Edge by M. E. Kerr Page A

son.
    Everyone said it was a good thing he knew his way around the prison. He’d have no trouble finding things when he got sent there.
    One time he was picked up for shoplifting in the A & P and another time he drove off in someone’s car on County Fair Day. He’d crawl into the Schine Cinema window from the fire escape, or he’d break into the YMCA after midnight for a skinny dip. He set a pig loose down a church aisle on a Sunday and he stole the iron balls from the Civil War memorial cannon on the village green.
    Then when he grew up, it was girls. It was fathers keeping guard over their daughters, for fear he’d break one of their hearts or worse. Mostly it was “or worse” they worried about when it came to Lasher.
    He was charming, devilish, a looker, and he had his own car. A van.
    A big van, decorated hippy style, stereo inside and heaven knows what else.
    And then … and everyone in Arcade remembered it—it was Lasher and Laura Waite.
    â€œBefore my time,” Mr. King likes to say, with that cocky smile of his.
    Mrs. King gets red, always. It is a story she doesn’t think he should tell, not because she cares that Lasher has become a prison guard in Florida and a Born-Again. “Bald now, and fat ? He breaks chairs. Swear it!” Mr. King often has to stop laughing before he can continue. “I didn’t know who he was, he’s so bloated.”
    For Mrs. King this particular story is not about what Lasher has become, as much as it is about what passion does to love when passion has a say in it.
    Who didn’t know what was going on between them? Who’d never seen the two of them together, how they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, couldn’t stop grinning and looking into each other’s eyes?
    Victor King continues: “Says, ‘How’s my Laura?’ to me. His Laura!” Mr. King slaps his knee.
    No, it is not what Lasher turned out to be that makes Mrs. King embarrassed for her husband.
    No one can take back the fact that Laura Waite was Lasher’s girl. Mrs. King thinks of it as ages and ages ago, the year she wrote the poem.
    Her mother found it at the back of Laura’s diary and demanded an explanation.
    Laura said, “Why don’t you explain why you snooped?”
    â€œ Lips your lips on mine, ” her mother read sourly, “ And wet your eyes, eyes, eyes,/Not yet, not yet. What does that mean?”
    But Mrs. Waite knew the answer to that question. That fall Laura found herself attending Miss Grey’s for Girls, off in Pennsylvania.
    In all her life she’d only written the one poem.
    â€œWhat did you like about it?” Horacio asked.
    Tory’d been passing by, somehow, just as the supermarket was closing for the night.
    â€œThat the hero was so intense, I think,” said Tory. “And that it was really much more than just a love story.”
    â€œYou know the author, García Márquez? I was born in the town where he was born. Aracataca, Colombia.”
    He took her hand then, just like that. Of course, they had come to a crossing, but he was going to hold it after they got to the other side. She knew it.
    He said, “All that intensity is my birthright.” He looked at her to test how her eyes would take that and he saw them shining back. Now he was almost sure of what he’d dared to hope when he first saw her lingering outside.
    A night of firecrackers and stars.
    They sat in the canvas chairs along the front lawn of the club, facing the lake. Drew had on white pants and a red T-shirt, long and lean in this, the last summer of their youth.
    Tory had called it that a moment ago, holding a sparkler away from her yellow halter dress. Drew stretched his legs out in front of him and said that he expected his youth to last until the end of college.
    â€œBut it’s the last time we’ll be living with our parents, full-time. Did you ever think of