100 Cupboards Read Free Page A

aimlessly, looking for something it had lost. He knew he had forgotten something, but he didn’t notice when one blink was too heavy to reopen. He was somewhere else, dreaming of a field where he knew how to throw a ball. And for some reason, a man in a purple robe was watching.

CHAPTER THREE

    Henry slept for a long time. He woke because he couldn’t sleep any longer. His body was full. He picked himself up out of bed, pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt, and felt his way down the steep stairs with feet a little soft from sleep. He found his aunt in the kitchen.
    â€œHenry!” she said, and grinned at him. She was still canning. Her hair was staggering away from her temples, and her face was tomato red above a faded green apron. An enormous black pot boiled on the stove. “We were about to send out a search-and-rescue team.” She laughed and cranked a contraption that was pulping wrinkly apples. Henry stared at the long snake of peels and cores and nastiness that was crawling out of one end. Dotty looked back at him and laughed again. “Don’t you look down on my apples, Henry York! The worms add to the flavor. Cold cereal’s on the shelf behind you if you like, and I’d think you would after coming out of hibernation. Bowl’s on the counter. Milk’s in the fridge.”
    â€œThanks,” Henry said, and began assembling his breakfast. He was used to milk with transparent edges, milk that looked a little blue. This milk looked more like cream. It was thick, white, and coated the cereal with film as Henry poured. In his mouth, he could feel it clinging to his tongue. His tongue didn’t mind.
    Dotty dumped a bowl of pulped cores into the trash and turned around.
    â€œWell, then, Henry York,” she said. “When you’re finished there, you can rinse out your bowl. Then, unless you want to go back to bed and sleep through another meal, you can head out to the barn. Your uncle wants to talk with you. You should have it to yourselves. The girls are off in town for a birthday.” She wiped her hands on her apron and turned back to her work.
    Henry, licking his teeth, walked out of the kitchen, through mounds of boots in the mudroom, and onto the back porch. The overgrown lawn drifted downhill to the foot of the barn. Beyond the barn, flat fields stretched to the horizon, broken only by irrigation ditches and the occasional dirt road. The rest was all sky.
    Henry stood and stared blankly at the landscape. At another time, it would have affected him. He would have marveled at the flatness, at the bareness, at how much space could fit into a single view. Instead, he wandered through his sleep-cobwebbed mind, trying to sort and straighten thoughts just as filmy as his teeth and tongue.
    Distracted, Henry walked down to the barn. The door was a puzzle. It was a slider, and he couldn’t get the metal lever to unlatch. When he did finally succeed in jerking it up, he couldn’t persuade the big plank door to plow along its rusty runners. With a slip and a stagger, he got it in the end and walked inside, too curious about the contents of the barn to notice his rust-stained hands. It was bigger inside than he had expected. There were old plank stalls along both sides. A Weed Eater and three bicycles dangled from the beams.
    â€œHenry? That you down there?” Uncle Frank’s voice fell through the ceiling above him. “Come on up. There’s a ladder at the end.”
    Henry found the ladder, nailed to the wall and completely vertical. He stepped onto the lowest rung, a dry, dirty board, and stared up the ladder shaft—up past two levels, up to the underside of the barn’s beamed ceiling. There had been a ladder on Henry’s bunk bed, and that was as high as he’d ever climbed.
    â€œHenry?” his uncle yelled.
    â€œYeah, I’m coming, Uncle Frank.”
    â€œAll the way up. I’m in the loft.”
    Henry started climbing. If he