Come In and Cover Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

midnight sun . . .
    â€œShe’s the one,” she sang aloud, softly, opening her eyes.
    She could see a silhouette at the foot of her bed. Hands clasped behind his head, face tilted toward the ceiling, knee bobbing up and down furiously to his humming. His arms were thin and boyish, more elbows than biceps.
    The bed was perfectly still.
    From where she sat, feet tucked under the sofa cushions, Ren watched her mother struggle with the pie in the fireplace. Ren’s brother—sprawled across the green recliner—tried to balance a battery on his knee. The battery wobbled, and her brother slammed his hand down, trapping it.
    Ren’s stomach itched, and she reached under the leg of her leotard. It was hot pink and she loved it. With a few good swipes she could feel the scabs peel away from her belly—quick and satisfying.
    â€œStop scratching,” Ren’s mother said. She faced the fire, but she could hear the scratching. “You’ll make them scar.”
    Her mother, Anna, kept her hair pulled back, safe from sparks. This was a new thing: The front of her Levi’s stayed hot to the touch, and her face was always slick because it was too hot, really, for a fire in early fall, but she still needed to practice.
    Frontier women used to bake pies in the embers. Those women fluffed eggs in iron skillets and browned biscuits and crisped fatty bacon in the fireplace, and Ren’s mother needed to be one of those women by the end of the week. She knew all the history—the people at Litchfield Farm had given her thick books and thin pamphlets—and she’d ordered her muslin dress and leather lace-up boots, but she still had to master the cooking before she could start playing her part as an innkeeper. It amazed Ren that someone would pay her mother money to pretend.
    â€œI’m hot, Mommy,” Ren said.
    Her mother wiped the sweat from her own forehead before running her hand along her jeans and then resting the back of her hand on Ren’s forehead. “You really should go upstairs where you can feel the air-conditioning,” she said. “You probably still have some fever.”
    â€œI don’t want to be by myself.”
    Anna studied her daughter’s face. “Leave that one on your forehead alone. It’s bleeding you’ve scratched it so much. I’m going to tape mittens around your hands.”
    Ren sat on her hands. She had tiny flakes of skin and scab under her fingernails.
    The embers on top of the pie pan were orange and bright, and Ren wanted to string them on a necklace. She watched the fire and her mother’s sweat-shiny face. She was waiting for the pie to come out, to see if this one would be liquid as milk or gloppy like pudding or maybe perfect and solid. She liked the pie required by this new job of her mother’s. She liked the fire and the wide dress.
    Her brother, Scott, did not watch the fire or their mother. He had fit the new battery into place. He watched the blink-blink of red, green, yellow, blue on his new game. The game would flash a color, and Scott would have to press that same color. Then two flashes of color to remember, then three. Then it got harder. Blue. Blue green. Blue green yellow. Blue green yellow yellow. Blue green yellow yellow red green blue. Scott’s memory was not good, and the toy squawked at him every few seconds when he remembered wrong. He let Ren play only when their parents made him, because he was nine and she was four and he could pin her arms behind her back with one hand. So she watched the colors and memorized them, pushing imaginary buttons on the sofa cushion. Red blue yellow green green yellow red.
    The room was too warm, but she sort of liked it. Not too close to the fire, Ren. Don’t scratch, Ren. Don’t spill your juice, Ren. Don’t run around, Ren. She did not move. She watched. Mommy bending and head tilted and looking back at her and smiling. Scott, his back