Adrift

BON VOYAGE
Coral
The lobsters were all dead. We ran around the newspaper-covered table armed with hammers, smashing the cooked crustaceans as if they were trying to escape back into the ocean.
Bang! Squirt!
“Gotcha!” my cousin Isa shouted, her hammer landing on a giant claw. I held my hammer above the last intact lobster. “Rest in peace,
Homarus americanus,” I said with a solemn voice. Isa snorted. “God, you’re such a nerd, Coral.”
“What?” I gazed at her innocently. “If we’re going to eat it, the least we can do is give it a dignified send-off.” “Send-off, schmend-off…” Isa picked up a morsel of claw meat and
dipped it in a bowl of melted butter. For a second, I kind of felt bad about the lobsters, especially since I’d seen them crawling around, alive, in Uncle Henry’s lobster trap a couple of hours ago. But ever since I could remember, our Bon Voyage Lobster- Clam Bake was an annual tradition. And traditions were really important
in the Bituin-Rousseau family. “Kain na tayo!” Tita Sunshine announced while smacking an empty pot with a wooden spoon.
Uncle Henry sneaked up behind her and took the pot and spoon away. “I think everyone heard you, honey,” he said with a wink.
All five feet and one inch of Tita Sunshine stood taller, as if she could ever reach over Uncle Henry’s six-foot-three frame. It was the same move that Isa used on me whenever she tried to emphasize her seniority. I mean, she was barely a year older, yet she acted as if she were the Gandalf to my Frodo. Truth be told, she was more of a cross between Samwise and Gollum. But most of the time, I just let her believe what she wanted to believe.