Edge by Michael Cadnum

to let me know it wasn’t an ignorant remark. “In this case we had photographs of people who have been arrested before.” I could sense him simplifying for me, keeping the information smooth.
    A merchant had seen this crime and done nothing. Watched it happen and not run out into the street ready to risk everything to save my father. I had to take a deep breath and lean against the car, studying the speckles of the asphalt, the different shades of gray.
    â€œWe haven’t taken anyone into custody yet,” said the detective, letting me absorb a little more of his cop talk.
    â€œYou’re looking for someone,” I said. Someone with a name, a face. The sunlight was so bright I had to close my eyes.
    â€œOur investigation continues,” he said. He said this with a little extra meaning, trying to peek out from behind the official phraseology.
    â€œHis wallet was empty, all the money gone,” I said.
    â€œThey didn’t leave anything of value,” said the detective.
    â€œThat means my dad gave him the wallet.” I tried to say this all in a rush. “Handed it to him. And he shot my dad anyway.”
    Detective Unruh slipped a pair of sunglasses out of his breast pocket and took a while unfolding them.
    Whenever I began to think that the hospital was a regular place, a building of people engaged in ordinary activity, I would glance into a room and see a woman lying with her mouth open while a nurse tapped her arm, looking for a vein. Or a man holding his stomach like it all might come out, watching while a bag of blood was hung on a pole.
    Mom fished a bagel from the crinkly paper bag.
    â€œThey’ll catch him,” I said.
    I didn’t understand the look my mother gave me, touching a bite of bagel into her mouth.
    â€œYou specifically said blueberry,” I said.
    The Sunday newspaper amounts to several pounds of nothing, instant recycling. A television schedule is usually slipped deep inside the real estate ads, the rest of it stories they could write weeks ahead of time, another tenant hotel closing, the crab catch at a record low. But I hunted through the bale of newsprint until I found it, four short paragraphs. The article did not give the titles of my dad’s books.
    My dad’s prospective PBS special was never actually shown on television. It won third place in a film festival in Mill Valley, and then KQED had a major cutback. I thought of my father as famous, but once I saw a letter my dad had torn into pieces. I nudged the fragments together without actually taking them out of the trash can, not wanting to pry. “Who cares about spittle bugs?” someone had written in the margin of my dad’s letter.
    â€œI saw a priest,” said Sofia.
    â€œPeople die here,” said Mom. Every now and then I could see Mom’s eyes lose their luster and stare at Sofia in the old way. But at other times something new was developing between them.
    â€œHe was wearing his collar. He looked our way and took a step in our direction, and do you know what? I stood right in the doorway,” said Sofia, as though she would be able to block the passage of any halfway determined person. My father must have been attracted to short women. “You know how Teddy detests that sort of thing.”
    â€œThe priest didn’t mean any harm,” said Mom.
    Sofia made an incredulous little laugh. “What if you were stricken—” Her word choice impressed all of us. Stricken . Sofia blinked, had trouble maintaining her composure, and then continued, “and you looked up and saw a priest in the doorway?”

F IFTEEN
    For such a sunny person Rhonda Newport keeps her living room very dark, and even with morning light outside, I had to peer around at the framed color photos of the American West on the walls, sand dunes with sidewinder tracks, a mesa and a grazing pinto. It was Monday morning, and I felt like I was living in a rented body. I was