Read Online A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online

belt if you want the best advice.
    He rose up on the lift and, fifteen feet in the air, began wrestling with the mini-fridge. He whistled a Supertramp song loudly to convey that all was well. I didn’t want to make him nervous by staring up at his struggles, so I turned and looked down the aisle. There was a lot going on. A couple was choosing between two pieces of white pipe, and farther down I saw a big woman in a sweater and leggings pointing up at something. She had a lot of hair. She mounted a moving metal stairway, one that has rollers on one end and rubber nubbins on the other, so that when you put your weight on them the nubbins act as brakes, and she unhooked a toilet seat from a display. Shelooked at it from several angles—a big angelic oval in the air above the heads of the ground level shoppers—and then she handed it down to her husband. He held it for a while, nodding, then handed it back up to her. She rehung it on its hooks. By then our mini-fridge had landed.
    So now there is quite a nice fridge in the guest room. Henry and Phoebe unpacked it, pulling off all the pieces of blue tape. It was similar to the unpacking of a new printer, which always has pieces of sticky-but-not-too-sticky tape holding the various movable elements in place.
    And now Henry has appeared in the dawn-lit living room. I just asked him if he’d had a good sleep in our bed.
    “Yes, I was quite warm,” said Henry.
    I asked him what made him wake up so early.
    “Dad, you see, Mom said she was going to read me some more of the book we’re reading, and I wondered if she was awake yet. And when I felt how warm it was, I snuggled in. I joined the party.”
    Henry puts the word Dad in practically every sentence he says to me. He seems to want to say the word Dad. Who is that Dad? I am.
    “Dad, in only two years I’m going to be ten,” he justtold me. He has tossed an egg carton onto the fire. There was a fall of large shaggy flakes yesterday; the wild grape at the end of our lawn and the tall pines across the valley are squirrel-tailed with snow. And now I can hear the crows, the birds that announce the end of my secret morning.

17
    Good morning, it’s 4:03 a.m., early, early, early. I did something new while the coffeemaker was snuffling and gasping: I washed a dish that I’d left last night in the sink to soak. Claire made a pathbreaking noodle casserole, which we ate three quarters of. One quarter is now socked away in the refrigerator. While I was filling up the carafe of the coffeemaker, it clinked against the glass casserole dish, and I thought what the hay. The dish was full of night-cooled water when I began. I put my hand in it. The suds were gone and the water was still—it was like taking an early-morning swim in the lake at camp, not that I ever did that. I could feel some hard places down on the bottom that would need scrubbing, and there were two dinner forks lurking below as well. I wasglad to know about the forks, because if I had poured the water out without removing the forks I would have made a jangling that might have woken Henry. I got the water from the tap to a hot but not unbearable temperature and, having successfully felt for the rough-sided scrubber sponge and the container of dishwashing liquid, I squirted a big blind
C
over the bottom, where the baked-on cheese was. It was a silent
C:
as one gets better at squirting out dishwashing liquid one learns how to ease off at the end of a squirt so that one doesn’t make an unpleasant floozling sound. And then I began to scrub, scooting over the smooth places and then ramming into the islands of resistance. Soon the baked-on atolls, softened overnight, began to give way: I pestered at the last one from the side for a while, smiling with the clenched-teeth smile of the joyful scrubber, and it was gone—no, there was still a tiny rough patch left behind to be dealt with, and then, oh sweet life, I could circle my sponge over the entire surface of the dish at