Page 71 of Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
“I was just making us a little snack,” Nadine says. “Welcome to stay. You like dino nuggies?”
“Who doesn’t?” I say. “So, what’s this Barbie movie about?”
Bella rolls her eyes, like I should definitely know this. “Barbie and her sisters go to a small town and sing songs and have the best Christmas ever.”
“It’s actually kinda okay,” says Ian. “And we can draw. Maybe I’ll get an idea.”
“More the merrier,” says Nadine.
Bella heads back to the TV room. “You can’t sit on the couch with me, though, Henry. It’s my turn to lay on it with the Ravens blanket. You can have the chair.”
I was in a decentmood a few minutes ago, because the Barbie cartoon was surprisingly cute and because Nadine’s dino nuggies really hit the spot. Now, though, I’m grimacing as I walk through Grace’s neighborhood holding the humane trap.
“It’s not that cold,” I tell the mice, but of course it is, and I’m freezing my ass off.
The playground is desolate: frozen teeter-totters and empty swings rocking back and forth. At the drop-off point, what little water is left is topped with a glaze of ice.
When I set the cage down and open it, the mice do nothing. I givethem a second, then lift one end and try to pour them out, but that doesn’t work, either. I shake the cage, then smack the back like dislodging ketchup.
“Come on, guys,” I say. “You gotta go.”
My only option, I’m realizing, is to pull them out, probably one by one. Normally, a move like that would take some emotional gearing up, but it’s cold and I want to get this over with, so I take a deep breath, reach in, and find that the mice have huddled together for warmth. As I pull one away, it squeaks and squirms in my hand.
“Shit,” I say. “Goddammit, I’m sorry.”
The mouse goes rigid, either from fear or the cold. I set it on the ground, but the instant I let it go it leaps up and attaches itself to my shin. Thankfully Ian isn’t here for my scream, which echoes through the woods. I nearly swat the thing, but then I see that it’s looking at me. I shake my leg a few times, but its eyes, beady and damp, stay fixed on mine. I’m not scared of it anymore, or skeeved out, because I can see what’s happening. With its tiny nails dug into my jeans, the mouse is pleading with me. It knows that if I leave it here it’ll die.
I pull it as gently as I can from my leg and set it back in the trap with the others. “Okay,” I say. “You win.”
I’ve driven by this Petcoon York Road a hundred times, but I’ve never been inside. There’s a bin full of candy cane–shaped dog chewies beside me, and I’m talking to a skinny young man with green streaks in his hair who works here.
“Um, yeah, those’re some pretty nice mice, man,” he says. “But, um, yeah, we don’t really take, like, donations.”
“You can’t sell them?” I ask. “You could just stick them in with those mice over there. No one would know, right?”
We look to an aquarium near the Guinea pigs that’s full of mice. They’re sticking their heads out of cardboard forts and climbing on one another, living it up. One stands on its hind legs atop a plastic riser, like it’s giving a speech.
“Those aren’t the same kind, though,” he says.
“They aren’t?” I ask.
Warm now in the trap, the mice—mymice—stare at me. They stared at me like this from the passenger seat on the way here, too.Thanks for not killing us,they seemed to be saying.But where are we going?
“Nah, man. We get ours from corporate. Like, an official inventory, tested for funguses and stuff. Lots of red tape.”
“Oh,” I say. “I had no idea.”
“If you’re dying to get them off your hands, I could feed them to the snakes. But the fact that you’re here looking to put them up for adoption makes me kinda think that’s not your jam, though. Yeah?”
Yeah. Saving them from a slow death by exposure only to feed them to snakes is something only a cartoon villain would do. Plus, the looks on Ian’s and Bella’s faces—particularly Bella’s—if they ever found out would haunt me.
There’s a guy in line behind me holding a bag of dog food the size of a beanbag chair. “Mind if I pay for this, bro?” he asks. “My back’s starting to go numb.”
The Petco guy looks at me, waiting. The guy with the dog food looks at me, too. So do six displaced mice.
It’s then that I notice Petco is running a special on aquariums. Twenty-five percent off. Not a bad deal.
The Holiday
