Page 50 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

childhood fantasy world; he would never again bury his fears
in that closet.

He tiptoed into the tiny kitchen where meals had always
been taken around a rectangular metal table. Now, only a small
gate leg table stood in front of the window. Harry looked out,
confident that he could see passersby but they couldn’t see
him. The overhead cabinets along the side wall, where he often
banged his head getting up from the table, were new, as were
the stove and sink, the only concessions to the new tenants in
all these years.

Just then, he was drawn to a drawer in a corner cupboard
that had served as the inimitable “junk drawer” during his boy-
hood. It was filled with memories of all those things that were
too good or too bad to dispose of: postcards of places seen and
unseen during the years of the depression, unused food ration
stamps….
He opened the drawer and pulled it out as far as it would
go. Suddenly, the phone rang and the drawer fell, spewing its
contents onto the kitchen floor. The noise was like an explo-
sion.

The phone rang twice, three, four times, then fell silent.

Quickly, Harry gathered the objects that fell on the floor
and stuffed them back into the drawer. Getting it back into its
slot was difficult, and as he fumbled with it, he noticed a piece
of paper wedged into the wall behind the drawer. He reached
in and pulled it out. It was an envelope addressed to his moth-
er. The postmark was nearly 60 years old. He was about to
remove the contents when he heard a shuffling of keys at the
front door. He stuffed the envelope into his breast pocket and

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