“Anything you want, dear. Anything you want.”
We have an unwritten rule at home: let Mum wake up in her own time. It’s like that maxim, “Happy wife, happy life.” Let her be and she’ll wake up and be her chatty self.
Wake her up suddenly, and you may get a statement like, “Do that again and I’ll knife you.”
It comes across like she means it.
So I tread lightly in the morning, making sure my clothes aren’t too hard to find to avoid banging around too much. Or … the knife!
That bad?
I’ve never pushed it to find out.
Until now …
We have a new puppy, called Kiki, and she’s Mum’s dog, not mine. So every morning when I get up to take her for a walk, Kiki looks at me glumly as if to say, “Oh, it’s just you.” She drags her paws on the walk. That is, until she sees our house again, and then there’s no stopping her. I open the door, unleash her and off she dashes to see Mum. I run after her, trying not to shout, knock things over or make any noise whatsoever to warn Kiki about the knife. But Kiki takes no heed, and before I can say anything, she’s run into the bedroom. And my hands shoot up to my head, “Holy shit!”
But then I hear … a giggle.
My wife is laughing!
I get to the bedroom and peer in to see Kiki leaning up on the bed licking her face, and my wife is smiling and laughing, and saying, “There’s a good girl.”
I dash off to make her a coffee, enjoying from afar what has become a daily occurrence: my wife laughing in the morning, and heartily at that. I return to the bedroom and hand her the coffee and she says, “Let’s go to the beach. The surf may be good.”
I rush to get the kids up, pack the bags, put the surfboards on the car. All with a kick in my step. My wife is not far behind, still smiling. And right behind her trots a little puppy who can get away with anything. And I mean anything!
