Eventually I pulled myself away. “OK”, I reluctantly asked, “how can I make it up to you?” This was our little predefined code for when one of us conceded that we were in the wrong. At this his smile broadened spectacularly, at which I felt so relieved.
“I’m so glad that you asked that.” (This phrase too was an established part of our “making up” routine.) “I was thinking that you could be on heavy chores for a week.” Well it was not like there were many options. It was solo dinner duty, heavy chores, or daily washing the car. While we had agreed on these as fair ways to make up to one another, what invariably happened too is that we would enthusiastically throw ourselves into our supposedly week-long “punishments” for only two days at most, then we would both forget, and fall back into life as normal – possibly because we loved cooking together and just generally hanging out together and somehow we would always find an excuse to come to disturb one another while working out our punishments. “Do you mean heavy chores for two days?!” At this we both really laughed, and then we hugged again, and this time the hug seemed to last for the rest of the day, and the week, and the month.
THE END
