Alternating Between Trickery and Patience

Mike assuages The Captain’s delicate sensibilities through lies that inflate his ego

I’d pleaded with my eyes and asked with my mouth that Emma please get us into our temporary permanent residence before I started my job on Monday, and she did it.

And after a hapless day of seeing houses in the rain the night before I started my new job, she got us a suite on the first floor.

“And I cried and cried when I saw it. ”

And I cried and cried when I saw it.

The vibes were off. Particularly, I hated the tiles in the bathroom. They reminded me of Mr. Frank’s house, our next door neighbor when I was three. My mom began her career as a cleaning lady, cleaning Mr. Frank’s house and caring for his wife. Every day, I would go and sit silently, afraid to touch anything or make a noise. There were no toys. Mr. Frank and his wife were in their 70s, and Mrs. Frank was newly in need of a caregiver. And when I saw the tiles in the bathroom of our new first floor suite I cried, and like an idiot exclaimed that “the vibes were off.”

Not like maybe leaving my house, job, friends, and family with three possible demon/animal hybrids and a pretty great boyfriend might cause me to be emotional. It was entirely the tile.

But without question, Mike looked at me, heard what I was saying, went down to the front desk, came back up twenty minutes later, and handed me a new room key. The key to a second floor suite directly above the first suite that looked exactly the same minus the tiles, and I looked at him and soberly explained why the vibes were not off in this one, as opposed to the other one.

And he nodded.

Then, we spent four hours moving into our new room. We locked ourselves out just once, begging our surrogate mom, Emma, for a new room key. She obliged.

It took two hours to move our lives again - our toiletries, our clothes, our food, and two hours to move the things we were responsible for keeping alive - our plants and our animals.

I’m not sure how The Captain stays so satisfied with himself, but I think it’s inversely related to how little he’s accomplished

The Captain was the last to go.

“I stood outside the room in the hall, smiling and half waving at passersby while electing to not explain that my presence in the hall and non-presence in the room was a direct result of my son hating me from birth.”

We hadn’t seen him since check-in, and spent the majority of that two hours alternating between trickery and patience. A large part of that time involved Mike gently assuaging him with compliments both true and false to inflate The Captain’s sense of self worth so exaggeratedly that he’d find it difficult to continue to hide under the bed. I stood outside the room in the hall, smiling and half waving at passersby while electing to not explain that my presence in the hall and non-presence in the room was a direct result of my son hating me from birth.

Eventually, we resorted to treats, which in hindsight it’s weird that we didn’t start with treats, like maybe we thought we’d insult his sensibilities or that’d we’d be treating him like an animal??

All that matters is that we did get him into our temporary permanent residence in a hotel across the street from an Arby’s.