spear olive secrecy diagonal corkscrew baby flummoxed despair
The expression on Tim’s face was inscrutable. He gaped open-mouthed at Chase. His eyebrows, twisted into the shape of corkscrew pasta, hung over his dark eyes as they bore into Chase’s own serene gaze.
Chase did not try to determine the meaning of the look. After half a minute of silence, he slid his eyes away from Tim’s. He wielded the toothpick in his glass like a spear and stabbed an olive as dark as Tim’s mood.
Silence stretched long and heavy between them until Tim drew in a deep breath.
Chase stopped chewing the olive and waited for what would come.
Tim exploded with a single word. “Flummoxed!?”
Chase raised his eyebrows in surprise. Because of the proximity of eyebrows and the partial paralysis of the area by his left temple, his eyebrows lifted from left to right in a diagonal line across his forehead.
Tim was usually reduced to helpless laughter by this expression of Chase’s. “You look like a baby surprised by what you’ve just done in your diaper,” he had joked on several occasions. But today Tim would not be distracted from his tirade.
“You feel flummoxed? I can’t believe you just said that!”
“I’m just telling you how I feel,” Chase defended himself meekly. His calm tone and low volume conveyed a sense of secrecy in direct opposition to Tim’s boisterous despair.
“And I’m telling you that I feel ridiculous. I’m a grown man. And my biggest contribution to the world is making some guy’s underwear look good so he can sell them for entirely too much money. $50 for a pair of briefs! Have you ever heard a more ridiculous thing?”
Chase spoke quietly. “I have 6 pairs of them.”
Tim gaped at Chase again. “Your grandfather, the war hero, is probably turning over in his grave.”
“He probably did that the first time I kissed a boy,” Chase replied.