Second Avenue
I awoke to the sound of the front door opening. A late night visitor was not unusual. Relatives often arrived late after a long travel day. Earlier in the year a taxi driver had walked into the house at night asking who ordered a cab, and Dad would often come in late after working a shift, “Go back to sleep,” so I was not unprepared. The front room / living room was where I slept so guard duty just came naturally. The others were all asleep somewhere deep in the house. Mom, Dad, Duree, Lloyd, Kristin and Regina, sleeping the sleep of the well-guarded.
Through the bars of my crib I sized up this new visitor. Didn’t look like family.
About six two, medium build, adult but not old, slicked back oily black hair, dark dark eyes that darted around the room, leaning back against the wall beside the door and breathing unevenly in the half light.
All my life my friends have told me how much they loved coming to our place for meal times, how they were always made to feel welcome by my parents, how they were always fed and treated immediately like they belonged at our table.
Family, extended family, friends of family, if it was meal time it simply meant how many potatoes to boil or how many eggs to fry.
We had all been at other people's houses during the hushed ritual of whispering about dinner. It always began around four thirty and continued until it was established that the “guest” was not staying to eat. Whispering was the preferred mode of conversation; it ensured the intended object would be paying close attention to the impending shortfall of foodstuffs and leave the premises within the half hour.
But not at our house. Meals at the Ogmundsons included every kind of dinner guest, even people who insulted the cooking (“Jeezus that’s too much salt, that could put a kid right off chicken soup.), people we didn’t much like, people we hardly knew and people we had just met.
Somehow this guy was different. He barely even noticed me, glanced over the room and headed to the kitchen on his left. I could hear more than see him now as he rummaged around the room. The noise he made caused a stir in another room and brought on a light that flooded the kitchen.
“Who’s there?” it was my Dad’s voice.
Immediately the man scrambled through the drawers and pulled out a large kitchen knife (“Put that away! That’s not a toy,” I could hear Mom's voice inside my head.)
“Who’s there?”
Dad entered the room as the man turned, holding the kitchen knife between them.
Dad gently stopped his approach. It took him only a moment to assess and evaluate.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “How about a cup of tea and something to eat?
The man didn’t move, said nothing.
“Honey,” Dad called out to my mother, “can you come and fry us up a couple of eggs? Fried egg sandwich sound okay?”
No response.
Mom came to the room and stood behind Dad. The man shifted his position, backed away slightly, enough to allow Mom to move towards the stove. He kept the knife and Dad between himself and Mom. Mom pulled her housecoat tighter around her and went to work, never making eye contact with the strange man in her kitchen.
Before long the familiar smell of eggs filled the rooms. The kettle was boiling. “Do you take any milk in your tea?”
The men began eating, hunkered down over their sandwiches, inches from their plates, wordless while they ate.
“How about another?” I noticed for the first time that the man was holding his sandwich with two hands, knife on the table.
“Sure.”
Kind of a grunt. Didn’t say “please”.
Mom was back in action. Two more sandwiches, once again the two men ate in silence.
The man gulped his tea, Dad sipped.
Low voices, short conversation, quiet tones.
Eventually the man got up from the table, nodded at my Dad, half nodded at my Mom, backed through the kitchen, turned and went out through the front door.
Dad looked at me. “Go back to sleep,” he said and turned out the light.
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