Edge by M. E. Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

the sunporch hide-a-bed. Riding my 10-speed bike. Wearing my socks, my jackets. Playing my CDs, and hogging my PC. Harley made himself right at home.
    â€œThat’s what we want him to do,” my father said. “It won’t be for long, Connor. His uncle’s going to take him as soon as he finishes his work in Alaska. If it wasn’t for Harley’s dad, I wouldn’t be alive.”
    Dad wasn’t that surprised when he saw the swastika Harley had pinned to his cap the day we met his bus.
    All Dad said was, “Better take that off, Harley. That won’t go over too well here in Cortland.”
    â€œIt’s just a decoration—doesn’t mean anything,” said Harley, but he unfastened it and stuck it in his pocket.
    The reason Dad wasn’t surprised was that he’d been through the Gulf War with Harley’s father, and he said Ken Sr. was a little “insensitive” too.
    That was putting it mildly. After the war, he’d call Dad long distance and he’d always start off the conversation with the kind of jokes Dad hated: Polish jokes, jokes about Jews, blacks, Italians—no race or color was excluded.
    If I ever told a joke like that, I’d be grounded, and Dad didn’t have any buddies who spoke that way either. But Ken McFarland always got away with it.
    â€œThat’s just Ken,” Dad said. “He doesn’t know any better. But he knew how to pull me out of the back of that Bradley when we got hit. He risked his life doing it, too!”
    Both Dad and McFarland were reservists who suddenly found themselves in Iraq back when Saddam marched into Kuwait … I was still in middle school then, wearing a yellow ribbon and an American flag, running to the mailbox every day, and never missing a Sunday in church.
    I didn’t dislike Harley. He was friendly and so polite my mother kept commenting on his good manners. We all felt real bad about his folks’ death too, and we couldn’t do enough for him.
    But there were times, a lot of times, when my mother’d tell him at the dinner table, “We don’t call people that, Harley.” Or, “Harley? We don’t think so much about a person’s race or color.”
    He’d say, “Sorry, M’am. I don’t have anything against anyone. I’m just kidding around.”
    â€œBut I have a problem with it, Harley,” Mom would try, “and it sounds like you are prejudiced when you talk that way.”
    â€œNot me,” Harley’d tell her, always with this big smile he has, his blue eyes twinkling.
    â€œCork it around here!” Dad would say.
    â€œYes, sir. Right. I’ll watch it,” would come the answer. But there seemed to be no way he could stop himself. It was built-in … Sometimes after my folks called him on it, they would roll their eyes to the ceiling, ready to give up on trying to change him … I made up my mind I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. He’d be gone soon.
    He was a fish out of water in Cortland. He’d come in summer. I had a job waiting tables at Tumble Inn. Mom and Dad worked too, so Harley was home by himself a lot watching TV, playing computer games, riding my bike around. He was 15, as I was, and he didn’t have a lot of money, but Dad said let him have the summer off: Poor guy. Let him do what he wanted. He was going through enough.
    He never showed that he was going through anything. He put a photograph of his parents out on my bureau, and he ran up our phone bills calling his buddies. He’d tell them eventually he was going to live with his uncle in Wisconsin. (“Yeah, I know it sucks!”) And he’d ask a lot of questions about what was going on. Then he’d tell jokes like his father’d told—we’d hear him in my room hooting and howling, spewing the same kind of language my folks had called him on.
    His uncle’s job in Alaska took longer than