Rundown by Michael Cadnum

you?”
    Mom makes a quiet, pretty laugh through her nose, as though too courteous to laugh out loud.
    â€œAre you sure she isn’t watching the house?”
    â€œYou’re as bad as Cass.” My sister had done a report on the CIA as a high school senior, and for months afterward was pointing out innocent-looking pedestrians who could be operatives.
    â€œI’ll have a talk with Dad,” she said. She usually referred to my father as Terry or Terrance.
    I took a ten-second shower, toweled off, and skimmed into my nightie. I turned out my light. I was sure I could see the dim strobe of an emergency blinker, the cops sitting at the curb conferring. I stole across the floor and parted the drapes. The street was empty.
    Plumbing whispered quietly in a far corner of the house, my mother taking a bath or a shower, trying to quiet her mind so she would be able to sleep. The phone trilled beside me and I groped, knocked it off the bed, found it in the dark.
    Cass gets affectionate and talky when she’s sleepy. She asked how I was feeling, was I getting enough rest, and then, niceties observed, careened right into her usual topic A. She said Danny found everything too easy, he rarely even had to study.
    I said that this was hard for people like Cass and me to understand, because our own parents had worked so hard. Cass had always complained about Danny, said he was too good looking and that he was always going off to embassy cocktail parties with his parents, meeting God knew what sort of French-speaking temptress. It was her way of bragging.
    â€œWell, Dad didn’t exactly suffer,” Cass began.
    â€œRemember how he didn’t want us to see how upset he was when the restaurant burned?”
    Cass had picked up a knowledge of sleeping pills from one of her first boyfriends, a pre-med student with an MG. I wondered if she had been mixing a few sleepy-time tablets with a glass of wine. For an instant I worried, thinking: Barbiturates, alcohol, coma.
    Cass was making her feline sound of a person mulling heavy ideas, not to be interrupted. A yawn, or half yawn, flared the silence. “It’s true—there were tears in his eyes,” she said.
    I found myself thinking how much easier it would be on Dad if the wedding was called off.
    I looked dumpy in my maid-of-honor dress, a robin’s-egg blue Dupioni silk V-neck with a sweeping, A-line skirt. I didn’t look cavewoman, but I didn’t look half as good as Cassandra did in her princess-line skirt, off-the-shoulder bodice, white all the way. The wedding consultant had told Dad this was the glamorous but understated look an afternoon wedding demanded.
    I had expected the consultant to be a friendly Dracula, eager to watch the fittings, all of us in our undies. Instead he had the carelessly well-dressed manner of a basketball coach and talked about flow: traffic, caterers. “Attention wants to flow to the bride.”
    â€œI’d have a heart attack,” she continued, “rather than call off the wedding. If we agreed to get divorced right after the ceremony, we’re going through with it, no matter what.” A brace of her Stanford friends, willowy and talkative, were going to be stunning as bridesmaids, a court of powder-blue dresses.
    â€œDr. Theobald is going to recite a poem,” I said.
    As she sometimes does when approached by news she dislikes, she checked her hearing, made sure her data was sound before she reacted. “Dr. Theobald is doing what?”
    I told her again, same words, same tone of voice.
    â€œI didn’t agree to that.”
    â€œDad left me a note, like it’s especially wonderful news.”
    She didn’t sound sleepy now. “I told Dad that Dr. Theobald is unreliable.” She said his name with mockingly overcorrect pronunciation Tib-buld . “I don’t even like the way his voice sounds when he reads.”
    â€œIt doesn’t say what poem. But Dad used three