Taxing Times

“Why is our refund so. . .numerically deficient?” I paused without signing the tax returns and wrinkled my nose in an “Okay who made the stinky?” face so Bill Dear would appreciate the gravity of the situation and conjure a larger refund out of random bits of dust and dog hair.

“That’s all we get.” He said with a shrug and a blank look. He is not as proficient as I am in the art of conversation by facial expression. Now that I think of it, his blank look is the only conversational facial expression he has, excepting his “Everyone is going to die” face, which I can cause him to produce with astounding regularity.

“But last year we got twice as much.” Here I added my “This deficit is obviously the fault of some politician who owes me money. Otherwise it’s your fault in which case you’d better cough up some dough” face.

“We could only claim one son.”

“But I’ve got the stretch marks to prove two children and a small elephant.” I have a face for this, but it couldn’t possibly help the situation at this point.

“It doesn’t matter. We can only claim one son as a dependent.”

“I cook potatoes five nights a week. Anything that moves slowly through my kitchen gets grill marks. There is enough ice cream in our refrigerator to open our own Baskin Robbins outlet store. And there is a pallet of Fruity Pebbles sprouting groves of fruit trees with artificial flavors on the back porch. Don’t tell me they’re not dependent.”

“Son One has a job. He filed his own tax return.”

“Oh sure, I wait 20 years for him to do something by himself and he picks tax time. Why wasn’t he this prompt when he was potty training?”

“Because he didn’t get something nice direct deposited in his bank account for that.”

“He gave me a direct deposit, but I can’t say it was that nice.”

“Just be glad you didn’t get dividends.”

“No, but I got a surprise in his bathwater once.”

“That’s okay. If we kept good records over the year we can itemize and maybe we'll come out better.”

“Great.”

“Okay, where’s the box?”

“The box?”

“The box with all our receipts so we can see what we spent.”

“Oh, we didn’t have a box that was big enough.” I handed him a huge, black garbage bag, it’s contents bulging like it belonged to a pre-Christmas Eve Santa.

He peered inside. “There’s nothing in here but empty Girl Scout cookie boxes.”

“Right. You wanted to know where our money went.”

“It all went for Girl Scout cookies?”

“Yep, but I was smart.” I dug way down past flattened cardboard cartons, crinkly wrappers and cookie crumbs and pulled out one last perfect box full of Thin Mints.

“What’s that?”

“I’m way ahead of the government." I took a bite of cookie heaven. "This is our stimulus package.”

Bill Dear gave me a look. And it wasn’t his blank expression.

I think I'm gonna need a bigger box.