Different Circles

Phil and Dana, the hippies, agreed to clean up their mess and leave the slingshot and its frame behind. The deputies all left before the job was done, but Elsa dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweater and went out, armed with a six cell Maglite, to personally supervise the cleanup and make sure that every last dirty diaper was put back in the lawn and garbage bag and taken away. Phil and Dana were quite intimidated by Elsa, who lectured them the entire time about common law property rights, the fallacy of using vandalism to advance one’s radical environmentalist causes, the philosophical basis of the sanctity of a man’s castle and why that sanctity should be honored above all but the family unit, and the coming breakdown of western civilization that the hippies and everyone like them were currently fomenting.

“And make sure you do not show your faces around here ever again,” were her parting words to the couple as they climbed back into their rancid smelling microbus with their bag of dirty diapers.

Phil promised they would never show their faces there again and they drove off just before sunrise, their microbus belching out a stinking cloud of hydrocarbon exhaust that lingered in the still air for the better part of thirty minutes. Elsa walked slowly back to her quarters and then took a shower and changed into her working clothes. She then made her way over to the main house to start the Monday duties. Mondays were the worst, and not just because the whole week was stretched out before her. Though Jake and Laura took care to keep the house clean, the laundry done, the garbage emptied, the dishes cleaned and put away over the weekend, they still could not keep things up to her standards of cleanliness and order. Thus, she would spend a good portion of each Monday spot-cleaning all over the house to bring things up to her standards. And now, she was going into a Monday morning after missing her last three hours of sleep thanks to those uncouth ruffians.

She entered the kitchen door and saw that Jake, now showered and dressed, was at the stove. The smell told her that he was cooking omelets—vegetable and cheese omelets to be exact.

“What is this?” she asked him, surprised. Jake never cooked breakfast during the workweek.

“I thought I’d give you a little break since you had to deal with the hippies,” he told her.

“Oh ... well ... thank you,” she said, surprised and pleased.

“I’ll even clean up before I go,” Jake said. “Of course, I know you’ll just come behind me and clean everything again, but at least I’ll get the first layer knocked down.”

She smiled. “That is very thoughtful, Jake,” she said.

“Go sit down,” Jake told her. “I’ll bring you your omelet and you can eat at the kitchen nook with us.”

“But it wouldn’t be proper,” she said.

“Don’t give me that crap, Elsa,” Jake said. “You just spent almost two hours outside in the cold with a couple of dirty diaper smelling hippies. You are going to eat breakfast with us.”

“Well ... okay,” she said. “If you insist.”

“I insist,” he said. “Where did you put that slingshot?”

“I dismantled it and put it in the garbage where it belongs,” she told him huffily.

His face fell a bit. “Aww, man,” he whined. “I told you I wanted to keep it.”

“Yes,” she said, “so that you and Miss Cadence can one day use it to shoot rocks into the ocean. Ridiculous. I will not hear of such shenanigans. That device has been cut into little pieces and rendered harmless.”

“What a rip,” Jake said, shaking his head.

Elsa went into the kitchen nook and found Laura there. She too was showered and dressed for her day. She had her blouse open and the little flap on her nursing bra down. Caydee, still dressed in her footie pajamas, was suckling on Laura’s left nipple. Elsa smiled at the sight, making a point to enjoy it because she would not be seeing it much longer. Caydee was down to only nursing from the source in the mornings now. The rest of the day she was fed with bottled breast milk and sometimes formula. At night, they added a little bit of rice cereal to the bottles to fill her tummy a little more and encourage more sleep time.

“Good morning, Laura,” Elsa greeted. “And good morning Miss Cadence.”

Caydee, hearing her name (the name that virtually no one but Elsa routinely called her) let go of the nipple and looked over at her. She smiled, cooed a little, and then went back to her breakfast.

“Were you and Jake able to get any more sleep after the deputies left?” Elsa asked.

“I got a little,” Laura said. “And I can sleep on the plane. Jake didn’t get any more though. He stayed in the computer room to watch you and the hippies on the monitors.”

“Wanted to make sure you didn’t kill them,” Jake said, bringing two plates with omelets on them into the nook.

“I did not want to stand close enough to them to perform violence on them,” Elsa said. “They were rather aromatic.”

“Because of the diapers?” asked Laura.