Sliding On The Edge Read Online Free Page A

one-way street. Everything about Kay is
business—no mushy center in ‘ole Grandma.
    She’s not an easy mark for a con,
either. Mom would have waited for someone else to come along before
giving me the signal to go into my lost kid act. Mom was the expert
at sizing up chumps, but even I can tell Grandma isn’t one of them.
She’s got a sharp look about her. And I’m going to have to be very
careful about what I do and say around her. That should go in the
manual, Entry #2: Do Not Try to Con.
    “ I best get back to work,”
Kenny says. “I’ve gotta check on your mare.”
    “ Is her temp up again?” Kay
asks quickly, and her voice is tight.
    “ A little, but I’m keeping
an eye on her.” He walks out the back door and spits over the
railing.
    “ I’ve got chores, too.” Kay
clears the table and sets the dishes in the sink. “Get some rest or
do whatever you want. You know where the food is, so help yourself.
There are books in there.” She points toward her office at the end
of the hall that she’d showed me when she gave me the
tour.
    “ You got a TV?” I
ask.
    She doesn’t look at me. She grabs a
wide-brimmed straw hat off a hook by the kitchen door and walks
out.
    “ Guess that means no.” No
MTV, no shopping channels? What does she expect me to do for the
rest of my life? Watch Kenny spit brown juice all day?
“Arrrg!”
    I roam through the house
again, like I did when I followed Kay. She showed me where I’d
bunk. All of her rooms look about the same—big, with dark beams
like square bones holding up the ceilings, and cowhides stretched
across the walls. She’s got her own style, that’s for sure.
And glitzy is not
a word in her decorating vocabulary. I poke my head into her
office, a room bigger than our whole apartment in Vegas. Kay’s
super-sized desk is piled with stacks of folders and sits in the
middle of the room—Command Central. I step inside. Walls covered
with bookshelves rise up around me like a canyon. For a minute I
feel like I’ve taken a wrong turn and wound up at a bookstore or a
library. It feels weird to see so many books in a room down the
hall from the kitchen or the bathroom—not like where I’ve ever
lived before.
    I walk past the shelves and run my
finger across the spines, something I can usually only do at the
library. There’s everything about horses, presidents, history, and
poetry. And that’s just what’s at eye level. I can’t see what’s
overhead.
    Mom only reads the jokes on bar
napkins. Entry #3: Granny’s Not Dumb. Living with her is going to
take some getting used to.
    Down the hall is my room . I step inside
and close the door.
    I’ve never had a room with a door. Mom
always took the bedroom and I got the sofa or the cot. Or, like at
Tuan’s, the roll-away. I open the door and close it again—just
because I can. The closet is empty. The dresser drawers are too.
But there’s a smell . . . leather and spice, and not girly. Some
guy must have lived in here once. On each side of the big bed are
nightstands stacked with . . . more books and tall brass lamps. I
feel like I’ve landed in heaven. There are books everywhere I look.
A picture of a wild-haired man with deep-set eyes and bushy brows
as thick as his mustache stares up from a book cover. I recognize
Mark Twain’s face from the English class I was in for a few weeks
last year. My teacher read a lot of his stuff out loud.
    I pick up the Twain book and
leaf through its pages. The book falls open to a page with a corner
folded down. Someone underlined a sentence halfway down: Pity is for the living, envy is for the
dead. I read it a couple of times, soaking
up the idea. Wow! Who was the depresso with the pen?
    I put the book down and turn to
explore the rest of my space.
    Green plaid curtains hang on each side
of a wide window that looks out on Kay’s barn and the hillside
where horses nose the grass. Some of them have moved to the shade
of a wide-branched tree, where they huddle like