Web of Angels Read Online Free PDF

company’s computer system. His desktop wallpaper was a photograph of the kids and Sharon, looking stiff as she always did as soon as a camera was pointed at her.
    “Would you like some broccoli, Cathy?” she asked.
    Cathy had a lamb chop, cucumber salad and mashed potato on her plate. “Yes please,” she said, accepting the broccoli, too. She wasn’t really eating any of it, just cuttingand poking bits around so that she had something to do at the table.
    “What time are your parents expecting you home?”
    Cathy poked her food some more. “Maybe eight.”
    “I’ll walk her home, Mom.” Josh was sitting next to her, tilting his chair back and balancing on it while Emmie fussed over her lamb chop, having suddenly realized it came from an actual animal like the stuffed lamb she slept with every night.
    “Eat it,” Josh said. “It’s just meat. What difference does it make how old an animal is? It’s raised to be eaten.”
    “Chicken isn’t an animal,” Emmie said. “It’s chicken.”
    “Sure it is. All of your stuffed animals are meat. In some places, dogs aren’t pets and people eat them because they’re meat. They’ve got the same rights as pigs. Or not.”
    “Pig?” Emmie asked, her face appalled. “Like Miss Piggy?”
    “Yeah. Bacon, ham, pork chops. That’s all Miss Piggy.”
    Emmie pushed her plate away. “I don’t want any meat,” she said, her face screwed up, tears rolling down her chipmunk cheeks.
    “Thanks, Josh.” Sharon put an arm around Emmie, brushing back the mop of red curls as unruly as her own.
    “No problem, Mom.” He grinned.
    “So make your sister a peanut butter sandwich,” Dan said, his tone wiping the grin off his son’s face. On Saturdays the two of them liked to play board games, keeping a running score from week to week. Josh looked so much like him, round black eyes, tanned skin, long legs and long arms,and then a touch of his Jewish grandpa, with those sticking-out ears, but nothing of Sharon, as if her genes were just on the inside.
    She glanced at Nina, who had Dan’s colouring but her pointed chin, struggling to cut her lamb chop, refusing to ask for help. “How was your spelling test?” she asked.
    “I didn’t know all the words,” Nina said.
    “That’s good,” Sharon said decisively, all the more decisive because spelling tests had always scared her to death.
    “It is?”
    “Of course. You get another test next Friday, right? Well, if you knew all the words today there wouldn’t be anything to learn.”
    Cathy stopped pecking at her food. “If I don’t get an A, I get grounded,” she said, using a napkin to wipe imaginary smears off her lips. “Because people who do well, do well. And people who don’t, don’t. Like my sister.”
    If Sharon had been looking at Cathy, she might have seen something unexpected in her eyes. But Sharon’s attention was on her middle daughter’s mouth wobbling as she looked down at her plate, knife and fork motionless in her hands. Maybe her mom was lying to her again. Maybe she was in trouble or dumb, dumber than Josh anyway. He knew how to spell everything. All of these thoughts, Sharon could read on her daughter’s face just as well as if she’d said them out loud, for she’d been listening to the language of her children’s eyes and lips and fingers and toes since their birth. Nina hooked her right index finger over the other when she was upset. She was doing it now.
    “Everybody has to start out not knowing,” Sharon said. “I just want my children to learn.”
    “As long as you try your best,” Dan added. “What counts is effort.” And he believed it, sincerely. He got up to stand behind Josh at the counter, where he was slicing bread for Emmie’s sandwich.
Don’t saw at it, cut it
, Dan instructed.
Not like that. Thinner
. But he was still wearing the hideous tie the girls had bought him for his birthday and he always accepted Josh’s word, even when the evidence was stacked against