“Eat your orange, right guinea pig?” My mom leans close to my guinea pig’s cage then says in a high squeaky voice, “‘right!’”

“Mom why do you always have to be like that? Talking for Tutti? And why does she always have to agree with you?”

“Because I always talk for the guinea pig, I always talk for the animals. I talked for Cookie, Bou, and Long Legs, I always talked for Long Legs – she always agreed with me of course, and who doesn’t like agreeing with me. They would want to be on the winning side of the argument, not the losing side – right Tutti? ‘Right!’”

My dad walks downstairs. He says that it’s getting awfully late, shouldn’t we be getting to bed soon.

“Yes we should be soon, but your daughter decided to be good and got an orange to eat. She used to not like oranges but now she does.”

My dad says, “Yes she always liked bananas and everything else but not oranges – she’s getting smarter in her old age.”

“Wow”, my mom says, “you look like you have color in your face compared to hers – have you been out a lot? Were you out in the sun a lot in Calgary?”

“No it was overcast there, rainy.”

“Not like me, I’ve been out, you didn’t happen to see me biking in the background on the weather channel did you?”

We shake our heads, and roll our eyes.

“She used to have a dark face, darkest in the family, always tanned. Not like me - red faced. Red faced, I think there must be something that causes that – lobster face. My great grandmother had that too – runs in the family. But yours was the darkest, orange-like sometimes” she says nodding at me.

“Yeah,” my dad says” because she ate so many carrots; like that thing what it’s called?”

“Cookie?” my mom suggests.

“No no – like that rabbit… uh, Bugs Bunny that’s the guy. Like Bugs Bunny.”

My mom, “Yep I used to tell people that you ate three carrots for supper at night, and they thought I meant the tiny ones,” she says gesturing with her hands, “but I meant the big ones. No, I was cheap back then – not so exorbitant buying the little carrots. No you ate the big carrots for supper. Three of them.”

I look over at my dad, while I’m peeling some of the white bits off of the orange. “I usually eat more of the white bits, just so you know.”

“That’s fine I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Well you were thinking it. I could tell.”

“And I was going to tell your mother after you went out of this room.”

“Extra loud so I could hear though.”

“Of course.” He smiles.

“Well I’m going to go put this orange peel into the green box. Good night.”

“Night,” they both say.