The Man in the Window Read Online Free PDF Page A

how he wanted to put them in jars and sell them at the hardware store?”
    “I remember,” Atlas said.
    “Sell different strengths, he said. Some jars would have five fireflies, some ten. It’s funny to think that’s how the store seemed to him—a place where his father sold hammers, and paint, and for all he knew, jars with different strengths of fireflies.”
    “He loved the store.” Atlas smiled suddenly. “That’s why he thought of shelves stocked with fireflies, and who knows what all. The store is what he misses most, I think. All these years it’s been only four blocks away, and he hasn’t been able to get to it, could not bring himself to venture out on the streets of Waverly even if he wore a hundred hats and scarves.”
    Then Gracie saw Atlas find a memory, saw it take shape behind his eyes, watched him work his mouth in preparation for the telling of it. Here we go, thought Gracie, there’s no stopping him now. She was glad though, at least for the moment, to have his recollections quell her own.
    “Say,” he said, “you know how Louis will ask me about somebody who was in some way connected to the store? How hedoes because he knows it will make us both remember and move up and down the aisles again, the way he and I used to when he was little?”
    “Yes, I know.” Gracie leaned against one of the pilings on the dock, braced herself really, because that’s what you did when Atlas was about to take off on one of his tales.
    “Guess who he asked about last week?”
    “Who?” She knew he didn’t want her to slow him down by actually guessing.
    “Mrs. Meem.” And with that, Atlas’s flight began. Gracie took a deep breath and climbed on board beside him.
    “That’s right,” he said, “Mrs. Meem and the dog. She and Louis both felt the same magic in the place, I think, the sheer excitement of being surrounded by so many miraculous things, over your head, in drawers, hanging from the ceiling, spilling out of boxes. Louis was satisfied just to be there amongst it all, but for Mrs. Meem, it was more than she could bear. Brought out her criminal tendencies.” Atlas raised an eyebrow.
    “Poor Mrs. Meem,” said Gracie, smiling.
    “Poor Mrs. Meem? Rich Mrs. Meem, you mean, rich with all the stuff she stole from my store! And tricky Mrs. Meem, too, because she tricked me and Louis for the longest time, which was understandable. Who could believe that a fifty-year-old woman with a weakness for flowered dresses and fruited hats would be snatching sixpenny nails and electrical tape? That big pocketbook of hers should have been a clue, but on her frail arm it wasn’t, even when it bulged with half the contents of my store.
    “But of course, what really confused the picture,” said Atlas rubbing his chin, “was the dog.”
    Gracie laughed. If it was Mrs. Meem who always got Atlas down the runway, then it was the dog who lifted him off the ground.
    “Laugh away, but you know that dog was unregenerate. Nothing about it was right. That dog was so wrong you couldn’t stop staring at him. He mesmerized you! Which of course, wefinally realized, was the plan. To begin with, he swaggered, which is okay for a Newfoundland or a husky, but this dog was terrier-sized, and as a rule you should never trust a little guy who swaggers. His coat was gray, but to say coat suggests it covered him completely, when in fact it only sprouted out of him here and there. That way you got a good look at his skin, which had moist pink areas, partially healed wounds from the battles he waged with his own flesh. And then, of course, there was that smell and those eyes. I believe the two were related in that his god-awful odor, which could not have come from him alone, but was perhaps something dead and rotted he rolled in, something he applied to his pink spots like a salve—I believe this overpowering stink caused his eyes to squint and cross, as if they had done everything they could to get away from it, rolled this way