Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free Page B

shirt, suspenders, and saggy pants. He’d killed himself when my dad was sixteen, the story went, leaving my dad and Grandma Bennie on their own. I’d always hated that picture, because it was the kind where the eyes follow you wherever you stand, judging you, finding you to be small and possibly stupid. Grandma Bennie, I’d always thought, would have needed a sense of humor to live with a guy like that.
    “If my humor isn’t from Grandma,” I said, “then it must be from someone even further back.” My mom nodded after I said this, as if to say
Of course,
but quickly and without another word she looked down at her tablet, as if something of great importance had sprung up on its screen.
    I didn’t stick around to encourage any more weirdness. I’d had my fill for the day. Instead, I let that hairline-fracture-in-a-perfectly-normal-seeming-window feeling lead me away.

    I fed the cows a while later, taking time to pat a few muzzles and to rub behind a few fuzzy ears. There were only twenty in my dad’s herd, all Herefords—red body, white face—my dad’s favorite breed, and they all had names, as if they were part of our family. I could hear my dad’s truck pull into the drive as I filled the trough with fresh water, announcing his and my brother’s return. My dad and Toby both worked for the county roads department—Toby on a road crew, my dad as a crew leader—hauling coal patch to fill potholes in summer, scraping the roads clean of snow in winter. In spring, they’d get calls in the middle of the night to go out to remote corners of the county to cut up trees that had fallen across roads during storms, and occasionally I’d go with them to help out, to hold a light on them as their chain saws buzzed through limbs like knives through butter and rain spattered against their concentration-lined faces.
    When I came back in from the barn, they were already sitting at the dining room table. “Come on, Aidan,” my dad said, dinging his fork against the side of his plate and nodding at my empty seat. “I’m famished. Wash your hands and get over here.” The Lockwoods were like that: we ate dinner together like a family in a Norman Rockwell painting, only without the overly happy faces populating the table. It wasn’t that we were unhappy. We just weren’t the best examples of glee.
    The conversation during dinner that evening revolved around the roads department, as usual, since my dad and Toby were still stewing in their daily work stresses. That night their complaints centered on their boss, who my dad, in private, always called a corrupt politician. My mom didn’t join in. She never took part in these types of discussions. She’d just sit there and listen as she cut her steak or as she lifted a forkful of baked potato. She wasn’t much for talk of work, and she was even less interested in politics, which she always called “a petty game played by petty people,” in a tone that made it sound like she blamed politics for all the world’s problems. She preferred the domestic world: the house, the garden, the farm, her family.
    I never had much to say in these dinner conversations either. Like my mom’s, my life was limited to just a few social spheres. I’d go to school and then come home to do work around the farm for my dad. And because of that, I wasn’t in any after-school clubs, so I didn’t have much to add. Probably my dad thought this was normal because it was how he’d grown up. Once a month I’d attend a 4-H meeting he insisted I go to, and I’d sit in a circle of kids from local farms, listening to speakers talk about cuts of beef. This wasn’t interesting to anyone except my dad, who hoped 4-H would keep me on the farm as an adult, which I didn’t really want, to be honest, so I usually kept quiet at dinner. I didn’t want him to know how I felt. I didn’t want to invite any arguments. Arguments with my dad were unwinnable.
    That night, though, when he and Toby had finished