Then everyone piled into the rented mini-van and drove off to begin the week long celebration.

Back at the hotel room, hours later, we unpacked. My brother B. was staying in town. "Are these o.k. to eat?" my sister A. asked my mother, holding up the bin of cookies.

"Yeah, I guess. Why shouldn’t they be?" my dad replied.

"Uh, because of the parasite." A. said.

"Parasite? What friggin parasite? Has B. got a god damned parasite?" he hollered to my mother, who had stepped into the bathroom. "What the hell kind of parasite is she talking about?"

My mother the nurse came out, sat us down, and gave us an "everything we never wanted to know about giardia" lecture. She told us it was an intestinal parasite that gives you terrible diarrhea, and that it is very hard to get rid of. She told us that it can "encapsulate" itself in your liver or brain and cause "complications at a later date". And that public health codes require that an infected person not work in food services until s/he has had three negative cultures for it.

"Has B. had three negative cultures for it?" my father asked, he was pacing now. We didn’t know. B. had been on medication for only a few days. Had this been long enough? And how did mom say it was spread? Through "oral fecal contact".

"You mean if he didn’t wash his hands, and we all eat these cookies, we could get a parasite?" my dad practically shouted.

It was decided we would not eat the cookies. But what would we do with them? B. would ask about them, we knew he would. And he might be in the hotel room over the next few days. He would certainly notice the still full tub o’cookies.

"Maybe we should just hide it" my sister suggested.

"We can’t do that," I said, "He’ll ask about them. Then when we lie and say we ate them all and they were very yummy, he’ll ask for the container back."

We thought about it.

"We could throw them out," my mother offered, half-heartedly. We all would feel bad about that. You don’t just go throwing out food. And it was a gift. I know we were each thinking about how happy he had been when he gave us the cookies. No one wanted to risk eating a cookie, and no one wanted to hurt B.’s feelings by telling him we were afraid to eat the cookies. It seemed like throwing them out was the only thing we could do.

"We can’t throw them all out at once. What if B. comes back here tomorrow. There’s no way he’ll believe we ate all of these in one night."

We thought some more.

"How about if we just throw them out a few at a time?"

"But if we throw out a few every day, he might see them in the trash, and that will make him upset."

"We can throw them away outside. There’s a big covered trash can out there in the hall!"

And so it was decided. Every morning for the next couple of days, we would each take a few cookies, only as much as we would have eaten normally. Into the trash they would go. No one mentioned it, but the guilt hung thick when B. would ask us "So did you guys like the cookies?" or say "I hope you don’t mind that I used pecans instead of walnuts..." We felt bad, but we never told him what we really did with the cookies.