Heat by Michael Cadnum

Author:Michael Cadnum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“I heard you up again in the night,” said my mother from the dining room.

She doesn’t mind holding a conversation with someone she can’t see. She’ll talk to a closed door, right at you, or through earphones. It was the next morning, after a night of bad dreams.

“I wake up a lot,” I said.

I was slicing a banana. The banana sections looked like primitive coins.

“Why are you eating it like that?” Mom demanded, bustling through the kitchen.

I said something about it being good practice in lab technique. She had a folder marked “Immigration Service” in her hand. An employee had been using the Social Security number of a deceased cousin. She would spend the morning selecting letter formats on her word-processing menu: Business Letter, Personal Letter, Death Warrant.

I had been wondering what role she would adopt: distant but still caring ex-wife, indifferent, nosy. She had opted this morning for the frantic, business-as-usual ploy she used when a cat has died or an unexpected envelope has arrived from the IRS. She said, as she hurried off to the Spartan shelves and drawers of her home office, “I forgot to tell you—there’s a postcard for you, from Georgia. Under the wooden fruit.”

A sweeping panorama, a beach with gigantic driftwood, the ocean-cured logs of the north coast. “Thinking of you, Egg Head!” she had written in her graceful, feminine hand.

“I called her last night and told her about your father,” Mom said.

I asked what Georgia had said.

“She’s worried about you,” Mom said. “She always said you and your father are like this,” she added, holding up two fingers side by side.

Georgia once said the pattern of seeds in a slice of banana look like a monkey’s face. My mom says the Man in the Moon looks like a rabbit eating cabbage. I had a piece of rye toast for breakfast, sliced banana, and a glass of pineapple juice.

I gave Rowan a call, knowing the Beals were probably gone for the weekend. But to my surprise Mrs. Beal answered, and said that they had heard about my father’s troubles and that they had every sympathy. That was the way she expressed it, making this all sound historical, the Time of the Troubles.

Mrs. Beal has the most wonderful voice on the phone, it melts all opposition. “But you have to come over,” she protested. Or maybe she has the gift, knowing what the caller needs to hear.

Mrs. Beal’s parents were always appearing in the society pages, fund raisers for the ballet. Mr. Beal’s family used to own a company that manufactured environment controls for airplanes—the mechanisms that allow aircraft flying through cold and lethally thin air to turn the atmosphere into warm, breathable gas. Mr. Beal’s scuffed hiking boots and loose-fitting plaid shirts were made to order, and their driveway always had brand new cars spattered with mud.

I wondered what they fed you Sunday morning in a county jail.

Mrs. Beal opened the door wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and showing a smile of perfect teeth, the kind you capture after years of orthodontia.

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