The Family Unit and Other Fantasies Read Online Free Page A

negotiation in which Arch barely participated—and of which he knew Brenda would have gotten the better, anyway, having what seemed like legal training. Finally, weeping, Arch agreed to take on the new family name of “Wiltog.”

    With a razor blade in his trembling hand, Arch scraped the D.E. sticker from the side of his car, as the contract required, leaving a splotch from the adhesive that looked like the white guts of a pigeon he had once seen squashed in the street, a permanent stain.
    Days or hours later, he drove a route he remembered by instinct. At dusk, he pulled up a few feet short of a house, not wanting to park directly in the driveway. Then he walked stealthily over a precisely mown lawn to a stone path parallel to a side window. There he half knelt and looked inside.
    In an eat-in kitchen, the Blum family was getting ready for dinner. Red was turning on a radio that dated from the Art Deco era; a novel in a Penguin edition was spread open on a counter near where Karina stirred a pot. One son laid aside a catcher’s mitt as he took his place at the table; the other, already sitting, faintly hummed a show tune.
    In exile, Arch Wiltog hid as the father stepped forward to draw a curtain, as if indeed upon a stage play. The drape was decorated with a swirling pattern of D.E. logos, which were almost undetectable in its elegant design. Soon the sun went completely down, causing the light from inside to glow even brighter on the family no longer visible. It illuminated the window, which was now a mirror. Arch crouched, unmoving, his mouth open, and stared at the image of himself, which was all he had left.

HOLE IN THE GROUND
    “Closed for Renovations.” He had always thought it one of the great and unappreciated lies, up there with putting things in the mail and not in your mouth. Was he alone in thinking it? Barry Bumgardner felt alone, standing before the shuttered Steen’s, which had been his local green grocer for the past—how many? Twenty?—years. Sometimes it was “Under New Management,” but always recognizably Steen’s, the aisles never altered enough to look like any other store, the new owners always too lazy to change the name, the identity of the original owner of no interest to the new Asian, Latino, and now Albanian owners, as unimportant as the meanings of expressions one used every day—“Break a leg!” “Down the hatch!”—and didn’t question.
    This time, however, was different—brown wrapping paper was taped over all of Steen’s windows, though not well enough to prevent Barry from peeking through. Today he saw a dark, abandoned interior, with paper boxes strewn about unassembled and a few steel racks fallen over like robbery victims, the Terra Chips and Pirate Booty and low-fat pretzels gone from their shelves. Unopened mail lay in a small pile near the front door—bills, Barry figured, and the real reason for the owner’s rush exit.
    “Closed for Renovations.” The sign would probably stay there until a new store showed up; at some other places it had taken years, time definitively exposing the lie of the sign, which nobody believed in the first place, the way time caught people in lies nobody ever bought—“My wife is visiting relatives” (for ten years)—but were too polite to challenge.
    Still, pondering the future didn’t change his present quandary: where to buy milk now that Steen’s was gone—the organic kind, without the cow hormones or whatever was bad. He turned, his feet feeling heavy, and walked at the pace of a man twice his age (forty-five—his age, not twice his age) to, well, he guessed Green Harbor was the nearest place now, though the milk was hormonal, the bananas were always brown, and he saw a mouse in there once.
    Barry’s head throbbed. The four blocks seemed to take forever—because, of course, he didn’t want to go, Steen’s had been just fine with him, and so his resistance increased time, and not in a good way. Other people might not