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“What is that?” Kali asked, looking at the five foot tall stuffed animal in the living room.
“I don’t know, I think it’s a beaver.” Gabriel replied from his recliner surrounded by candy.
“And where did you get it?” Kali asked, still looking at the toy in disdain. Gabriel was crazy if he thought she was letting him actually keep that thing.
“You remember that fight we had right?”
“How could I forget, you still haven’t apologized.” Kali snorted.
“I wasn’t wrong in the first place.”
“Yes you were.”
“Anyway…” Gabriel continued while eating a few gumdrops. "I was out and about when I ran across Buc-ees.”
“What is a Buc-ees?” Kali asked, sitting on the sofa and finally able to see everything that Gabriel had brought home.
Not only had he brought home a tall stuffed toy beaver, but it was wearing a red hat and shirt with what appeared to be the store logo on it, a yellow circle with the same beaver in it with the name of the store under it. She couldn’t see it from the sofa, but on the back of the shirt was a peace sign, a heart and another beaver, with the words “Peace, Love and Beavers” written under them. Gabriel was surrounded by a small lake of candy and on his head was the most atrocious hat she had ever seen, even more so then the beer drinking hat. It consisted of a red baseball cap with fuzzy brown ears on the top.
Gabriel noticed her looking at the hat. “You like?” he asked, taking the hat off. “It’s even got a tail.” He spun it around and showed Kali the beaver tail that hung from the back. Kali groaned and rubbed her temples. Of course it had a tail… There was a soft thump of something landing on the sofa next to her. She was afraid to look and kept her eyes shut.
“C’mon, look already, it’s not gonna bite you.” Gabriel said as he moved on to the chocolate he had brought back.
Kali looked at him and then down at the bag. It was an oversized tacky turquoise and glass “diamond” encrusted purse. “How much of that candy did you bring back?” she asked, gingerly picking up the bag.
“Nearly all of it, everything but the sugar free. No wait, I brought back a bag of that because the gummi strawberries weren’t too bad. They have a wall of candy ten feet tall and like, seventy feet long and a foot deep.” Gabriel grinned, gesturing at Kali to open the bag. “Ignore what the bag looks like, out of all of the choices, that was the nicest.” Kali suppressed a shudder and opened the bag.
“So why were you there?” she asked as she looked into the bag.
“Because it looked interesting and I was curious. They’ve got a meat market in there that had the best roast beef and their giant rice krispee treats were awesome. There were four soda dispensers, well until I drank them, there were four. The beer selection was okay, but I mainly liked the candy. Go on, look at what I got you; the place is like the Wal-Mart of truck stops.”
Kali suppressed yet another shudder and slowly reached into the bag. The first items she pulled out were two bags of hard candy, red hots. The next was a much smaller version of the stuffed beaver in the living room. After that it was a tie-dyed shirt with the “Peace, Love, Beavers” motif on it. Then it was a handful of silver jewelry wrapped in a sheer dark red scarf, followed by several chunks of light blue calcite wrapped in a blue and green tie dyed shirt. The last item was a cami and underwear set done in camouflage. Kali stared at the set for several seconds. Camouflage. He had gotten her a cami set in camouflage. She let the set slip into her lap unsure what to say. Some of what she had gotten was nice, but some just left her at a loss for words. She didn’t know what exactly she’d be doing with some of it, but she was sure she could find a use for it.
“”You don’t like it.” Gabriel said, swallowing a gummi shark.
“No, I do. I’m just trying to think of what I’m going do with it is all.”
The stuffed beaver was target practice when Gabriel wasn’t paying attention. Kali wished she could do the same to his, but he would have noticed that. With the exception of a star pendent, the jewelry was melted down and reformed into something she could actually use. The candy she ate, it was surprisingly good. The stones became a part of her garden and the scarf was stolen by the baby dragon and turned into a hammock.
She still has no idea how but it was. She happily looked the other way when he stole the shirts for nesting material.
The cami set was shoved into the back of a dresser drawer and forgotten about until one day after a shower. She didn’t really feel like getting dressed in actual clothes, so she dug out the cami and the underwear. Kali looked at the set and wrinkled her nose at the camouflage before putting it on.
She would never ever say it out loud, but the set was actually rather comfortable. Gabriel would never know about it or she would never hear the end of it.
The End.