MC Part 2 #4
“Duke, if you had a cigarette in your hand, you’d look like that actor, what’s-his-name.” Maggie said, up to her elbows in soapsuds.
“Who? Bill Murray?” Duke replied from the other side of the milking parlor sink.
Now that their guests were long gone, they were catching up on sterilizing steel milk buckets. They couldn’t have their clients wandering around with plastic jugs full of their products—Thorson Dairy specialized in small production/ultra-high quality dairy products, and had a certain reputation to uphold—when the steel containers looked and performed better.
“You do not look like Bill Murray!” She stuck her tongue out at him and threw a colony of soap bubbles at him. They didn’t fly far.
“Not even when he was younger? ‘He’s right here, Ray. I think he can hear you. Aaaargh!’”
“Quoting scenes from ‘Ghostbusters’ won’t make you look more like him, you goof!”
“I feel like I’ve been slimed after all the insanity of yesterday and this morning.” He stood up and leaned backward, trying to stretch out his spine. Wearing elbow-length rubber gloves, he looked more like a mad scientist than a farmer.
“Well, we don’t drink like we used to, and we don’t party hard.” Maggie smiled to herself, remembering their younger (but not too far past) days. “Also, I’m pretty sure we’ve never had paranormally-active mead before.”
“Ha! We need to remember this the next time I get an urge to invite Murky and his pack of jolly friends.”
“Speaking of him and his gang, did Mike hang around after everyone left?”
“Who? You mean the gangly boy with long blond hair?” Duke gently throttled his memory, in hopes of improving the fuzzy image in his mind.
“That’s him. Patti told me she wanted to ask him about updating the farm’s website, and I was just wondering if they’d connected.”
“The way she and Logan stick together, I don’t think you could coat them in olive oil and expect them to slide apart.”
“Are you going to suggest that to them for their wedding night, honey?” Maggie smirked, fully aware she was sticking her toes into a tense family issue.
“Gah.” Duke shook his head.
“Still having trouble coping over our little girl being a grown woman?”
“Of course.” Duke sighed. “It seems like yesterday she was this freckle-faced little thing with skinned knees and pigtails.”
“You’ll probably see her that way while you’re bouncing our first grandchild on your knee!”
“Sweet Jesus, Maggie! Don’t say things like that. I don’t even want to think about them getting married, much less making children.” Duke frowned mightily, and applied himself to individually scrubbing every molecule of the milk jug.
She laughed to herself, as amused as she was happy. The thought of grandchildren didn’t bother her one bit, and she knew Duke would fall in love the moment a baby was placed in his arms. After all, she’d seen it happen twice before.
“So, this thing with Cam’s girl and John. What do you think about that?” Duke asked.
“I don’t know. It might work out, or it might end in tears. She is from a different world, and I can’t even imagine what problems that is going to cause.” Maggie turned off the water and dumped out the container she’d been washing. “If she can stay here, in our world… Hell! That’s going to give Immigration and Naturalization a fit!”
“I hadn’t even thought about that.”
“Stacy Keach!”
“What?” Duke tried to follow her train of thought and found himself wandering in the station.
“He’s the actor you’d look like.”