The Thing About Flip Flops

Chapter Thirty Two: Failed Parenting, Vasectomies and Ketchup Cake

I can't help chuckling alongside him because his laughter is infectious.

With a jolt of surprise I realise I've been staring at him for way too long and I drag my eyes away forcefully.

"Henry I guess..." I answer.

Jack finishes his seizure of laughter and clutches his stomach, which is probably aching from laughing so hard. "God you're so weird. Where do you come up with these things, A?" He asks me while shaking his head.

I roll my eyes, "What can I say, I'm special."

"So are you going to let me in or am I going to have to stand out here for the rest of my life?" He asks with a teasing expression on his face.

Relenting, I move aside from where I stand in the doorway and jerk my chin in the general direction behind me, a casual gesture for him to come in.

He shrugs off his leather jacket and tosses is on the couch without a care in the world, making me raise an eyebrow and say sarcastically, "By all means, make yourself at home."

"Thanks for the hospitality," Jack replies in a random posh sounding accent, "Would you be so polite as to extend that to food? And beverages?"

"Idiot," I mutter under my breath but lead him to the kitchen anyway.

I open the fridge and see that we don't have that much on hand in terms of snacks, just stuff like eggs, milk and leftover pasta and also for some reason a jar of those really sweet cherries that you get on top of ice creams at fancy restaurants.

"Score!" Jack exclaims, which makes me turn around only to see that he stands with one hand jammed into his pocket and the other on the door of the cabinet we have that's full of snacks and random food objects. He seems to be scanning past the cereal boxes, cans of soup, and a family-sized bag of tortilla chips. Then I notice that he's talking about a box of store bought Betty Crocker cake mix that he just picked up.

I shake my head, "Nah it takes a while for it to bake and I don't want to be sitting around for half an hour trying not to be tempted by the smell of cake."

Jack chuckles and says with a mischievous look in his eyes, "We could always do something to pass the time while we wait..."

I smack his arm lightly in an annoyed response. He just ignores this and keeps pleading me to let him make the cake. Eventually I give in just to stop him pestering me so much.

"Fine, we can make it! But when it goes wrong you're taking all the blame."

Jack snorts a laugh, "It's store bought cake mix, how hard can it be?"

"Well I'm a terrible cook so it's hard, like really really hard," I tell him and suddenly clap my hand over his mouth as he attempts to open it, most likely to make a dirty joke about me using the word hard. "Don't you dare."

He rolls his eyes and pushes my hand off his mouth with his own. "C'mon it'll be fun, plus my dad's a chef, remember? I've learnt a lot from my dad."

***

Jack Golden has not learnt a lot from his dad.

You know what, I would actually make the argument that he has learnt nothing. Of course, I'm not any better at cooking than he is so I can't really judge him.

I mean, it's a packaged cake mix. Literally, there aren't even that many steps in total. And yet Jack and I manage to screw up every single one without fail.

"I blame failed parenting," Jack explains to me after the cake fiasco. "It's not my fault."

But this is basically how it went: