Free Eric's Edge by Holley Trent Page A

of the shoulder and going, “Huh? Huh? See that?”
    I see it, you horny motherfucker.
    “Not long,” Eric responded when he pulled his gaze upward and found she’d raised a curious eyebrow at him. “Maybe twenty minutes. I wanted to make sure that we would be okay if we end up unable to stop within easy reach of civilization for a while after we grab the kids.”
    “Got ya.”
    He ran the cart to the nearby corral and returned to the RV to find her kneeling in front of the tiny fridge putting perishables away.
    “Probably going to need more milk,” she said.
    He got the RV started and snapped the tongue of his seatbelt into the groove. “I thought that, but I had to choose between the gallon-sized jug and not being able to fit other things in there.”
    “Maybe we’ll be lucky and they’ll hate milk.”
    “Knowing our luck, I doubt it.”
    He was picking up speed on the highway going north when Maria made her way up to the front and dropped herself into the passenger seat holding a container of yogurt and a plastic spoon.
    She put on her seatbelt, plugged her phone into the charger, then peeled back the foil on the cup. “My brain doesn’t understand this phenomenon of available food. This time of morning, I’m usually staked out somewhere and can’t move from my spot without risking missing my target.”
    “That’s mostly what you do for the Shrews, right? Surveillance?”
    “Yeah. That’s my shtick, I guess. Dana says it’s because I’m the most observant, and that may be true, but I also know I’m the least skilled with weapons and my reflex time is slower than Dana, Sarah, and Tamara’s.”
    “But not Astrid’s.”
    “Astrid’s is about like mine, but she’s got good aim. I don’t have her aim.”
    “We grew up around guns. Our grandfather used to take us hunting with him and he wanted to make sure we could always provide for ourselves, even when times were very lean.”
    “I guess he would have seen the importance of that, coming out of Germany after the war.”
    “Yeah, he and my grandmother were very frugal in their personal lives. All the money they saved from not having anything for themselves went into the business. They didn’t think about having kids until they’d been in the US for about ten years, and my grandmother was over forty when my father was born. He was their only child.”
    “And that’s why you and Astrid ended up inheriting the lodge.”
    He grunted. “Yeah. It’s just the two of us left here. We’re in touch with some of our cousins in Germany and might get to go see them after Astrid has the baby.”
    “That sounds like fun.”
    He glanced over at her and watched her brow furrow as she dipped her spoon into the yogurt cup. “Why do you sound so wistful?”
    She shrugged in his periphery. “I guess I’m a little bit jealous. I don’t know much about my family. I mean, I know more about my father’s family than my mother’s. I’m not close to my father’s family anymore because I haven’t seen them in years. With my mother’s family, I just…I don’t. She was so secretive about them. I know my mother left home for college and got caught up in protesting and advocacy. She fell into a group of ‘change-makers,’ as she called them, and I think everything in her life became about upending things. Institutions, I mean.”
    “Sounds exhausting.”
    Maria grunted softly. “I definitely wonder now what sort of environment she came out of for her to have become such a radical.”
    “Do you ever think about getting in touch with them?”
    “With who?”
    “Either side of your family.”
    “Oh.”
    For a long while, she didn’t say anything, and Eric didn’t force her to. He drove, she ate.
    After about five miles, she set the empty yogurt container into the cup holder and pulled her feet up beneath her. “I think about it all the time, and it seems so silly. So… weak of me to want to pursue them.”
    “How would getting in touch with them to