Flame Out by M. P. Cooley Read Free Book Online

but even then it took me weeks of coaxing her before she finally agreed to testify. It was like the Wild West over there.”
    I thought of Dave, who talked about the Island as if it were an isolated outpost. Perhaps for him it was.
    â€œAnyway, if the judge wouldn’t even fight for him, Bernie must’ve been dirty.”
    Dad unmuted the TV, signaling that our conversation was over. A trumpet flourish blared, making the newscast sound grand.
    â€œLower the sound a touch?” I said. I pointed upstairs. “Lucy.”
    He dropped the volume. I watched along with him for the first fifteen minutes, deciding to go to bed before the sports and weather.
    â€œYou coming?” I asked. My dad usually woke at five, and he was up way past his bedtime.
    â€œI’m going to watch the eleven o’clock report, but you go getsome sleep. You’ve got to finish this once and for all for me, and Luisa, and Ted.”
    I touched his arm as I went to the kitchen to wash out the Waterford crystal. I hoped we’d find Ted’s body soon and would have another reason to break out the good glasses and close the case file.
    I WOKE UP TO THE SOUND OF MY FATHER’S VOICE, SPEAKING softly in the kitchen. I crept downstairs. He was showered and wearing different clothes, but I couldn’t tell if he’d slept or not.
    â€œGotta go,” he said. He stopped speaking when he saw me. “Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . take care . . . bye.”
    I poured myself some coffee. “Who was that?”
    â€œYour mom.”
    â€œInteresting. How often do these little chats happen?”
    â€œI don’t note it on my calendar,” he said. “When there’s news. When something big happens.”
    I hadn’t seen my mother for three years, at Kevin’s funeral. I spent most of my teen years resenting her for leaving my dad after she claimed he was too caught up in his job. I stopped visitation. My father tried to force me, and my sister tried to guilt me into it, but my mother took the faux Zen approach: “She’ll come back when she’s ready.” I added her attitude to the list of things to be mad about.
    But in my late teens I softened. I didn’t jump to reunite, mostly because I didn’t want to admit my mother was right, but slowly we reconnected. I responded to her e-mails, and called to thank her for the grocery money she sent me in college. I visited for a couple of weeks on a college break and, to my amazement, almost had a good time. I had to make sure I didn’t trip over Mom’s crystal collection and I escaped outside for a break from the incense, but I began enjoying her for who she was. I even liked her “soul mate” Larry, who teased my mother while at the same time hanging up her wind chimes to “restore the chi in the guest bathroom.” I invited them tomy wedding, and encouraged her to visit for a long weekend a few months after Lucy was born.
    When Kevin got sick, I thanked my Mom for the CDs on positive visualizations and the selenium she sent to help fight the free radicals in Kevin’s body. She came from Florida to cheer us up. She did, unintentionally, as Kevin laughed himself to coughing after she gave “healing blue light” to his midsection, where his cancer was slowly crowding out his vital organs.
    She swept into Kevin’s funeral wearing muted linen earth tones, her hair twisted into a bun.
    â€œYou lost him long ago,” she said to me in the mourning line. “I hope you can see how the universe needed to carry him home.”
    Stunned, I didn’t say anything, focusing on the next mourner, Mrs. MacNeil. I took her condolences—“So terrible. Much too young.”—and averted my eyes as my mother floated her hands above Kevin’s dead body, “aiding him on his path into the next realm.” Later, at the house, my mother explained how I shouldn’t get caught up in the