93. The Birthday Cake Leprechaun

As everyone well knows, Michael celebrates his birthday many times throughout the summer. This year he decided to begin celebrating at the Patay-Gutom Burguer in Wee Elmira and invited Don Alonso and Mr. Panza to order all they pleased and when he noticed they were abstaining from tasting things Michael thought they might like so he wouldn’t go broke, Michael ordered these too, as well as a birthday cake with one candle in the middle of it. It was a chocolate and vanilla ice cream cake  with peanut butter icing and decorated with slivers of hazelnuts and almonds. And his guests liked it a lot. As a matter of fact, they found everything about the burger exotic, except some of the conversations they heard and secretly recorded. These were a little sad.

     

There were children there coming to a classmate’s own birthday party and they coincided with other kids who hadn’t been invited, and that was a little pathetic.

There was a mom who wanted for herself a Smiling Through Meal, which was the cheapest box with a toy for kids in it, because the grandparents she lived with had never been able to afford to buy her even that when she was little and now she was collecting these toys.

There were kids all drinking from the same paper glass who were sure to spread the bad cold two of them already had and as if that were not enough one of them had the idea of refilling the glass with water from a toilet.

But of all the conversations they took note of, the one that moved them into interfering with the humans was that of three teenagers who were always hungry and didn’t have enough money to buy a satisfactory meal each.

The teens – two boys and a girl - spent a while arguing about what they could buy with the little money they had and finally decided to split a menu this way: the girl would get the salad so she could diet even if she didn’t need to, one boy would eat the hamburger without the bun, and the bun would go to the other boy along with a sundae because he wasn’t lactose intolerant.The fries and the drink they would split among all three.  

“We have a lot of leftovers,” said Michael. “Shall we let those kids have them? There’s far more here than in three large menus.”

Sancho and Don Alonso were pleased to say yes. They had wanted to suggest this themselves but weren’t sure if Michael might not have other plans for the leftover food. As for the teenagers, they were thrilled. 

When Michael got back home that afternoon, he found on his kitchen table a large cardboard box and a note from Fiona. It said she had baked a cake for his birthday dinner that night. Michael peeked inside the box.The great big cake in it had pastel green icing on the sides and was topped by a field of sugar clover, with a toy leprechaun and his pot of gold standing in it. 

Michael sealed the box carefully and left it where he had found it. That evening, when he served the cake after blowing the candles,  he removed the toy leprechaun carefully and put it in a clean teacup on the table thinking it would be safe there until the party was over and he could find a better place to keep it.   

                   

But when Michael cleaned up after the party, he found the leprechaun was no longer in the cup, or anywhere about. It had clearly gone missing. Michael was puzzled as to what could have become of the leprechaun. None of his guests would have lifted it, he was sure of that. 

“Alpin’s not here,” he thought. “And he wouldn’t have taken just the leprechaun. And I can’t think of anyone else who might have. Surely it can’t have gone off on its own, can it?”