Read Superpowers for Free Online

a lot to take on. But maybe you wanted to, once. All I'm asking ... is you think about it."
    Jack thought he would start crying if he answered, but he managed to contain himself. "I'll think about it, Dad."
    "That's all I ask."
    Jack's mother brought in a card table. "Soup'll be ready in a minute," she said as she set it up.
    Alice followed with a plate heaped with roast beef sandwiches.
    "Would you like a sandwich, Zeke?" Jack's father made an expression of distaste. "All right. I'll get you something to drink, then, so you can take your medication. That's not optional."
    Jack turned on the TV, and they watched Judge Judy while Alice fed pills to his father. Zeke sipped cranberry juice through a straw to wash them down, and forced down half a bowl of the vegetable soup his wife brought in, but the effort seemed to exhaust him. Jack ate half a dozen sandwiches and three bowls of soup, and he was still hungry. Neither of them said much of anything, just sat and watched the TV while Mom brought and cleared dishes and Alice made scattered, unanswerable comments.
    Judge Judy was lecturing the plaintiff when Jack realized his father was asleep. He looked less drawn, less in pain while sleeping, and Jack hoped it was so.
    He found his mother in the kitchen, slumped behind a cup of coffee.
    "Still raining," he said.
    "Well, we need it." She sipped her coffee. "It's good you came. You headed back now?"
    "Yeah. Still looking for another job for the summer."
    "Don't take on too much, Morty."
    "I'll be fine, Mom." She looked like a little girl, hunched over the white tablecloth, a long strand of hair hanging loose from her ponytail to frame the left side of her face. He wanted to comfort her, to take her hand and let her cry if she needed to. If she dared to. It was Dad who was dying, but there were no doctors for what she was feeling.
    "I'll come by on Friday," he said.
    "Drive carefully," she said.
    As soon as he was out of sight he ran so fast that the fields blurred past him, that his calves burned and his lungs ached. He ran to Madison and then he ran on, west and north until things looked unfamiliar and he knew he would have to stop to find out where he was. But not yet.
    _______
    Detective Ray Bishop flipped through a mail-order catalog with one hand and none of his attention. He was on hold again. He spent half of his time at the station on the phone. He thought about taking up smoking again, not very seriously. He'd given it up six years before, after his divorce, and Ray didn't believe in backsliding.
    Self-improvement was Ray's quiet obsession. Since his divorce, he'd given up a bad habit every time a woman left him—smoking, drinking, caffeine, biting his nails, cracking his knuckles, snapping his gum. He'd even tried giving up masturbating, but he had feared for his mental health after two weeks and relented.
    It wasn't that his habits broke up relationships. There had been plenty of problems between Olivia and himself that his smoking had nothing to do with, and Barbara hadn't slept around because Ray snapped his gum. But Ray had a picture of his ideal self in his head, a guy who always knew the right thing to say and do, a guy who always looked good and smelled good, never had gas and never had food caught in his teeth. He would never be that guy, of course, but there was no reason not to aim high—what was the point of the concept of perfection, if not as a goal?
    Not that it seemed to help much. The last woman he had gone out with had nixed a second date, telling him over the phone that he was "too perfect" for her. Try as he might, he hadn't been able to turn it into a compliment.
    He set the catalog aside and leaned his elbow on the desk. He wished the coroner's office would get some hold music; at least then he'd know for sure that he hadn't been hung up on.
    A nasal voice came on the line. "Bishop?"
    "Cutler. How many bodies have you got over there, anyway? I've been waiting fifteen minutes."
    "Answering the phone