled there like a brick, and I started giggling as well.
“Okay, it was pretty bad,” Leah finally admitted.
“Bad?” her mother asked, “We had to fix the roof!”
“And we had nothing but cold food for nearly a month while mom tried to find a new oven!” Rhian said, shouting with laughter.
“To this day, I do believe that there is a badly beaten Bundt cake pan embedded in the ground somewhere on this island,” their father said, attempting to keep a straight face.
It was an extremely unlikely meteor.
“Well, if I find it, I’ll let you know,” I said, eliciting another wave of laughter.