“Sharing” Mangoes With My Sister

Sitting in my car seat, I stared out the window, waiting for my mom to return. She had been gone for about seven minutes, but it felt like an eternity. On trips to the regular supermarket, I would have gone in with her, but this was not a regular market. Regular supermarkets had aisles lined with boxes of cereal drowned in sugar, rows of endless cookies, and a whole section dedicated to chocolate—literal eye candy.
But there was no eye candy in this store. I had only been in there once and it was terrifying. Rows after rows of strange animal “delicacies” like beef heart, chicken feet, and goat head had scarred me for life. They were more like eye vegetables to me, so I dared not go in there and decided to sit and wait in the car with my sister, Cynthia, instead.

When I finally saw my mother come through the door of the supermarket, I began to squirm in my seat. It was not my mother that I had so anxiously waited for, but the special treat she held in the brown plastic bag in her hand.

She stepped into the car and placed the bag in the space between the two front seats. I couldn’t reach it, but I could see what was inside. Mangoes. I desperately wanted to reach out and grab one, but my car seat kept me strapped in tight and I had no idea how to get myself free.
As we began to drive off, the mangoes moved around inside the bag and I could see that there were three of them. This made perfect sense to me—three mangoes for three people, but soon enough we pulled over somewhere and I my dad got into the car. I knew we were on our way to pick up my dad, but I didn’t realize that he may interfere with my happiness. I may not have been smart enough to get myself out of my car seat, but I could do math and four people could not evenly split three mangoes.
As my mother began to distribute the mangoes, she placed one in her own lap, handed one to my father, and then passed the final one back to my sister for her to share it with me. Naturally, Cynthia got the mango first, just like every other time we had to share something. Usually she would tell me it was because she was the oldest, which puzzled me; I never really knew why that mattered. But it made sense to me that she got the fruit first since I had no idea how to peel a mango.
On the few occasions when I was able to enjoy a mango all to myself, I usually tried to bite it like an apple. It never worked, and the most I was able to accomplish getting waxy pieces of mango skin into my mouth as my teeth scraped the side of the unrelenting treasure. Eventually I would manage to sink my teeth into it like a vampire and try to get joy out of licking the small droplets of mango juice off the side of the fruit. It wasn’t very effective, so in the end by way of the rear view mirror, my mother always managed to see me making a fool of myself and would come to my rescue by peeling the fruit for me and the handing it back to me in a napkin to enjoy.
Today I was happy to know that I would be getting a taste of the sweet treat. But it was agony watching my sister peel the fruit. I could practically see the scent of mango as it rose into the air and drifted to my nostrils. The sweet fruity smell danced and tingled itself through my nose up into my brain, and although my mind could recall how my last mango had tasted, it didn’t compare to the feeling I’d get from eating this new one before me.
I watched her take the first initial bites for what seemed like forever. And when she finally handed me my share, she said, “I made sure to save this part especially for you since it’s the most delicious and important part of the mango.” With joy, I took the piece into my hands and stared at it with the excitement of knowing that my sister had loved me so much as to save me the most important part. And as I sat there in my car seat, I shoved the mango seed into my mouth looking like a buffoon, trying to consume the only non-edible part of the treat, not realizing I had just been bamboozled.