The Last Notebook of Leonardo Read Online Free

my hand on his furry shoulder. “We’ll just go somewhere else.” I didn’t like to see him upset, so I tried to sound cheerful. But I thought that our problems were probably just beginning. “Dad,” I said, “is it too late to go make up with your boss, and get your job back, and turn yourself into a person again?”
    â€œNot a chance,” he said. “It would take another ten years of research to get the reverse transformation.
And what’s the excitement in that? It’s boring. It’s a re-tread. Anyway, the point is, old Spork is an idiot with a squishy tomato for a brain, and I’m not going back there for anything. No, you’re right Jem, we’ll just have to go somewhere else and make do the best we can.”
    Making do turned out to be difficult. My dad tried to rent another apartment, but when he showed up at a realtor’s office they panicked and shooed him out the door. He sent me instead, but I was so young that they didn’t take me seriously. He tried to get a job, and he did pretty well over the telephone, but every time he showed up for an interview he got rejected. Not even a gas station would hire him. He came very close at one body shop, showing off his long arms and explaining about the squeegee. The mechanics who worked there were impressed, but the boss thought it was too risky. “Fact is,” the boss said, “it’s against regulations. Sure, I could do with a big monkey to lift the engines onto the service rack, but what do you think the inspectors’d say if they saw me working a monkey? It’s illegal. It’s cruelty. I’d get shut down. Sorry, no can do.” He even tried to get a job at the Bronx Zoo, because he thought they might have a use for someone in his condition. But that was the biggest disaster of all. He almost got shot with a tranquilizer dart when he knocked at the
zoo’s front office, and he had to run home double quick to escape the zookeepers.
    Everything was a no go, and our final week was disappearing from under us. On the evening before the eviction, my dad and I sat at the kitchen table eating our last supper and trying to figure out what to do. We were desperate.
    â€œI could buy a tent,” I said, “and we could camp in Central Park.”
    â€œIt’s twenty below!” my dad said. “It’s snowing like crazy! We can’t camp out, we’d freeze to death.” He tossed a quarter of a head of cabbage into his mouth and swallowed it whole.
    â€œMountain climbers do it all the time,” I said, dipping a chicken finger in mustard sauce and eating it. “They get the right equipment, and they go camping out on the top of Mount Everest for weeks at a time and cook food over a gas fire, and it’s real fun. Dad, what else can we do?”
    â€œYou got me,” he said. “You sure got me there. Maybe that’s all we can do. We can travel up the state, camping as we go.”
    Right away I began to feel better. The disaster didn’t seem so disastrous suddenly. It seemed like we could have a lot of fun; and I wouldn’t have to go to school, of course. “I bet EMS is still open,” I said eagerly. “They have a Christmas sale. I could
go right now and get supplies. Give me your credit card, Dad, and I’ll go do it!”
    I could see him thinking hard about it, chewing on an apple or two that he had put whole into his mouth. The more he thought about it, the less worried he looked. All week he had looked anxious, and his gray leathery face had folded up into wrinkles around the eyes, and now I saw the wrinkles smoothing out. Finally he produced a gigantic belch that made the long hairs around his mouth whiffle in a breeze, and he looked at me and said, “Jem, you’re right. That’s the only thing we can do. After a while, after we travel around, maybe we’ll find somewhere nice and settle down. But you