Minnie made cupcakes and so help me God, I don’t know if I’m gonna survive.
Usually when she makes somethin’ like this – date squares or molasses cookies or rocky 
road squares or anything like that – I can get by all right if I respect her three day rule. She just expects I’m gonna be my usual pig self and eat as much of it as I can. But for three days after she makes somethin’, she expects to be able to have one of them with her tea after supper, and if she don’t, well there’s gonna be hell to pay.
The other night there Minnie and Rosie are out in the kitchen while I’m watchin’ the hockey game and I notice on one of my trips to the fridge, they’re bakin’ up a storm.
Whatchyis makin’? I said, scoopin’ a big fingerful of chocolatey batter up with my finger. Minnie cracked me with a spoon and Rosie said “Daaaaaaaaaaa” in that way that goes on for about a full minute.
I come out again in the second intermission and I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like in the movies when somebody looks at somethin’ and there’s like a spotlight on it and harp plays and all that – right there in the middle of the kitchen counter was a great big pyramid of cupcakes.
They had four layers of them all rigged up on some kinda stand.
It’s a cupcake pyramid, Minnie said.
I stuffed one in my face.
Triple chocolate.
Now I ask yis, is that fair? Triple chocolate for a fella like me? They had the chocolate cakey part, with chocolate frosting, and like a chocolate pudding down inside the middle of them. Some of them had candy sprinkles on top and some had a cherry.
I had a second one stuffed in my face and a third one in my hand before Minnie was pushin’ me back into the livin’ room to watch the hockey game.
Of course, the hockey game went into overtime. Ya can see where this is goin’. The kids go to bed, and then Minnie throws in the towel and says she’s goin’ to bed. The hockey game goes on and on, end to end, close call after close call. And even though my team ain’t in it, it’s the Stanley Cup finals and if this kinda hockey don’t getchya excited, check your pulse.
Anyway, on one of the commercial breaks I realize I’m not up all by myself at all. There’s a whole town’s worth of cupcakes sittin’ out on the counter. I ran out and got two more and came back in and ate them. Not ten minutes later, there was an offsides and they went to commercial again, so I figured I might as well get another cupcake.
Now, call me lazy if ya want, but I got a real talent for never doin’ more work than I absolutely have to. So, just to save myself the walk from goin’ out to the kitchen every time I wanted a cupcake, I figured it’d make a lot more sense if I just carried the whole cupcake pyramid into the room with me.
The funny thing is, I actually thought to myself, I better be careful carryin’ this in there because if I drop it and Minnie and Rosie lose all their cupcakes, I’m gonna be in big trouble.
So I carried it from the counter right into the coffee table with no problem at all. Not a single Big Billy thing happened on the way, like trippin’ over the dog, or steppin’ on my own pit sock or sneezin’ and makin’ it rain cupcakes everywhere.
What happened next is just a flurry of sugar and chocolate. I’d call it a blackout, but it was so chocolatey, I should probably call it a brown out. I started shovelin’ them cupcakes into my mouth like they were lumps of coal goin’ into a furnace.
I remember through the cakey creamy haze realizin’ there was only one cupcake left on the whole pyramid. I thought to myself, well you’re gonna get it for this anyway, so to hell with it.
I woke up the next day right where I fell asleep in the chair, with the icing-smeared pyramid on the table in front of me and empty cupcake wrappers in a circle around me like giant pieces of fat-guy confetti.
Do you have any idea how many cupcakes were on that thing? Minnie yelled at me, so loud I think the curtains moved.
I was still half asleep, my chocolatey fingers stuck together like I was wearin’ a baseball glove.
I didn’t even have to answer. Because I found out, in a very loud voice, that there was three dozen of them.
I heard all about how much her and Rosie worked on them, and how I ruined the whole thing, and what a rotten so-and-so I am. And I’ll be the first to admit, I deserved all of it. It was a rotten thing to do, so I took it all, both barrells.
She reminded me of the Christmas I ate a whole tin of shortbreads she was gonna give away as a gift, and the day last summer when I cooked and ate a dozen hot dogs all by myself on a Saturday and the kids had nothin’ for a weenie roast that night.
It was some tense for the rest of the day, I tell ya. I got the silent treatment for so long I wondered if she was ever gonna talk to me.
So after supper, I thought I’d try to get back on her good side, and I jumped up to get the tea for us.
Now, I wasn’t thinkin’, so when I broke the silence by askin’ – Do we got anything sweet to have with the tea? I’m not surprised Minnie threw the salt shaker at my head.
John McNeil 