Dancing on the Edge Read Online Free PDF Page B

him and go away.
    Gigi got out of the car and said, “If you’re waiting for Opal to come out and welcome us, you’ll be sitting there forever. Now come on, we’ll leave the U-Haul for now and just bring along our suitcases.”
    I waited until I saw Gigi lift her suitcase out of the back before climbing out of the van. Then I grabbed my bag and turned around to face Grandaddy Opal’s house. It was small and squat and sat crowded in a neighborhood of other small, squat houses. Back where we used to live we didn’t have neighbors, just fields and ponds. It was more conducive to Dane’s work, Gigi had said. Gigi called Grandaddy Opal’s house a bungalow. The shutters were all crooked, the way they are on haunted houses, and the porch slanted downhill so much I imagined people spilling out of the house, picking up momentum on the porch, and tumbling off the edge, missing the stairs completely.
    I followed Gigi up the porch hill and into the house. As run-down as the outside was, the inside was tidy and white and smelled of new paint. Our house at home always smelled of Gigi’s incense: of flowers and wet wood.
    â€œWe’ve got four rooms,” Gigi said, setting her suitcases on the wood floor and spinning around, first right, then left, to ward off evil spirits. “This is the great room—living room, dining room, and whatever else—Opal doesn’t use it.” She took a bottle of rose water with a drop of liquid gold out of her pocket and poured some into her hands. Then she sprinkled it on the floor and furniture—for good luck and prosperity.
    It was a large room. She had to use two handfuls of the rose water to charm the whole room. Grandaddy Opal had furnished it with a sectional sofa, an orange La-Z-Boy, and to one side a table and chair set. A double stack of
National Geographic
s rising clear up to the ceiling stood next to the La-Z-Boy. They wobbled and threatened to topple over when we walked across the room.
    â€œThen here . . .” She wandered out of the great room and I followed her. “This galley is the kitchen. Opal doesn’t use this room much, either.” Gigi did her spinning and sprinkling ritual again.
    I followed her from the kitchen to the hallway. I could hear TV voices coming from behind the first closed door. “Opal’s,” Gigi said, rapping her knuckle on the closed door.
    â€œPipe down out there!” Grandaddy Opal growled.
    â€œBathroom,” Gigi said, tapping the door on her other side. “And here”—she pushed open the last door—“is our room.”
    I took it all in at a glance. White walls, two cots, and a table between them. I dropped my suitcase, spun around left then right, and ran to the little table. “Look! A TV!” I said. In all my ten and a half years of living I had never seen a television show. Dane said he didn’t believe in television. I remember once Aunt Casey dragged him into her and Uncle Toole’s bedroom, pointed at their TV set, and said, “See? Now you can’t say you don’t believe in TV. It exists, there it is. It’s not like believing or not believing in God. You have to say you either accept TV or don’t accept it; it’s not a belief system, you know. And you call yourself a prodigy.”
    She acted real proud of that one. She always tried to catch Dane, trip him up somehow and make him look stupid. I believe the TV proof idea was one of her finest, because Dane stayed in a sulk all night long, and we had to go home early because he said his teeth hurt.
    I switched our little set on and a gray-white light came up on the screen, nothing else, no sound, no picture.
    â€œIt’s broken,” I said to Gigi.
    â€œIt figures,” she said.
    Â 
    W E’D BEEN IN Grandaddy Opal’s house for a whole week and I still hadn’t seen him. Then one night I heard him get up to go to the bathroom and I climbed