Shama:
“Martha, I think Sheila’s really terrified,” I said, trying to get Martha to bring up her usual sympathetic nature. Martha really wasn’t like this cold-hearted woman she was portraying. Somehow, her daughter kept bringing out the worst in her.
Carlo skipped over to Sheila, put his hand on her shoulder, and said. “It’s okay. I got scared, too. Shama put me up on Frey. He’s big! I thought I was gonna fall, but I didn’t. It was okay. Frey was nice.
“Then I gave him an apple, I was scared then, too. I thought he was going to bite me. He didn’t.”
Francis, always protectively right behind his little brother, was watching this interaction with a worried look in his eyes. His lips were frowning. It was evident that he didn’t trust Sheila. She had been mean to them.
But when Sheila didn’t pounce back with something nasty, Francis decided to add to what Carlo had said. “Frey is big, but he’s gentle. Everyone knows that. He just wants to play and forgets he’s so big.
“That’s because Shama, our mommy, raised him from a colt. From a foal, although I forget which comes first. Shama carried Frey home when he was born because his mother died. That’s like us. Our mother died, and Shama took us home. She’s our mommy now.
“Martha is going to be our grandma. She takes care of us, too. She’s your mother, Shama said, so you’re lucky. But if you’re really, really lucky, Shama will take care of you, too. Then we can all be a family. How come your children didn’t come with you? I think we should meet them, so they can be part of our family, too.”
That was more than I’d ever heard the boys say, even if the things Francis had said might seem a little presumptuous to Sheila, but Francis wouldn’t understand about that. He’d been getting doses of kindness ever since his father’s terrible nastiness. Doses of kindness never hurts anyone, Old Mother used to say, and I agreed.
Francis seemed to run down. He looked like he was waiting to see if Sheila would tell him about her two children. I think they were both also hoping that the woman would realize that Frey wasn’t the threat she’d envisioned . . . certainly not a fire-breathing dragon.
Martha had left even before the boys started speaking, fleeing away from the stress of her daughter’s hysteria and to resume her bunny pancake making. The latter was a good thing, because at any moment, the boys would be starving after they learned that all the excitement was over.
That was the temperament of little boys, I acknowledged to myself. It was nature’s method of protecting them from the trauma of life because while they were filling their stomachs they weren’t thinking about how things were bad sometimes. They were just pleasuring themselves with bunny pancakes. I guess we should all be like that, appeased by something as simple as a hot pancake