Read Online Redhanded by Michael Cadnum - Free Book Online Page B

to talk, ready to listen. I had called her three times and didn’t want to leave a message on the machine.
    Hugo gave me a cool, easygoing, “Hey, Steven,” and one of those smiles you see in magazines, what fluoride can do for your teeth.
    Danielle did give just a little bit of a glance back in my direction, a profile shot, disguising her curiosity by reaching up at the same time and fussing with her hair.
    They left, walking along together, his arm touching hers, toward Hugo’s metallic blue sport van. It was a new model, custom-detailed, with metal edge mudguards hanging behind the rear wheels, and sky blue curtains on the side windows, the kind that pull all the way shut.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    I get nervous waiting.
    So does my dad, but he covers it better, straightens pillows on the sofa, tells me what to wear.
    â€œLiz says the elevator is working again,” my dad said.
    Dad had ordered my blue dress shirt washed with extra starch. It buttoned up stiff and unnatural, little creases starched into place releasing with soft sighs as I flexed my shoulders. The sleeves were too short for me, and I kept my elbows tucked in to disguise this. I put on pants I almost never wore, hairy wool, too tight around the middle.
    Mom was late.
    He had not told me, but I suspected that his plan had been for her to hear the piano as she approached our door. Maybe she would stand outside and listen to the music, rapt, thinking, Just like old times. Dad and I had not discussed it in every detail, but we both believed that Dad was going to win her back, get her to stay a few nights. Maybe she would develop the habit of staying around, finishing up her dissertation at home after she paid her parents her semiannual visit, down in the desert.
    Henry the parakeet popped the mirror with his beak every now and then, ringing the little bell attached to it. Every half minute or so the bird did it again, pecked his reflection. Every month or so he would decide to feed the mirror, smearing it with puked-up seeds. When I reached in to scratch his head, he closed his eyes in anticipation.
    And then the yellow burst of energy was out of his cage, a flurry of wings, twice around the kitchen. He did a flying circus tour of the living room, as he did once or twice a month, when I changed his cuttlebone. With a whispered, miniature explosion of wings, he settled on top of my dad’s head.
    â€œHow you doing, Henry?” said Dad, in a gentle, resigned tone. Dad had always lived with a pet of some kind, and after dinner in the right mood he’d unwind tales of cats rescued from avocado trees and stray dogs cured of mange.
    He mouthed at me, as though he did not want to hurt the parakeet’s feelings, “Put him back!”
    Hard metallic raps, her key ring on the doorknob. I had expected her to have a key to the apartment.
    I captured Henry just in time.
    When you first see someone after a while they look different for a few heartbeats.
    And then they look the same.
    â€œThe traffic was a disaster,” Mom said, hugging Dad, hugging me, brisk, happy to be here, but nothing dramatic, like she had been gone for a weekend. She had left two years ago, living on the north coast. While she kept in touch through the fax machine and E-mail, she had not been in this apartment in months. “All the way through Pinole the freeway was packed like a junkyard.”
    Dad was explaining that he should call the restaurant, change our reservations, and Mom said she wasn’t hungry.
    You could see Dad’s disappointment, so Mom corrected herself. “I can have a salad,” she said.
    â€œAre you okay?” she asked.
    I said I was.
    I could see her eyes searching my features for signs of boxing damage, puffiness, the kind of flattening and swelling that days will not erase. And if she had asked I would have told her this was part of the attraction—it was the kind of muscular competition her family loved, raised to a new