It was all we were about on Saturday: Emma Grace’s birthday party. The guests would arrive at one and be gone by three, and from the time we got up in the morning until the very minutes they arrived, it was all streamers and icing and gathering things for games and setting up the punch bowl and tidying the house and trying trying trying to help Emma Grace contain her excitement.
It was a Valentine’s Day party, of course; how could we avoid it? And with a birthday only two days after Valentine’s Day, one could hardly blame me if I always had a Valentine’s Day party– but I don’t. No, we settled on the holiday theme because this time– just this time– the party would be on Valentine’s Day itself. Heart-shaped cake and a game involving hearts and girls decorating with icing and little candies some heart-shaped cookies that they would be taking home in gift bags at the end of the party.
It was during the preparations for one of these things that Emma Grace, standing next to me at the kitchen counter and liberally dispensing her wisdom about my activities, spied the wishbone where it sat on the kitchen windowsill where her father had placed it after roasting some chicken bones in the making of some broth.
“Mom, what’s that?” And I didn’t immediately know the answer to this because I was preoccupied with the frosting of a cake or the tracing of some hearts or the cutting out of some cookies or Something.
But I told her, when I knew, what the wishbone is and how one can use it to make a wish: one holds one “end” and another holds the other “end,” and both of you simultaneously make a wish and pull on your end. The wishbone comes apart and the one with the longer end, in the end (if you see what I mean), gets his wish to come true.
I explained this to her in a distracted sort of way and she went off immediately to find William.
Ah, William, the elder of the older brothers. The one who dispensed tape during the (seemingly endless) task of hanging the streamers; the one who had already (by ten a.m. or so) agreed to oversee the playing of backyard games for the little sister’s birthday party; the one who, for Everett’s sixth birthday (four years ago), designed a treasure map for the backyard treasure hunt– despite the fact that, then as now, he had Better Things To Do. That William was summoned to the kitchen to be at the other end of the wishbone.
It all happened quickly and quietly. I did not look up from my work. I heard it snap, but it was barely a noise at all, nothing to note. And then the gleeful cry from the birthday girl: Emma won the wish.
Oddly– and against all the wishing etiquette of which I am aware– she proceeded to launch immediately into the telling of her wish. But you will understand why, for her wish was as follows: “Ha! I won! Now you have to dress up as a princess for my party, Will. You have to dress as a princess and wear a crown and a dress and gloves and you have to wear make-up and lipstick and dance at my party.”
This was her wish. This. And clearly she would have to inform him of the wish, as there was No Chance in H E double hockey sticks that– had he not been compelled by the wishbone– Will would have complied to even a fraction of what his little sister hoped for.
But they had wished on the wishbone, and Will’s side of the wishbone had, as they say, Fallen Short.
He did not demur. He did not protest. But neither did he honor his sister’s wishes with even a vowel of reaction to her outrageously misplaced hopes. Instead, he told her quietly and with a smile what he had wished for, and with these words erased simultaneously any thought of any possibility that her wish would be fulfilled:
“Oh,” he said, and calmly, “I wished that dad would get a good job.”
