That One Time My Brother Really Bugged Me

It was the morning after Thanksgiving at my mom and dad's house. I was in college; my brother was in grad school. My Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Bradley (you can read about my relationship with him here) were visiting for the holiday, and we had just finished a leisurely breakfast when it happened. 

I had come downstairs that morning to find my brother, a notoriously early (and obnoxiously cheerful) riser, and my mom, who is much the same, in the kitchen already. My mom was frying sausage, my brother was sitting on the kitchen counter. When I entered the kitchen (my dad and I were the grumpy ones, although after I had kids I found out that I no longer could afford the luxury of being a crab in the morning), my mother told me she was going to make biscuits and gravy to go with the sausage.

Canned biscuits. Because she didn't want to mess with making them from scratch (or Bisquick, which is as scratchy as she got with biscuits).

(I interrupt this post to present a joke, ca. 1945, that my mother thought was a riot when she was a girl:

          Knock Knock
                Who's there?

          Bisquick.
               Bisquick who?

         Bisquick! Your pants are on fire!

Back to regularly scheduled post.)

I immediately started whining that I didn't want canned biscuits, and my brother joined in. My mom wasn't having any of it, until my brother said, "I'll make them. Do you have Bisquick?"

My mom pulled a box out of the pantry, saying, "It's kind of old. I don't use it very often," and my brother set to work. He produced a pan of beautiful, golden biscuits.

Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Bradley joined us, and we sat around the table, visiting, long after we had all finished eating.

There was one biscuit left on the plate, and as I listened to the conversation, I reached over and picked up the biscuit, cutting it in half across its equator. As I began to spread butter on half of the biscuit, something caught my eye. I looked closer....

A dead weevil was baked into my biscuit half.

I quickly placed the biscuit half, cut-side down, on my plate, then reached for the other half of the biscuit, which I crumbled into bits on my plate, looking for evidence of another weevil, but I didn't find anything. As everyone began leaving the table, I carried my plate into the kitchen, flipped over the biscuit half, and showed my mother the baked-in weevil.

She was horrified.

My brother came in the kitchen at that point, and my mother said, "Show him."

I proffered the biscuit half to him.

He gave it a glance and said, "Huh. Missed one."

Our mouths dropped open.

"I really wanted biscuits," my brother continued, "but when I opened the box, there were bugs inside. I sifted through all of it and fished them out, but I guess I missed one."

Shout out to Christine at
 A Fly On Our (ChickenCoop) Wall:
this drawing thing is HARD!

We never told Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Bradley about the weevils in the biscuits. We figured it was best that they never knew about it.

And I never eat anything that my brother bakes (and he's a pretty darn fine baker, I must admit) without it crossing my mind that he wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing again.

And probably has.

I figure it's best that I never know about it.

Linking to Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop. Prompt #3 Share a story about a sibling that still makes you smile.