To Sing Frogs Chapter 26a

 

Last Pictures at the Vlad Inn

Chapter 26

 

Up in the Air

 

  “Anya!” Stass ejected while rolling his eyes. “We don’t have time to eat.”

“Sure we do. I just want some pancakes. I’ll ask them to hurry.”

“Oooiiiii, Aaaanyaaah!”

Anya was one of the few non-North-Americans who had gone to the trouble of acquiring a taste for Maple Syrup. The Vlad Inn was one of the only places outside of North America that had it. They also served American styled pancakes rather than crepes. Anya couldn’t resist them. She walked into the restaurant and took a seat. We all followed. Stass brought up the rear mumbling another one of his prayers in Russian.

“Are we going to be okay on time?” I asked, sensing his level of frustration.

“We should be fine. We just won’t have time to spare if anything goes wrong.”

That was Anya, though. She was a sweetheart, but you couldn’t get her in a hurry if you turned a fire hose on her. Bill and I asked for Cokes. Amy ordered apple juice for her and the kids just to be cordial; we had already eaten lunch. Amy and I were nervous. Bill was calm as ever. Stass didn’t order anything. He just sat in his chair and scowled.

By the time Sarah’s juice was gone she couldn’t be contained. We had gone through the soft books earlier and showed her that today we were going to Moscow. The little girl couldn’t wait to get on the plane. Sarah was winding up her sister too. Denney’s twenty-pound head had been replaced with a twenty-pound liver. He felt miserable and nothing was getting him excited. Thankfully he wasn’t any worse than he had been the day before. He was still bad enough so all he wanted was to be cuddled by his mother. Amy was in her element.

“I’ll take the girls outside to wait,” I said. I needed to get Sarah outside before I was met with a hefty repair bill. I was also stupid enough to think it might persuade Anya to hurry. She still had two of three pancakes left. We would apply pressure from the outside. Stass would attempt to force-feed her in the restaurant. It wouldn’t make a difference much as we hoped it would. I remembered our agent from Adoption Associates telling me you might as well try to push a rope as to push a Russian. Anya sat coiled on her chair and savored each bite of her lunch.

We wandered the paths through gardens outside the lobby while looking at all of the flowers. We took last pictures with the miracle buttercups just outside the door. Everyone but Denney smiled for the camera. His red cheeks glowed like beacons.

 

 

“She says she can’t give you boarding passes until we pay the fee. She has to charge you because you changed the tickets from yesterday to today,” Stass translated.

I told that to Stass before we approached the window. He had insisted that we try anyway. “Great, I said while pulling out my wallet and fingering a credit card. How much?”

“We don’t pay here. We pay over there.” Stass pointed to a queue several windows down. Just my luck, a single-file-line for the first time ever in Russia. People say there are lines for everything in Russia. They don’t mean single-file lines. Usually they mean crowds. Sometimes they mean arrowhead shaped groups of people that start with a few individuals at the back. The “line” broadens with people crowding until reaching a total of about fifteen people wide near the front. Finally the hoard narrows to three people at a window, each trying to reach in further than the next. If it had just been the usual crowd I could have elbowed to the front like a true Russian. Everybody in Russia knows the person crowding to the front is obviously in a bigger hurry than they are. While in such a situation they might have given me dirty looks nobody would have said anything. It didn’t matter. Murphy’s Law and Darwin’s theory were both playing out before my very eyes. Russians were evolving to the point of forming single-file-lines. They were doing it right then. Why couldn’t Russians evolve to “Queue Use” in another three million years? If anything could go wrong it probably would. Stass and I went to the back of the line.

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