Sliding On The Edge (3 page)

She glanced up at the sound of the bus
pulling away. A lone girl stood looking around, like a visitor from
another planet.

Well
, Kay thought,
Sacramento and Las
Vegas are different planets. Those bus depots with slot machines at
every door look alien to me.

Kay took a moment to see the downtown
from a stranger’s point of view. The clatter of cars and busses
filled the air, their exhausts belching fumes. Several blocks away,
the gold ball atop the state capitol building poked up from behind
the jagged ridge of office roofs. This part of the city was built
sometime in the nineteen-forties or fifties. Many of the
storefronts were a faded turquoise or imitation stone that Peter
had called “Late Tacky.” Handwritten signs promising the best for
less looked like super-sized Band-Aids on the grimy
windows.

Kay studied the dark-haired
girl across the street. Dressed in a T-shirt and low-cut jeans, she
clutched a brown paper bag. Like most of the girls these days, she
looked a little sloppy and a lot sassy. Kay tried to read her
expression.
Some apprehension, she
thought. That’s normal. She’s in a strange place about to meet
someone for the first time. But what else is there?

The girl leaned against the wall of
the depot. She looked up then down the street, as if deciding which
way to go if that grandmother didn’t arrive.

What are her
options?
Kay wondered.
What if I don’t cross the street, tell her who I am? Where
will she go? What will happen to her?
She
ran down the list of strays she’d taken in over the years: Buster,
who’d limped in on three legs with a deep cut in his front paw.
Kenny, with
a suffering
man’s eyes. The uncountable cats. Two donkeys. All
unwanted or abused, until they landed on her back porch.

She looked again at the girl with the
brown paper bag. Under the tight jeans and tough expression was
another stray needing a safe place to stay.

Kay stepped into the street and walked
toward Shawna.

Chapter 5

Shawna

How come nobody ever told
me Northern California could be cold in August?

When I changed buses in Stockton, I
shivered so much that people around me must have thought I had
malaria. It turned out good though, because nobody sat next to me
on the bus. I stretched out and dozed off, wondering if I left
Monster in Vegas, wondering if Monster can travel. If he can’t
he’ll have to find somebody else to push around. But what will I do
if he doesn’t show up anymore? Is that pathetic or what? You get
one secret bud and his name is Monster.

What a relief to step off in
Sacramento, where at ten in the morning, it’s already in the
nineties—almost like back home. But this sure isn’t
Vegas
,
and I’m
feeling all jumpy inside. All I got is three twenties, two tens,
and some change
. What if Kay Stone decides
she doesn’t want to meet me? There’s no way I can get back to
Vegas. And even if there was, what would I do when I got there?
Damn.

I lean against the wall by the front
doors of the bus depot and count backwards from one hundred, an old
habit from waiting on Mom.

“
Shawna?”

I look up at the woman coming toward
me. I try to find something familiar about her. Maybe her eyes or
her hair look like Mom’s. She’s tall, but otherwise there’s nothing
of my mother there.

“
You’re not what I expected,
either,” she says like she’s reading my mind. “Where are your
suitcases?”

I hold up my paper bag.

“
We can get you some clothes
later.” She turns and walks back across the street.

So, is she taking me home
with her?

She looks over her shoulder.
“Coming?”

I shrug.
Guess that means yes
. I step off the
curb into the street. She walks with wide swinging steps in
mud-caked boots. Every step or so, clumps of dirt come free and
scatter across the sidewalk. Her jeans fit snugly over her long
legs, and I’m having trouble imagining her as anyone’s
grandmother.

She stops at a black pickup that looks
like it runs into everything it gets near.

“
Door’s open,” she says.
“Climb in.”

The battered door screeches when I
open it, like it doesn’t want me inside.

She starts the engine and releases the
brake. “Seat belt.”

And that is the last she speaks for
the hour we drive together. I’m used to Mom’s chatter, so sitting
beside Kay Stone, who is living up to her last name, makes me chew
my thumbnail to a stub. I wonder if she’s ever going to talk to me
again.

The sign for Sweet River
comes and goes before I blink.
Is it a
ghost town?
We wind around up a mountain,
cross a couple of bridges, and turn onto a dirt road that looks
like a dry creek bed. That’s when the truck turns ugly and slams my
head on the roof. I grab the seat and hold on.

On either side of us, horses
stretch their long necks through wood fence rails and yank up grass
almost out of reach. I count three scruffy critters standing near
the road, all taking a siesta.
Could those
things be donkeys?

Kay stops at a row of mailboxes and
grabs a handful of letters.

“
Mostly bills,” she says,
tossing them on the seat between us.

I jump at the sudden sound of her
voice, but she doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve practically left my
skin.

She pulls to a stop in time
to save my teeth from coming loose and falling into my lap. We’re
in front of a dark red house with white trim that looks like a
squat version of the barn a hundred yards or so behind it. A
cluster of trees shades the truck and I look up, wondering what
happens when one of those suckers falls. I’m not used to trees that
big
. They look like they might reach down
to nab me by the back of the neck when I walk underneath. In Vegas
big trees are edged in blinking neon. Guys hose the dust off and
change the bulbs. I’d like to see anyone try to dust one of these
giant mutants.
There’s a fenced area in
front of the house with three naked sheep nosing the grass while a
white, ragged-looking dog roams behind their bare backsides. The
dog, tongue out in a summer pant, turns to look at us, then trots
over and thumps his tail against Kay’s leg when she steps out of
the truck.

Kay strokes his head and he wags his
tail so hard, his whole body sways side to side. “This is Buster.
Buster, Shawna.”

A man sitting on the front porch
waves, sets aside his newspaper, and comes down the steps. His
knees point in opposite directions, and his legs form an arch big
enough for a Volkswagen to drive through.

“
That’s Kenny. He works for
me.” Kay slams the cab door.

“
This her?” The old man
spits to the side and wipes his mouth with the back of his
hand.

“
Yep,” she says.

“
You got suitcases to carry
inside?” he asks.

“
No. She travels light. Come
on inside, Shawna. Are you hungry?”

I shrug.

Her lips pull up tight in a bundle and
she gives me a look.

What did I do? What didn’t
I do?

“
Well, let’s go see what
we’ve got anyway,” she says.

Inside, the house is cool, but I can
tell by the way it feels that she doesn’t have air conditioning. By
two, the furniture is going to melt in this place. Even Tuan’s dump
had air, well, it did most of the time. But this house is way
bigger than anything I’ve lived in besides the Casino Royale, which
I kind of consider mine because I eat there a lot and use the
restrooms—those marble columns and gold faucets are the
best.

“
You want a ham sandwich?”
Kay stands in front of the open fridge.

I shrug. “I guess.”

“
Milk?”

I shrug.

She turns and, uh-oh, she’s bunched
her lips again.

“
Do me a favor. Don’t shrug
all the time, like nothing matters.”

“
Sure,” I say, before I
realize my shoulders are heading north to my ears.

Man, having a grandmother
is way different than I’d imagined. Come to think of it, I never
did imagine a grandmother. I’d thought about having a dog once, but
Tuan told me he’d eat it if I brought one into his apartments.
That’s something else I never imagined, eating a dog.
Gag
.

But now that I study her face, I’m
thinking maybe that would be easier than getting used to living
with a grandmother like this one. It’s kind of like getting a
computer or software without a manual, you know?

Chapter 6

Shawna

I’m concentrating on keeping my
shoulders still. When I shrug it makes Granny go sour, and I don’t
want her pissed from the get-go. Since she hasn’t handed me a
user’s manual, I’ve decided to make one up. Entry #1 under Getting
Started: No Shrugging.

Kay gives me a quick tour of her place
and lets me wash up. I’m not used to so many rooms. I’m thinking I
need a map, but I find my way back to the kitchen and sit at the
table. I know I’m in a way different world already because the legs
on this table are even. I don’t have to stick a matchbook under one
to keep the milk from sloshing over.

I chew on a ham sandwich while Kay and
Kenny talk about things I’ve never heard of before, like tacks and
soapy saddles.

I can tell the two of them are close.
Every once in a while, when Kay is going on about some horse, the
old man’s eyes go kind of soft. He loves my grandmother, I’m pretty
sure. But I can tell it’s 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.