The Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free Page A

Bishop.
    Deke says, “Watch this.” He lets a marble go.
    Billy waits until it’s halfway down to say “Cool.”
    “Yeah,” Deke says, “but
watch.
”
    Billy watches the marble roll and drop, roll and drop, then turns to Mrs. Bishop. “How was it today?”
    She looks over at Deke. “He’s a good boy.”
    So nobody’s giving him a straight answer. But at any rate the TV’s not on. Unless she just now snapped it off, having heard his car. He could touch a wrist to it and check, but that would be a bit much. Cassie had let Deke have a TV in his room, which he’d watch for hours while she did what she did. Seven years old.
    “I guess Uncle can take it from here,” Billy says. He opens the hall closet, hangs up his jacket and gets out Mrs. Bishop’s coat. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? But Mrs. Bishop usedto baby-sit Billy and Cassie when they were little—she seemed old then,
is
old now—and this arrangement would be even more bizarre if the boundaries got blurred. Mrs. Bishop’s all right, just boring and religious. As far as Billy can tell, she simply regards him as a “bachelor,” maybe not even “confirmed”: she’s been keeping him up to date on her semi-bohemian granddaughter, now divorced and living in Saratoga. “Thanks again,” he says, and holds up her coat as she backs into it. “Oh. By the way. Your honorarium.” He hands her an envelope with a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. “So we’ll see you Monday?”
    “Lord willing,” she says. It sounds to Billy like some old ballad.
Lord Willing rode home on his snow-white steed/And spake to his servants three/O something something something something/And all for the love of thee.
Billy’s a tad overeducated for all this—and of course fatherhood had
not
been in the cards—but he’s doing it.
    He listens for Mrs. Bishop’s car to start up, then says, “So it’s you and me, partner. Got a whole big weekend ahead of us. And tonight’s a bath night.” Billy’s funning: every night’s a bath night. Cassie had him using the shower—when she thought of it—but Billy’s theory is that a bath is not just relaxing but primal, a ritual no kid should be done out of. So it’s play a quick game of something, put together a dinner while Billy’s in the bath, then right into p.j.’s, eat dinner, brush teeth, read and safe in bed by eight o’clock.
    Since Deke’s already into the marble game, that’ll be tonight’s amusement. Billy chooses a clear marble with red boomerang shapes inside—God, he remembers this very marble—and sets it at the topmost point, then lets it go.
Zoop plop, zoop plop, zoop plop.
“Kewel,” he says in his mindless-hippie voice.
    “Kewel,” says Deke. He’s good at mindless hippie. “Can Caleb come over for a playdate?”
    “This is somebody in your class?”
    “Kind of. He’s in my reading group.”
    “Does he
want
to come over?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Oh. So I guess step one is for you to ask him, and then I can call his parents. What’s his last name?”
    “Jacobson.”
    “Really. I wonder if—I think I might know his dad. So what do you want for dinner tonight? We’ve got pasta or spaghetti. Which would you rather?”
    Deke gives Billy his faux-disgusted look.
    “Okay, pasta it is. To tell you the truth, I hate spaghetti.”
    “It’s the
same thing.
”
    “Oh,” Billy says. “Well, in that case.” He goes into the kitchen and runs water into the big Revereware saucepan. They’ve had pasta the last three nights. Deke would eat it indefinitely, and Billy doesn’t care. If they want variety, they can always get a different Paul Newman sauce. Deke has come in to watch. “Today the marinara, tomorrow the world,” Billy tells him. Deke laughs; he seems to like stuff that’s over his head. If he’s going to be with Billy, he might just as well.
    This is supposed to be a temporary arrangement, while Cassie—as Billy explains it to Deke—is “getting better.” But he