Edge Read Online Free Page B

didn’t even want to turn off the light.
    What if tonight Mom came home with paint rollers and gallons of Navajo Sunrise latex she had won at a raffle, like the time three months before. What if she started to paint the house, the radio blasting All Oldies at two A . M ., only this time I wouldn’t have to put up with it.
    I wouldn’t have to go out and turn off the radio and stand in my pajamas waiting for her to get done yelling, spots of off-white all over her face.
    I might forget myself, and lose control.
    Or maybe she would find it first, like the time she had found the cigarette paper in my wallet, all flat and wrinkled from being sat on for months. She said she wasn’t going to be one of those mothers who went into denial, and began to dismantle my room, underwear and old shoes all over the place, wrecking my wasps’ nest.
    I took my pajamas off and climbed into my weathered Levis and an Oakland Raiders T-shirt so old the pirate was flaking off. Listening all the while for my mother’s car, I took a jar of Vaseline down from her medicine cabinet. I slathered the gun with petroleum jelly, so the cylinder was thick with it, the SMITH & WESSON on the barrel impossible to see. I held my breath when I coated the trigger and the hammer gently, very gently.
    When the gun was encased in half a jar of gunk, I settled it into a plastic Safeway bag, a few green pearls of broccoli at the bottom. The Safeway S got stretched out of shape, but the plastic held. I washed my hands very carefully at the kitchen sink, a thorough job, using Palmolive dish soap and hot water.
    The back lawn was wet with dew, the grass squeaking under my unlaced shoes. The night was windless. The leaves of my bean garden hung motionless, the ground still moist where I had watered the Kentucky blue wonders that morning. I rummaged for a spade in the toolshed, beside the sack of lawn nutrient my mother had been spreading all over in the middle of the night the week before. I dug a hole, listening for my mother’s car from time to time, hearing only the night sounds, the far-off murmur of the freeway.
    I buried the gun in the backyard, beside the lime tree.

F IVE
    Sleep hits me hard, a fact that embarrasses me sometimes. I sleep through operatic windstorms, hail, and even once when a neighbor was arrested one Fourth of July for firing clip after clip from his M-16.
    I tugged the earphones out from under the bed, a feat of great skill for someone as sleep-sodden as I was, The Human Jellyfish Grows Fingers. I listened to a CD Bea had loaned me, by a blind man who had been dead sixty years. Bea likes this, tapes of early Hawaiian folk music, Cajun yodel-masters, the bagpipes of the Isle of Skye. I had the feeling Bea could teach me a lot about music. The guitarist was pictured on the cover of the CD. One of the guitar strings had broken and hung like a long silver hair off the neck of the instrument. His lips were parted in song, and his eyes had that empty gaze of blind people, eyes like fingertips.
    When I woke again I was late.
    Her briefcase was spread all over the dining-room table, folders and multiple listing books, little photos of houses for sale, her business cards, FLORENCE MADISON , with a tiny photo of her smiling face before she let her hair grow long. Her maiden name had been Gant, but she was convinced Dad’s last name sounded better. Escrow folders had spilled onto the floor, confidential financial reports, loan applications, credit ratings. My mother could find out who owned any property in Alameda County by tapping her Social Security number plus a three-digit code into the computer in her home office, a cluttered hideaway just off the dining room.
    I didn’t bother being extra quiet; I had no time for that. An empty bottle of Bacardi rum glittered beside the toaster. I shook up a plastic bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice, mostly pulp after a week in the fridge. I thought I heard Mom call my name, but