Free The Invisibles by Hugh Sheehy Page B

looking, surprisingly so, given Leonard’s characteristic dullness and expanding paunch, and the daughter, a blonde child with gapped front teeth, was exceptionally cute. He felt he knew Tanya and her daughter intimately, though he’d never met them, and though people in his hometown frowned on mystical thinking, he sensed that if he kept his mouth shut when he met them they would find themselves mysteriously charmed by him. They had been planning for some time to go to his parents’ today and open presents, and Leonard had mentioned it so many times on the blog that Mason wondered whether his brother wasn’t really posting secret messages to him. Of course Leonard would never do this consciously; he was too jealous, too attuned to his local frequencies. But maybe some part of him, something spiritual, reached out to Mason while the dumb body labored on. He imagined Tanya’s daughter shrieking with delight as he threw her into the air and caught her repeatedly, while Tanya and his parents looked on, amazed by his way with kids, and Leonard unable to conceal his envy. It was not too late, he thought, never too late for family, for even if he had been the troublemaker, he had always been the favorite. Long before his troubles began, he saw himself in the story of the prodigal son. He was the carrier of his family’s joy. He reached for the baggie in the ashtray.
    They were going to be so surprised. Maybe too surprised. Maybe he should call from his cell phone to diminish the shock of his arrival. There was his father’s heart to think about. His mother’s ticker probably wasn’t shipshape either. He picked up his phone and nearly called, but then he remembered he was driving in extremely hazardous conditions, and then he remembered his earlier reasoning that it would be better to wait until he had stopped the vehicle before he broke a thirteen-year silence. A shiver of pleasureran from his throbbing head down through his spine and arms and butt. It was a good thing he wasn’t any higher.
    He glimpsed a passing exit leading up to what must have been a country highway. This couldn’t be Mansfield, not yet, and even if he wanted to stop to rest, there was nothing out here but farmhouses and barns and silos scattered over vast tracts of snowy farmland, and if you had asked Mason to guess how many of those structures had been abandoned for decades he would wager more than half, the rest inhabited by couples of a vanishing generation, people so old they were probably already tucking themselves in for the night.
    He had to push on another couple of hours at this slow-going speed, which with the coke would be no problem. He would slow and make the gradual turn into his parents’ driveway, and the people inside would see the headlights. He had presents, a backseat filled with them, gift-wrapped in shining silvery blue paper and red ribbons this very morning at a mall in northern Kentucky. Shopping had been a revelatory experience. Wandering among the stores, he had been seized by a spirit of generosity and serendipity that felt new to him. He found himself spending twice what he had vaguely budgeted, but it didn’t matter; he could always pour more drinks, and people would give him money. That had always been simple enough. He found he had a talent for choosing the right gifts. There was a book on history’s greatest military campaigns for his father, a copper-clad sugar boiler for his mother, a new bass fishing rod for Leonard. Though he had yet to meet Tanya, he was sure he knew her better than his brother did, reading beyond the observations in Leonard’s blog, and he had picked out a sleek leather jacket for her, figuring her for a size six — if he was wrong, there was always the gift receipt. For the little girl, he had picked his favorite board game, The Game of Life, in which you started out with a single plastic peg representing a personand rolled dice to advance