Free The Night of the Comet by George Bishop

or stuttering loners who lingered at the edges of his classes: these became his favorites, the ones he gave special attention to, because in them he saw the image of himself as a boy, that lonely kid sitting in his room at night with his astronomy books and homemade radio.
    Still, however much he began to feel useful at the school—a sense that he might actually be needed there—it would not have been enough to make him abandon his dream of graduate study and stay in Terrebonne.
    That would only happen, as he would tell it later, after he met a certain girl in a certain drugstore one certain night.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    MY mother, back when the new neighborhood behind us was first being developed, would sometimes take me and Megan there on Sunday afternoons “for a look-see.”
    I’d leave whatever book I was reading and we’d slide into the family Rambler, an economy model with a blue exterior, hot vinyl seats, and no air-conditioning—“a car that only a drunk door-to-door salesman would drive,” my mother complained. She’d steer us out of our neighborhood, across the Franklin Street bridge, and past the handsome wooden sign planted in a bed of cedar chips: “Beau Rivage Estates.” It was a glamorous name for a place that until recently had been a low wet field where people dumped old car tires and where Peter and I went to light fires and play soldiers. The windows down, we would roll slowly from one end of the neighborhood to the other along freshly paved streets, into cul-de-sacs and out, peering up at the large homes with their landscaped lawns and newly planted trees.
    As she drove, I saw my mother’s face take on the same covetous look it got whenever she brought us shopping at D. H. Holmes in New Orleans.In the cool lights and perfumed air of the department store, she became like a starving animal searching for food. Her lips would go thin and her eyes would dart from one side of the aisle to the other. If she saw something she liked, a dress or a new kitchen appliance, she’d step quickly to it and shoot out a hand to find the price tag. She’d peek at it, tighten her face, and then tuck the price tag back into place before pulling us along to the escalators for the half-off discount racks in the basement.
    She was the same on our Sunday afternoon sightseeing drives. “Don’t gawk,” she said as we stared out the windows with her. “Pretend you live here.” But even her saying that made it plain that we would never live there. We would only ever be tourists, gazing up at the homes that we would never enter, dreaming of the luxuries we could never afford.
    After our tour of Beau Rivage Estates and a conciliatory stop at the Tastee Freez, we’d return to our own nameless neighborhood. Bumping along the asphalt road that crumbled away on either side into open drainage ditches, seeing the mildewed clapboard houses with their rusting pickup trucks in front, the tilting tin sheds out back, the broken toys in muddy yards, we could practically hear our mother sigh in disappointment—at herself, at her husband, at our own shabby middle-class existence. She tried, god knows she tried, but in spite of everything she did to keep up appearances, she still hadn’t managed to scrape the mud of this town off her shoes.
    But just as the comet had begun to work its changes on my father, so it began to affect my mother. A glimmer of possibility shone up there in heaven—we all sensed it—and seeing the attention he’d begun to enjoy on account of his comet, and reading his weekly column in the newspaper, and marking the new confidence in his step as he set off for school in the mornings kindled in her the hope that our fortunes might still improve, that our life could be better than what it was. And if there was any model for what that better life looked like, it was the Martellos.

    My mother started to linger in the backyard on the lookout for them as she rearranged her potted plants on the porch. She spoke