A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun

Author:Adrianne Harun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING

In the kitchen, my mother dabbed pork chops with a paper towel before dredging them in flour and milk and cracker crumbs and forking them into a blistering fry pan. She’d never acknowledge the heat. Potatoes boiled, the window behind the sink steamed, sweat ringed our faces, but by God, my mother would put a real dinner on the table. She made twice the normal amount, as if we were having invisible dinner guests, and then wrapped half the supper up straightaway in tinfoil.

“You’ll take that to Bryan and Ursie tomorrow, okay?” she said as she put her tinfoil bundles in the refrigerator. She clucked her tongue, and I heard a long conversation in that sound, which all at once berated Trevor Nowicki, mourned Junie, and warned me to keep clear of any trouble Bryan might be sifting through.

For a while, the kitchen churned with purpose. It was the high spark of the evening. Soon, we would eat in a kind of a hush, the little kitchen fan’s beat dwarfed by the evening wind arriving through the open window, rising first with a welcome breeze barely tinged with smoke before escalating into a more malevolent, heavy rush that would whip my mother’s work folders off the counter and turn the tablecloth inside out. Then we would rush around to ease the western windows down, allowing only a few inches of open screen, so that the heat did not reclaim us.

After dinner, my mother left me to clean up the kitchen while she checked on Lud. By the time I finished, the little television on his bureau would be tuned into a romantic comedy from the 1970s, the sound so low, you’d have to be one of my mother’s shelter dogs to hear a thing. Uncle Lud didn’t care. Alone, he slept on, not even waking when I wiped the corners of his mouth, which had gone rheumy, with one of my father’s cotton handkerchiefs.

I sat with him for a few minutes longer, watching the muted romance on the television and imagining Tessa and me in that TV Land city, leaning against a skyscraper, kissing intently while crowds surged by without a second look. Maybe that’s all Tessa needed, I thought: both privacy and witnesses for safety. If Uncle Lud had been awake, he would have seen the longing in me and wiggled his eyebrows in my direction as if patting me on the shoulder from a distance. I might have stayed with him longer, watching the old movie and dreaming up Tessa dialogue, but a rustling down the hall made me uneasy.

In my room, my mother was sitting at my desk, staring at my computer screen.

“You need a better password,” she said. “I figured it out in two seconds flat.”

She went on. “This is terribly slow, isn’t it?”

Just then the computer dinged, and my mother glanced down to poke a finger at the screen, where a new e-mail now joined several unread others from Leila Chen, my physics instructor.

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