At the Water's Edge Read Online Free PDF

never know there was a war going on. She asked after you, by the way. Was very sorry to hear you weren’t feeling well. And the funniest thing happened at the stroke of midnight—did you hear? People will be talking about it for years.”
    The Colonel harrumphed and tossed back his whiskey. The canary jumped from one side of its cage to the other.
    â€œI’ve heard rather a lot,” my mother-in-law said coldly, still staring into her glass. Her eyes shifted deliberately to me.
    The blood rose to my cheeks.
    â€œSo, there we all were,” Ellis continued bravely, “counting down to midnight, when all of a sudden there was a positively
huge
explosion. Well, even though we’re a continent away from the action, you can imagine what we thought! We nearly—”
    â€œSilence!”
roared the Colonel, spinning to face us. His cheeks and bulbous nose had gone purple. His jowls trembled with rage.
    I recoiled and clutched Ellis’s arm. Even my mother-in-law jumped, although she regained her composure almost immediately.
    In our set, battles were won by sliding a dagger coolly in the back, or by the quiet turn of a screw. People crumpled under the weight of an indrawn sigh or a carefully chosen phrase. Yelling was simply not done.
    The Colonel slammed his empty glass down on the mantel. “Do you think we’re fools? Do you think we haven’t heard all about the
real
highlight of the party? What people will
really
be talking about for years? About your
disgraceful
, your
depraved
…your…
contemptible
behavior?”
    What happened next was a blur of insults and rage. Apparently we had done more than just get drunk and make fools of ourselves, and apparently Ellis’s moment of temper had not been his worst misdeed. Apparently, he had also crowed loudly about our decision to go monster hunting and “show the old man up,” stridently proclaiming his intentions even as Hank was using a foot to shove him into the back of the car.
    The Colonel and Ellis closed in on each other across the enormous silk carpet, pointing fingers and trying to outshout each other. The Colonel accused us of going out of our way to try to embarrass him, as well as being loathsome degenerates and generally useless members of society, and Ellis argued that there was nothing he
could
do, and for that matter the Colonel did nothing either. What exactly did his father expect him to do? Take up a trade?
    My mother-in-law sat silently, serenely, with a queerly calm look on her face. Her knees and ankles were pressed together in ladylike fashion, tilted slightly to the side. She held her unsipped sherry by the stem, her eyes widening with delight at particularly good tilts. Then, without warning, she snapped.
    The Colonel had just accused Ellis of conveniently coming down with color blindness the moment his country needed him, the cowardice of which had caused him—his
father
and a
veteran
—the greatest personal shame of his life, when Edith Stone Hyde swiveled to face her husband, bug-eyed with fury.
    â€œHow
dare
you speak of my son like that!”
    To my knowledge, she had never raised her voice before in her life, and it was shocking. She continued in a strained but shrill tone that quavered with righteous indignation—Ellis could no more help being color-blind than other unfortunates could help having clubfeet,
didn’t he realize
, and the color blindness,
by the way
, hadn’t come from
her
side of the family. And speaking of genetics, she blamed
her
(and here she actually flung out an arm and pointed at me) for Ellis’s downfall. An unbalanced harlot
just like her mother
.
    â€œNow see here! That’s my wife you’re talking about!” Ellis shouted.
    â€œShe was no harlot!” the Colonel boomed.
    For two, maybe three seconds, there wasn’t a sound in the room but the ticking of the clock and the flapping of the canary, which had been driven to