The Good-bye Present

“What have you got?” my friend asked when she opened her front door.

I grinned and handed her a pan of iced cinnamon rolls. “I thought your family might like something to snack on while they worked.”

Karen was moving that week, so I had baked cinnamon rolls, bringing Kami along with me to deliver them.

“Oh, Gale,” Karen exclaimed, “they look delicious!”

“Yes they do,” Joseph, her twelve year-old son agreed as he joined his mother at the door.“Hey, Kami,” he added, grinning at my daughter. They were the same age, and had been friends for the past five years. “Can we have one, mom?”

“Sure,” his mother laughed, as Joseph grabbed the pan out of his mother's hand.

“What can I do to help you pack?” I asked Karen as I surveyed the the living room stacked high with un-assembled boxes.

“There really isn't anything, yet,” Karen claimed. “The movers are coming tomorrow, and they will pack everything for us. All I'll have to do is supervise, then clean when they are done.”

“Can I help you clean?” I asked.

“Well, if you really want to, but you've done enough just bringing the rolls.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Joseph said as he and Kami walked back into the living room, carrying cinnamon rolls on paper plates. He grinned at me, then stuffed a huge corner of roll into his mouth.

His grin faded as his eyes grew wide and a look of surprised distaste appeared on his face. “Yuck!” he said as he spit a mouthful of roll out on the plate. “What's in these?”

Karen looked at her son with a horrified look on her face, embarrassed at his rudeness, but Kami was spitting on her plate, too.

“Mom! What did you do to these rolls?”

“I don't know,” I said in confusion, looking between the two kids. “What's the matter with them?”

“Salt,” Kami and Joseph said in unison, wiping their mouths with their hands. “They're awful mom,” Kami added.

Karen and I looked at each other, then I reached out and took a tiny bit of Kami's roll and put it in my mouth.

“Uhggg!” It really was disgusting.

“I'm so sorry,” I apologized. “I don't know what happened, but these are disgusting.”

“I bet I know,” Kami told me with a wicked grin on her face. “Krissi's been trying to do practical jokes all week. I bet she added salt to the dough.”

“She wouldn't do that,” I defended my youngest daughter. But honestly, I couldn't think of any explanation for how salt got into my rolls.

In the end, Joseph and Kami discovered they could eat the top part of the rolls, the frosting was fine, but they threw the rest of them away.

I went home and tried to figure out what happened to my rolls.

“Krisann,” I called my ten year-old daughter to come into the kitchen. “Do you know how salt got into the cinnamon rolls?”

“Well, maybe it was in the sugar,” she told me sheepishly. I opened the sugar canister and stuck my finer in to taste it. Sure enough, Salt!

“What did you do?” I demanded.

Krissi looked at me cautiously, trying to see just how mad I was, I guess. To tell you the truth, I was actually beginning to chuckle over the whole thing. It really was kind of funny. I guess Krissi could tell I wasn't too upset, because she finally admitted emptying a whole container of salt into my sugar. That darned girl!

In the end, I emptied out the sugar/salt mixture, filled the canister with just sugar, and made a new batch of cinnamon rolls. The next day I took Karen the good rolls, and spent the afternoon helping her clean her newly emptied house. We said goodbye to our friends that evening, knowing we would probably never be neighbors again.

“But when Karl retires,” I told Karen after my final hug, “you really should think about coming back to Arizona and moving up to Snowflake with us. I promise, I won't bring you salty cinnamon rolls as a moving in present.”