Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

black, as hard and smooth as the venerable seasoned pan. I was disappointed; I liked crab cakes. They were a family favorite; sometimes we had them with spaghetti, and sometimes we had them with poached eggs on top and hash-browned potatoes on the side, which was the way I liked them best.

“Were you going to have them with poached eggs?” I asked.

“Yes,” sighed my mother, and she tousled my hair to salve my disappointment. “I wanted something easy — something I could make without thinking, you know?”

I did know. I’d seen her cook without thinking; I sometimes did my homework that way. There were certain dishes that she made as if she were not there, as if she had drifted on a fair breeze to somewhere else and left an hourly employee behind to mix the crab and onions into the batter, shape the patties, and brown them till they were crisp and golden while she was someplace else where she was not required to cook.

“But I got — distracted.” She indicated a pad of paper and a list of things to be done after we took possession of the boat in the morning, and I understood that she’d been visiting the future, the place where our hopes take us, and had let tomorrow distract her from today.

“Couldn’t you take the burned part off?” I suggested.

She frowned and regarded the crab cakes doubtfully.

“He always puts ketchup on crab cakes,” I noted helpfully, as a good sidekick should.

She burst out laughing. We both understood that the only reason the burnt crust on the crab cakes mattered was that my father wouldn’t like it. She and I were both more interested in the boat; we had to give him something to eat to keep him quiet while we talked about it.

She hugged me.

“Clamburgers?” I suggested.

“Mm, we did that,” she said.

“Yeah, he’d smell a rat. We need something different, like — ”

“Hamburgers!”

“Yeah. That’ll do it.”

She grabbed her pocketbook. “Get some hamburgers, with the works, and french fries, and strawberry shortcake.” She opened her pocketbook and hesitated for just a moment. Then she pulled out the envelope that held the financing for her elegant excursions.

“Expenses,” she said. “Business expenses.”

We heard the crunch of tires in the driveway, and my mother began scraping the crab cakes into the garbage. “Go on,” she said. “Scoot.”

I was going out as my father was coming in, and before I shut the door, I heard my mother exclaim, “Oh, Bert! You’re home! Why don’t you make us a couple of old-fashioneds?”

I walked north, up our street, toward the Straight Line Highway, four lanes of concrete that split Long Island lengthwise like a filleted flounder. When I got to the corner where our street was broken by the highway, I could see the metal cladding of the Night-and-Day Diner gleaming in the evening sunlight, as flashy as the chrome grin on one of that year’s finny cars. To get to the diner, I had to cross the highway, and the designers of the highway had made no provision to assist the pedestrian in this endeavor. They had apparently assumed that no one would cross the highway on foot, but those of us who lived near it often did so, perilous though the crossing was, because we still had friends and even relatives across the divide and weren’t willing to stop visiting them just because the journey had been made artificially difficult. (In time, the highway became a greater divide, wider, running far more swiftly, and effected or completed another socioeconomic partition in the town, demarcating, like a contour line on a topographic map, a small but significant difference in elevation between the lower-middle-class families who bought the cheap little houses just south of the highway and the upper-working-class families who bought the cheaper little houses just north of the highway and a level lower on the social slope.) The fact that I had to do a little car-dodging always made the trip to the Night-and-Day seem like an adventure; it made the buying of hamburgers more like the hunting of a mammoth, the responsibility of getting them home without dropping them in the gutter more like the responsibility of feeding a family wholly dependent on me, waiting for me back in the damp and drafty cave, where they huddled in darkness, cold, frightened, frail, and desperate; it was the testing sort of labor that a stalwart sidekick ought to be assigned, and I made the most of the drama in it, darting and dashing across the traffic in a daredevil manner that wasn’t really necessary, since most of the drivers of that time didn’t go very fast, and would actually have slowed to allow a boy such as me to cross if I had stood meekly at the roadside and beseeched them with a look, something that, at my important age, I could not have allowed myself to do.

Safely across the highway, I ran through the parking lot, swung the door open, and stepped into the bright fluorescent light of the Night-and-Day. I loved the place, and I particularly loved the moment of entry. Now, right now, sitting here in Manhattan, I can feel the pressure of my palm against the cool door, feel the door yield, and at once I can smell onions frying.

Leon, the short-order cook, shot me a look, grinned, and nodded a greeting. Leon had a talent that I admired and wished that I, and my mother, possessed: he could keep stirring the onions on the griddle and even flip a burger while talking to someone at the counter; that wasn’t the talent, of course, merely a single manifestation of it; the talent was for doing more than one thing at once.

“My little man,” he said, “how are you doing this evening?”

“I’m just fine,” I said. “You?”

“Hm,” he said, and he paused to consider the question. After due consideration, he said, “I’m getting along adequately well, thank you. What can I get for you this evening?”

I gave