Absolute Brightness Read Free Page A

from.”
    â€œWhere? On Mars?”
    My mother said I was pure evil and she refused to listen to another word. To get me out of her sight, she instructed me to deliver a handful of fresh towels to Leonard.
    He was lying on his new bed in his basement lair. The aforementioned huaraches were kicked off, and he was gazing up at the system of pipes and wires suspended from the rafters as though he were looking at a field of shimmering stars on a summer night.
    â€œSo cool. Right? I’m going to call it ‘my boxed set.’ Get it? Boxed. Set.”
    â€œYeah,” I said without the slightest inflection. “I get it.”
    â€œIt’s neato.”
    I felt I ought to explain to Leonard why “neato” was a word he needed to drop from his vocabulary. If he expected to make friends during his stay in Neptune, I told him, he couldn’t talk like that. He just stared at me like I had something stuck to my face.
    Finally I said, “What?”
    â€œNothing. I was just wondering if you’ve considered a career in television news broadcasting. You have the ‘on-air’ face for it. Not exactly the hair, but definitely the face.”
    I couldn’t believe my ears. He had puffed up his pathetic chest while making his brilliant diagnosis, as if to make himself appear larger or more important. But he had the puny rib cage of a kid who had survived early illness. If I had had the presence of mind, I would have responded right away by saying something brutally frank. I might have explained to him why I would never in a million years consider handing out bad news on a daily basis to an unsuspecting nation while wearing a cheerful face, a plunging neckline, and a dated hairstyle. It was a hideous idea. The fact that my hair color at the time was magenta and my left nostril was pierced with a garnet should have convinced anyone with eyesight and half a brain that I had plans, and those plans did not include an “on-air” face.
    But Leonard had just arrived from Mars, so perhaps he didn’t understand the signals, customs, and facial expressions of the inhabitants of planet Earth. I decided to let it go. I opted instead to stomp up the stairs and in so doing express my impatience with the whole conversation. At the same time, I could get as far away from him as I could manage in a house so small and cramped. I slammed the door and retired to my room to read Madame Bovary . As Emma Bovary went careening around the streets of Rouen in the back of a closed carriage, making mad and passionate love to Monsieur Léon, I silently made a vow to myself never to speak to Leonard again, because as anyone could see, he was a loser.

 
    two
    OUR FIRST MEAL together was a form of early-twenty-first-century torture. Over spaghetti and meatballs, Leonard tried to figure out the situation between my parents. Why were they no longer together? Where was Dad living now that they had separated? What happened to make him leave? Was it actually a divorce? Were they planning to get back together? Mom tried to deflect each one of Leonard’s questions.
    â€œHe’s a missing person.”
    â€œDon’t ask.”
    â€œCould we change the subject?”
    â€œMore meatballs?”
    â€œEnough.”
    When Leonard persisted, she decided to take another tack.
    â€œYou know the way a snail abandons its shell?” she said, spooning a second helping onto Leonard’s plate whether he liked it or not. “Well, that’s your uncle. Only he moved way faster than a snail. And he wasn’t alone.”
    Whenever Mom talked about my father, she never mentioned the word “divorce”; it was against her Catholic religion. But then, it wasn’t her style to say much about anything—for example, she didn’t go around explaining to people why Chrissie Bettinger, a girl whom she had given every opportunity and had housed under her own roof, ran off with her husband. Not