The Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free Page B

doesn’t see why they can’t just keep going. After her thirty days in the hospital, she moved into a halfway house and went back to work, but nobody involved with her treatment—Cassie included—seems in any hurry about reuniting her with her son. And Billy isn’t pushing it.
    After high school, Cassie had gone to Boston to study piano and composition at Berklee. Billy thought she had the true gift. How many eighteen-year-old girls—especially in Menands, New York—aspired to play like Red Garland? Butshe also had the other thing, which he guessed went with the gift, and she lasted less than a year. Selling her baby grand, she later told him, had bought only two months’ worth of dope, but it was two months to die for. Then she’d done her scary turnaround: stopped using, cut off the down-to-her-ass hair, bullshitted her way into a job with Shawmut Bank, married Vic, got pregnant, divorced Vic, had the kid. By the time she crashed and burned this fall, she was making a hundred thousand dollars a year, living in a co-op apartment tower with a view of Boston Harbor—and, it turned out, using big-time and sleeping about one night in four. Ever since Berklee, she’s refused to touch a piano, even last Christmas when their dying mother bullied them into singing carols. Billy finally had to back them up, picking out the chords with aching pauses in between as he tried to get his fingers on the right keys.
    The place Cassie’s in has a no-number pay phone in the front hall; they can make one call a day and are allowed no incoming calls at all. She phones every other night and talks first to Deke (whose end of the conversation is mostly
No
and
Yeah
), then to Billy. She often says she’s glad Deke’s “in good hands.” Which always makes Billy think of that Sherwood Anderson story.
    But he secretly thinks that Cassie secretly knows Deke is in
better
hands. Back when Deke was born, it was Billy who talked her out of naming him Duke, in honor of Duke Ellington; did she really want to give her kid a name like a German shepherd? Billy’s enrolled Deke in school here, the school where he and Cassie used to go. He drops him in the morning on the way to work, Mrs. Bishop’s there when he gets off the bus in the afternoon, Billy’s back by six, then it’s two hours to bedtime. All do-able. Dinners had seemed daunting, but pasta’s just a matter of putting on water and heating up sauce; in another pan he steams vegetables with his mother’s vegetable steamer, a thing that looks like a Bucky Fuller dome on little legs. Once a week,he has Mrs. Bishop put a chicken in the oven. He’s bought age-appropriate CD-ROMs:
The Magic School Bus Explores in the Age of Dinosaurs
and
The Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System,
each described as “A Fun-Filled, Fact-Packed Science Adventure.” (He passed on
The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body.
) He reads Deke bedtime stories, and he’s gotten good at doing the characters’ voices, even in crap like
Bugs Bunny and the Carrot Machine,
where he has to do the proto-faggot Elmer Fudd. He’s made Deke a go-to-sleep tape of Horowitz playing a sequence of sweet, unjumpy pieces: the quieter sections of
Kinderszenen,
a couple of gentler Chopin waltzes. And he’s considered teaching Deke the first couplet of “Now I Lay Me,” without the die-before-I-wake part.
    This playdate thing, though. He can see it all now: him with little boys in the house, villagers converging with pitchforks. This Caleb must be Andy Jacobson’s son; Andy stayed here in town after graduation, married Angie somebody, two classes behind them, and went into his father’s fuel-oil business. Definitely not one of the guys Billy came out to back in high school. Around here, Billy’s thing has always been not to be
not
out but not to make an issue of it—when he was living in New York, it was a whole other story—and he’s sometimes more cagey than the situation requires. He introduced Deke to Mrs.