Read Online Edge by Michael Cadnum - Free Book Online

closely together, ropy tomato vines struggling out of a tub, green and yellow bell peppers wrestling for space. My beans were neat, long, slender stakes, each bean plant extending gracefully, climbing toward sun.
    The lights from the house glittered on the water from the garden hose, the smell of the wet earth rising around me. I turned the water off tight and wound the hose into loops, the way my dad had shown me years before, “ so it’s ready when you need it .”
    I dragged a suitcase from the closet, a big gray top-of-the-line Samsonite with little brass padlocks on the zipper tabs and wheels on the bottom. She had checked the items off on her smart pink fingernails. Bras, two. Panties, two. That was easy, my mom’s underclothes.
    The rest would be tricky. She had asked for a sweater vest, the one she wore around the house, an ethnic-look Greek thing, something she wore when she trowled the dirt in her herb garden. Whatever else I brought I was supposed to remember the slip-ons she had custom made in Lahaina. She was not dressing for appearance.
    I stuffed it all into the suitcase and then took it all out again and folded it as carefully as I knew how. Then I leaned against her dresser. She carried a makeup kit wherever she went, but she needed a little tube of medicine in case she got cold sores, which she always did under stress. She needed a container of saline solution for her contact lenses, in case the squeeze tube of Sensitive Eyes she always carried sprang a leak.
    â€œAnd don’t forget my glasses, in the top right-hand drawer,” in case her contacts fell out of her eyes and got lost. And Ban roll-on, unscented, from the medicine cabinet. “And anything else you know I’ll need.” I found the little silver cross from her nightstand, the one her Aunt Dot had worn during the London Blitz, when a five-hundred pound bomb blew the roof off a church across the street.
    I thought I heard a masculine cough in the background, a television laugh track. Ice tinkled in a drink. Rhonda has a set of cocktail glasses she picked up at the Alameda Flea Market, handpainted antique highball glasses, palm leaves, poodles.
    I must have said something, because she was adding, “He was on the news. Channel Two. It wasn’t the lead-off story. An Amtrak train ran over some people in Santa Maria, and that space probe they finally got to work. But I kept watching and there it was, Bay author shot.”
    My voice was able to get the question out, although the sound was strange, a talking dog.
    â€œNo suspects,” she answered my question, a sad dash of irony in her voice, mock anchorman.
    The television sound went off at that instant, somebody—maybe one of her boyfriends—listening in the distance, wondering who she was talking to.
    Bea was at the front door, a tapping I could barely hear.
    She looked up at me in the porch light. Somehow it was important, what she would say now, the words she would choose. The screen door was between us, a new door, replaced a few weeks before, a sheen of silver.
    She had a red bandanna tied over her head, Bea the pirate. I opened the screen door to let her in and had to put my hand out to the wall, unsteady. She leaned against me and kept me there, gently pinned to the wall.
    â€œThere’s no change in his condition,” I said, repeating what the hospital voice had told me.
    She nodded, her bandanna pressed against my chest as though she had foreseen this. For a while silence protected us. “They didn’t come tonight,” she said at last.
    I didn’t know what she was talking about.
    But one of us had to talk, just to keep time moving along. That was how it seemed: that our actions, our words, were tiny but essential.
    She looked up at me, trying to read my thoughts. “The Oil-Towners. They stayed home.”
    All of that seemed so long ago, something that had happened to someone else. I was glad to hear about it. It was