The Edge of Nowhere Read Online Free PDF

that would mean. She strode over and said, “Let’s get this in the back,” and she picked up the bike, its weight and the loaded saddlebags nothing at all to her. She carried it to the side of the truck and hoisted it into the bed, saying to the animals, “All dogs move,” before she said to Becca, “Hop in the front. Oscar’ll move over. Just let me get this settled.”
    Oscar turned out to be a standard poodle, without what Becca thought of as a poodle’s froufrou haircut. He was black, and he was secured into the seat with its regular belt. Since Becca wasn’t sure if she was intended to unfasten the belt, she waited until the woman opened her door, climbed in, said “What’re you waiting for?” and then laughed when she realized the seat belt was the problem. She said, “Sorry. Let me get that. Come on over here, Oscar,” and when she had the seat belt off the dog, she pulled the poodle over, and then said to Becca, “Diana Kinsale. I don’t know you, and I thought I knew everyone on the south end.”
    “Becca King,” Becca said. She thought the rest: Rebecca Dolores King from San Luis Obispo, California, by way of Sun Valley, Idaho, where I was born. I do not ski. You’d think I would, considering, but I don’t.
    Diana Kinsale said, “Pretty name.” She put the truck into gear.
    Becca glanced back through the window at the pickup’s bed. There were two labs back there and two mixed breeds. She said to Diana, “Doggie daycare?”
    Diana laughed. She took off her baseball cap and Becca could see that her hair was gray. Becca found this quite strange. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever actually seen gray hair on a woman before this because where she was from women dyed their hair the moment the first strand of gray came in. But Diana Kinsale was the definition of au naturel . She wore no makeup, and her hair wasn’t even styled.
    “They’re all mine,” Diana Kinsale said in reference to the dogs. “I didn’t intend to end up with five of them, but one thing always leads to another and here I am. What about you?”
    “I don’t have a dog,” Becca said. “I like them a lot, but my mom’s allergic.”
    “Ah.” Who is she ?
    Becca felt a pressure inside her head. Who is she? was, of course, the logical question. Who is your mom, this woman who is allergic to dogs, and does she know you’re on your bike all alone in the growing dark with the fog coming in heavier each minute? But these questions weren’t asked. They weren’t even thought.
    Becca stole a look at Diana Kinsale. Diana Kinsale glanced at her and said nothing. She punched a button on the radio, and the Dixie Chicks began singing at a volume that precluded conversation.
    It didn’t take long to get to Clyde Street. One and a half Dixie Chicks later, and Diana was pulling into the driveway of a gray clapboard house that overlooked water that Becca would come to know as Saratoga Passage. Below the house, a group of cottages sat directly on a spit of beach, and across from this another island rose up in a mass of trees, darkness, and a fistful of flung lights coming from the houses that stood at its south end.
    Diana got out of the truck and Oscar followed her. The other dogs began to pace. When Becca joined the woman at the pickup’s tailgate, Diana had lowered it and the four dogs leaped out and began bounding around the front yard.
    “No pooping,” Diana shouted at them as she heaved the bike out and set it on the ground. She rearranged the saddlebags upon it, and extended her hand to Becca. “I hope to see you around, Becca King,” she said.
    Becca reached out for the shake. When their hands met, a tingling shot up Becca’s arm, something between an electric shock and her arm coming awake from sleep. Her eyes met Diana’s and in that moment, Becca knew what her grandmother had said was true. Sometimes the absence of something indicates the presence of something else. The only difficulty lay in discerning what that