Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [38]
So in January, with the heat set at forty-five degrees and the cupboard literally bare, Martin went home for help. His initial plan had been to explain the recent string of bad luck to his parents and ask for assistance until he found more work. It was a Tuesday evening in February when he arrived at the front door of his parents’ house and found the windows completely dark. His parents were uncharacteristically out for the evening, and Martin couldn’t imagine where they might have gone. If anyone had a predictable schedule, it was his parents.
Martin turned and headed back toward his car when he realized that he still had a house key, and with a belly grumbling from a day’s worth of missed meals (apart from the doughnuts he devoured at work), Martin decided that it was time to eat.
It was odd to think of himself as a stranger in his childhood home, but as he fried eggs on a stove that his mother had used to cook his meals for more than eighteen years, the sense that he was an intruder intensified. Though it hadn’t occurred to him when he cracked his first egg, by the time the toast was brown and the eggs were well scrambled, he had begun to suspect that his parents, particularly his stepfather (though his mother would surely be standing beside her husband, silent and compliant), would not approve of his unsanctioned use of the kitchen and his consumption of their food. By the time Martin was buttering the last piece of toast, he had convinced himself of the severe reprimand that he would receive from his parents for the intrusion, and had decided to make every effort to escape before being noticed.
Not knowing where his parents were or when they would return made this process a stressful one for Martin. He began by rinsing off the dishes, initially forgoing the time it would take to apply soap but quickly realizing that if he did not take the time to wash the dishes thoroughly, his parents would determine on their own that someone had been in the house. Suspicion would then naturally fall upon the only other person with a key. This stress-filled balance between washing quickly and washing meticulously served as the basis for many of Martin’s future business decisions.
He never wanted to be in a similar situation again.
With the dishes washed, dried, and replaced in the cupboards as close to their original positions as he could remember (another problem Martin would later rectify, through the use of digital photography), he turned his attention to the kitchen surfaces: the stove, the sink, and the small round table upon which he had eaten. Wiping these surfaces with paper towels that he then stuffed into his pants pockets, he had the entire kitchen cleaned and returned to what he hoped was its original condition in less than ten minutes. He was pleased with himself. He thought that the chances were good that his presence would go undetected.
Martin felt less confident about the food that he had eaten. Four slices of bread for toast, three eggs, and nearly a half stick of butter were impossible to replace without more time. He felt that the missing bread would likely go unnoticed, but he was less certain about the eggs and especially the butter. His mother loved to bake, and if she had recently cooked up something that required butter, she was likely to remember exactly how much was left. In addition, butter was not a product whose loss was easily attributed to someone else in the home. It would be difficult for his mother to imagine that her husband had gone through half a stick of butter on his own. After all, there’s only so much a person who doesn’t bake can do with butter.
In order to deal with this problem, Martin removed a whole stick of butter from the box in the refrigerator (leaving three sticks behind), and lopped off slightly less than a third of it before placing