The Silver Glove Read Online Free PDF Page A

completely, though I was sure he knew exactly what was happening here in Kress’s Old-Fashioned Cleaning. “I wanted kids of my own, of course, I come from a large family myself. But my ex-wife—”
    I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the mirror image that had me hypnotized. Risking the moment of blindness, I clapped both hands over my eyes, and that did it. I whirled around and with my gloved hand I grabbed the glittering, reaching claw, set my heels, and gave the hardest pull I could.
    The radio let out a shriek that went through my head like a needle of ice.
    The claw in the clothes rack was so hot—or so cold—that I could feel its wiry pincers burning my skin through the leather of the glove. I gritted my teeth and hung on, straining against what seemed like the weight of the whole rack, the whole back of the cleaners place, the whole world.
    It all came loose so suddenly that I staggered.
    Out from among the clothes flew something like a silver skeleton, but of some buglike creature that never lived on this earth. It was all bundled wire, with a lot of whirling, glittering, skinny limbs that ended in catching claws.
    I slung it away from me as hard as I could, yelling with disgust and horror. It shot through the air, all huddled into a defensive, angular knot, and it hit the mirror with a shrieking jangle.
    Suddenly I could see outside again: the street, the restaurant opposite, a guy walking by with an attaché case.
    â€œWhat’s the rush?” came this crabby voice behind me. I spun around.
    Mr. Kress shuffled out of the back room looking very annoyed. “I’m coming,” he said. “I heard you. All of New York heard you. You might try to have a little patience, young lady. I do all my own work, you know, the old-fashioned way, here on the premises.”
    He held out his hand for my cleaning ticket.
    The radio played the theme from The Sting , and The Claw was nothing but a bunch of hangers lying all tangled up in a heap under the plate-glass window.

 
    4
Trouble, Trouble, Trouble
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    I WALKED HOME IN A DAZE with the clothes over my arm and the glove still on my hand. I let myself into the apartment and fell on my bed.
    The glove was unmarked, except for a couple of dark spots where my tears of desperation had fallen on it. I took it off very carefully. Two of my fingers were red, as if singed, where I had gripped The Claw for that instant before I flung it away.
    It had really happened.
    After a while I took some aspirin from the medicine cabinet and downed a small drink from the open bottle of wine Mom kept in the fridge. Barb and I had once done some experimenting with various bottles of this and that from the liquor cabinet, so I knew it wouldn’t take much.
    Sure enough, I conked out in about three minutes and I slept for an hour. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember what of, which was probably just as well.
    When I woke up around dusk, I wandered through the apartment reliving those crazy moments at Kress’s in my mind and repeating in a whisper what I could remember of the conversation I had heard over Mr. Kress’s radio. Everything around me was comforting and familiar—the blistered plaster and paint around the steam pipe in my bathroom, the pencil marks on the bedroom door that marked the stages of my growth—but nothing could wipe out the memory of that voice.
    Mom got home at seven-thirty and she looked spectacular. She was humming to herself when she came in the door, and her hair was sort of sweeping around and her eyes were big and glowing and all that stuff. I hadn’t seen her look like that since she had floated around for a week over some math professor from City College. He was actually not bad, but it didn’t last.
    My mom and I had been having some tiffs about our respective love lives lately, if you can call mine that. Just to put what follows into perspective, let me lay out here a brief example of the