Thin Ice Read Online Free PDF Page B

Claire about the lips. He glowed, he laughed, he whispered, he twisted the cord around his wrist.
    But no, he didn’t love her.
    We had our real supper. I’d come straight home from school and produced a nicely roasted chicken. He had brought interesting side dishes from an Italian deli in St Paul. We both ate too much. A real supper.
    After cleanup I went outside to admire the new snowmobile. I needed some coaxing because it was cold, one of the low days in a week of roller-coaster weather. I hugged myself and trotted in place on the fresh snow in the driveway. “Nice,” I said, but I really couldn’t share his pleasure. He saw fun and speed. I saw thin ice and black water.
    “Al and I are going out tomorrow to break her in. What do you say afterwards we go out for dinner? There’s that new steak place.”
    I was shocked. Saturday-night date with my brother? Since when? “Sorry, Scott, but I’ve made plans with Jean. School play. Unless you want to join us and go see Penokee High’s production of Macbeth ?” He didn’t, of course. I’m not sure I did, but it’s a small town, it was Saturday night, and I knew everyone in the cast. And, as it turned out, the play wasn’t bad, though all the guys looked silly wearing fake facial hair.
    Scott was home when I got in from the play, close to midnight. He was nursing a beer and listening to music. A woman vocalist, jazzy, unfamiliar. I foraged in the kitchen for my own bedtime snack. Toast.
    I was slathering peanut butter on a third slice when he joined me. “What’s that?” I asked.
    He held up his beer bottle and looked at it. “Pig’s Eye.”
    “No, the music.”
    “One of Mom’s CDs. Ella Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter. Her favorite. It’s her birthday today, you know.”
    “Ella Fitzgerald’s? No, I didn’t—”
    “Mom’s.”
    I finished a bite of toast. “I guess I’d forgotten.” A small offense, brother. Don’t look at me like that.
    “Hers was February second and his was November twenty-eighth,” he said.
    “I know that. I just forgot. Sorry, okay?”
    But he didn’t want an apology, he wanted a promise. “Don’t forget, Arden. What little you know about them, don’t ever forget.”

CHAPTER 14
    Years from now, when I reflect on my junior year in high school, I suspect that I will have no trouble deciding upon my greatest achievement. It will not be my solid A in biology. Not the money I’d made with Arden Art. Not even the Thai curry I produced last fall for Scott’s birthday.
    It will be the pompadour.
    Right before Thanksgiving I’d had an English assignment to write a personal essay based on a family photo. I found one of my parents taken on the day Mom graduated from medical school. She had this huge amount of hair piled on her head. Not sixties beehive, but turn-of-the-century puffs. A pompadour.
    Sometimes I forget what my parents looked like, and I had totally forgotten that my mother once had hair like mine. Long, thick, reddish brown.
    The teacher wanted five to seven pages of familial insight, but I was more interested in the mysterious man standing behind my father in the picture. I wrote about the stranger, and it steamed the teacher. C plus. Okay, maybe I didn’t produce a great essay. But after weeks of practice, I did manage to produce great hair. Special-occasion hair. Prom-night hair. Graduation-day hair.
    But for the pomp’s first public appearance, it was trip-to-the-mall hair.
    “How do I look?” I asked Scott.
    He poured some orange juice and drank before answering. “You look like a member of a very conservative religious group. And I’m not sure it works with the pants.”
    I frowned. New hair deserved new pants, so I’d purchased some red-and-green-plaid logger’s pants. Thirty-three-fifty at the farm-supply store.
    “If you’re going to criticize, then at least let me have that bagel. I’m running late and Kady and Jean will be here any minute.” He handed it over. “Funny smell,” I said as I