21
While Miranda was crying over Blake’s tiny cupcakes, Maude was in her kitchen staring at Michael-John, who had just screeched, “Enough!,” put down his dictionary, ran outside, gathered chicken eggs, and brought them into the house.
“No more soup,” Michael-John told Walt. “At least not today. Today, I demand eggs!” He stomped his foot, which, because he was wearing slippers, was not very effective.
Maude and Walt stared at Michael-John. “All right,” Walt said, putting a frying pan on the stove.
“Wow,” Maude said to her brother. “That was . . .” What was it? It definitely wasn’t like Michael-John.
“That was something you’d do,” Michael-John said, putting slices of bread into the toaster. “I was sitting on the couch, dreading another soupy meal. I looked at you and thought that if Maude wanted to stop Dad from serving more soup, she’d do something loud and sudden. That’s not what I would do, but then I thought, why not? What’s the worst that can happen? And now look!” Michael-John said happily. “Eggs and toast!”
Hmmmm, Maude thought. If Michael-John did something like her and it worked, maybe she should try doing something like him. After all, she wasn’t having much luck doing things like herself lately. Michael-John had loads of friends, and without Miranda, Maude was just a lonely onion (or was it garlic?) who was too weak to raise (or lower) a theater curtain. Waiting for her eggs, Maude opened a dictionary. She flipped through it, not paying attention, until a word jumped out:
Forgery: noun: the crime of falsely making or changing a written paper or signing someone else’s name.
Maude read the entry again. Forgery?
“Is a letter ‘a written paper’?” she asked, even though she knew the answer.
“Absolutely,” Walt said, putting a steaming plate of scrambled eggs in front of her. “The writer Lewis Carroll once said, ‘The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.’”
Maude took a bite of egg, closed the dictionary, and put her head on top of it. She’d signed “Princess Miranda Rose Lapointsetta” so many times she’d probably forgotten how to sign her own name! She felt sick. Was something wrong with the eggs Walt had just made? Or was it that she, Maude Brandywine Mayhew Kaye, social justice activist extraordinaire, was a criminal!
