Last Things Read Online Free Page A

with pilgrim soldiers. Some wanted to shoot him, but others hoped to keep him as a pet. Before this could be decided, Edgar woke with a start to the sound of a car in the driveway. “Who’s there?” he mumbled, kicking over the pilgrims all at once.
    I ran around to the front of the house. Alec was standing on the sidewalk wearing his black magician’s cape. He had on the shirt I liked best. “Super Duper Popcorn Freak,” it said on the front. Sometimes when he visited, he pretended to give me the shirt, but he always took it back at the end of the day.
    My aunt and uncle unloaded the car trunk, which was filled with groceries.
    “Come give me a kiss, Grace,” Aunt Fe said. She was wearing a complicated outfit in shades of orangeand brown. Once she had sold real estate, but then she had decided to become a color consultant. Everywhere she went, she carried swatches of different colors so that she could figure out what season you were. I was a spring, she said, and she was a fall.
    I let her kiss my cheek. She smelled like cinnamon. Men like the smell of cinnamon more than any perfume on earth, she’d told me once.
    I squirmed out of her arms. “Where’s Mary?” I said.
    “Still in the car. She’s having a time-out.”
    “What did she do?”
    My aunt shook her head.
    “She stabbed Alec with a fork,” my uncle said cheerfully.
    I peered at Mary through the window. Her eyes were closed and her hands were folded as if in prayer.
    “What’s she doing?”
    “Praying for deliverance, I suspect,” my uncle said. He handed me a casserole wrapped in foil.
    We carried all the food inside. My mother met us at the door with a kiss. “Pete, Fe, lovely to see you,” she said. She went into the kitchen and checked on the turkey. My uncle watched her from the doorway. If I squinted, I could make him look like my father, but whenever I did this, it made my head hurt. He came up behind my mother and whispered something in her ear. She smiled, but she didn’t speak to him.
    “Anna, Anna, Anna,” he said. “Are you ever going to forgive me?”
    My mother made him a drink with an umbrella, a sword, and two olives in it. “A peace offering,” she said. She had only just started speaking to him again. When my uncle didn’t pick me to be on his show, my mother gave him the silent treatment for weeks. If he called, she hung up on him. If he came over, she didn’t say a word. One night, after he’d gone on and on about the authentic Japanese garden he planned to build, my mother snuck into his backyard and filled his new pagoda with garden gnomes. Be reasonable, Anna, my father said.
    In the next room, my father put on a record. I could hear him talking to Aunt Fe about colors. He was explaining something to her about the spectrum of light, but she kept interrupting him. My father was a winter.
    “Go, Daddy-o,” the man on the record yelled. My uncle took my mother in his arms and danced with her. She put her head to his chest and sniffed his shirt.
    “Your personal hygiene has gone to pot since you became a celebrity, Pete,” she told him.
    My uncle laughed. “It’s not my fault. I was born without a sense of smell. You’re half hound dog, I think.”
    My mother spun out of his grasp. She looked pretty, dancing. “Drinks, everyone,” she called.
    Aunt Fe came in, carrying a bowl of peanuts.
    “How goes it with the birds?” she asked my mother. She was wearing a flowered scarf that kept slipping off her shoulders. It fell on the floor and I picked it up.
    My mother sighed. “One of the last two dusky seaside sparrows in the world died last week. The surviving bird has no mate, so for all intents and purposes that species is extinct.”
    “Isn’t that a shame.” Aunt Fe opened the oven door and looked inside. “I’m glad to see our bird’s not on the endangered list this year,” she said.
    My mother looked vaguely out the window. “Where has Edgar disappeared to?” she asked me.
    I found him on the