Read Online Lucky in the Corner by Carol Anshaw - Free Book Online Page A

she inhabits. She sees the humor in what everyone else finds merely annoying. She has a repertoire of urban imitations, like a pitch-perfect rendition of the six-sound car alarms that drive all of them nuts in the middle of the night. She also thinks Vahle’s Bird Store on Damen ought to have a striped ticking cover pulled over it at night. She inhabits a hilarious city in which she is always scouting out new landmarks like the Decent Convenient Store and the Little Bit Cleaner, both catering to customers with low expectations; or the Stationary Store on Leland, which customers can rest assured will still be there when they pick up their business cards. Fern links this to the Toujours Spa on Clark, whose promise seems to be that it will resolutely remain a spa, as opposed to changing willy-nilly into a tapas bar or optometrist’s office. Nora suspects that, as with the way she dresses, Fern is not entirely aware of how delightful she is, which only makes her more delightful.
    At the moment, though, Fern is not being very delightful at all. She takes the garlic peeler, looks at it as though it has historical significance, like the cotton gin. Then she puts it aside on the countertop and gets a knife from the drawer and peels a few cloves in the old, labor-intensive way, whacking them first with the side of the blade.
    From a shelf full of books on the difficult adolescent, Nora understands that Fern needs to blow off the garlic peeler, do things her own way, form her own style of peeling, form her own personal relationship to garlic. Nora understands this, and still, in these moments, her hope and goodwill evaporate and all she can see is the two of them on the floor, flat on their stomachs, positioned to arm wrestle, and—it being
her
fantasy—Fern has a weak grip and it’s an easy piece of work to force her hand to the ground.
    Harold is sitting across the kitchen table from her, crunching Lucky’s ears, bending to lift a velvety flap and whisper a sweet nothing. Nora tries halfheartedly to catch his eye, then gives up. Why bother? She will never make him see how skillfully Fern operates. He can never ascribe any malice to Fern; he has her in a little grotto, surrounded by small vases of cut flowers, flickering votive candles. Then, of course, she feels awful for wanting to tint his opinion. Why does she need an ally against her own child?
    Until he appeared half an hour ago at the kitchen door, Nora wasn’t aware that her brother was going to be part of this dinner. He arrived bearing a bowl wrapped like a mummy in foil, giving off frosty steam in the mild air of the early evening.
    “I found an old ice cream freezer at one of my junk shops on Belmont. I made Pistachio Rocky Road, from scratch. The thirty-second flavor.”
    It’s Friday night. Nora wonders why he’s not working.
    In spite of never having had a discernible career, Harold nonetheless appears to be on a gently downward slide in terms of employment. At first, the waitering jobs were a way to subsidize his acting. And for a while after he followed Nora to Chicago, he was a lively presence in local theater—in roles requiring a dash of the sophisticate, an edge of the sinister.
    He also, for a few years in the earlier portion of his thirties, worked for an escort service, and swears that in his case, it never went any further than escorting. He took single businesswomen to social functions, widows to weddings, none of them to bed. Topics were the problem—the constant search for conversation openers and continuers, the avoidance of awkward silences.
    Over time, he has gotten less and less stage work. Nora suspects that, along his way, he acquired a reputation for being difficult, a superstar-type perfectionist but without star clout, without, actually, any clout at all. There has been a parallel slippage in his waitering. He started out working in high-style places with zinc bars and pale wood tables, in the early era of chic food. Serving entrées