The Treasure Hunt

    It was on day three of our treasure hunt, our white t-shirts  transparent with sweat as we walked into the kitchen, that Dad asked us, “What are you boys up to?”
    “Trying to find buried treasure,” we told him.
    “Oh,” he said. “And what makes you so sure there’s buried treasure in the backyard?”
    We looked at each other for a moment and shrugged.
    “Well, who knows?” Dad said with a warm smile. “No sense in not trying, right?”
    We had dug up most of the backyard--Mom’s flower garden, Dad’s chives, and the pet graveyard, by the end of day four, with nothing to show for it but some scary pet corpses in shoeboxes. Plodding into the house, Dad asked us, “How’s the treasure hunt coming?”
    “Bad,” we told him. “It’s been four days, and no treasure.”
    Dad laughed and told us to keep at it. “You may be on the verge of a big discovery,” he said winking.
    The next morning, we agreed that day five would be our last. After breakfast, we gathered our shovels and all the dead animal boxes, as Mom instructed, to put them back into the ground. The early sun was reaching over the trees in the east, beating down on our slumped backs from afar, when Jeff called out to us. “Guys, I found something!”
    Sure enough, when we got over to Jeff, he was holding a small wooden chest. We opened it to find twenty-three crumpled dollar bills, a cheap locket with Mom’s picture inside, and a fallow note staring back at us. In Dad’s handwriting, the note read: “Aaaargh, matey, If ye have found this trunk, ye have found the booty of John Redbeard, the most feared and infamous pirate in all of the seven seas.”
    We ran away from home that day, not because we thought we could live on twenty-three dollars and a cheap locket, but because we were pretty sure Dad was a pirate.