Read Online Fresh Eggs by Rob Levandoski - Free Book Online Page B

floor, she pours an inch of orange juice into a glass and fishes in her bottle of Flintstone vitamins for a Barney. She finds one of her tennis shoes in the box by the refrigerator and one under the table in the dining room. Tonight there’ll be a birthday cake on that table and some balloons and crêpe paper dangling from the light fixture. There’ll be presents stacked on the buffet. At least that’s the way birthdays went before God moved her mother’s soul up to heaven.
    She puts on the apron her mother used to wear. It’s many sizes too big, but Gammy Betz has pinned up the bottom, so it doesn’t drag on the ground and make her fall flat on her cute little face. She goes outside to feed Captain Bates and the Buff Orpingtons. And gather their eggs.
    As the day drags on Captain Bates and his hens will wander far and wide in their search for bugs and worms. But right now they’re gathered by the chicken coop door, waiting for that heaping scoop of cracked corn. Rhea showers them with it, just like her mother used to. “Peck-peck-peck,” she says to them, just like her mother used to do. “Peck-peck-peck.”
    There aren’t as many eggs in the nests in the morning as you find in the afternoon, but there are always a few, and you have to collect them, her father says, so no hen gets a notion to set . This morning there are five brown eggs waiting in the nests. Rhea gently puts them in the pouch of her apron. Then she hears a frail cluck-cluck coming from one of the top nests and she stands on her tip-toes to look inside. “What you doing in there Miss Lucky Pants?” she says.
    The white Leghorn pecks sassily at her hand.
    â€œThat’s not nice,” says Rhea. She lovingly scratches the feathers on the hen’s breast. The hen softens her mood and purrs something like a kitten. “You got any eggs under there?”
    Miss Lucky Pants stands proudly. She has three eggs under her.
    It starts to itch between Rhea’s nippie nips. She knows she should collect those three white eggs, take them in the house so her father can scramble them for his breakfast. She knows she should obey her father. But Rhea also knows she’d feel terrible stealing those eggs out from under Miss Lucky Pants. She saved that poor Leghorn hen from the manure pit. Gave her a name. How can she now steal her babies away? How can she let her father scramble them?
    She pushes on Miss Lucky Pants until she’s back on her eggs. The hen kitten-purrs her gratitude.
    Rhea takes the other eggs inside. She washes off the manure and puts them in one of the cartons in the refrigerator. She turns on the television and clicks to the Nickelodeon channel and begins the long wait for her birthday.
    At noon her father comes in for lunch. “You watch too much television,” he yells.
    Rhea hears him, but goes on watching. Lassie is telling Timmy about the abandoned puppies she’s found. She wonders why Biscuit isn’t that concerned for the plight of others. Biscuit just eats and sleeps and leaves big piles of poop on the lawn.
    â€œCome make yourself a sandwich,” her father yells from the kitchen.
    â€œYuk,” she yells back. They’ve had nothing but sandwiches for lunch since her mother died. Every week they go to the Stop’ N Go in Tuttwyler and get lunch meat, bread, and cheese. And it’s always the same kind of lunchmeat—pound of Dutchloaf, pound of bologna—and the same kind of cheese—half pound of Swiss—and the same kind of bread—jumbo loaf of wheat. And on Saturday when they have soup with their sandwiches, it’s always tomato soup, made Cassowary style, half a can of water, half a can of milk, tablespoon of butter, and a quick shake of pepper. Her father’s suppers are better, though just as predictable: hamburgers on Mondays and Saturdays, fried bologna and onions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, spaghetti on Wednesdays, on