Free The Night of the Comet by George Bishop Page A

casually about changes to their house or garden: “They’re almost finished getting those lamps installed above the boardwalk. That’ll look good, won’t it?”
    At the dinner table she began to wonder aloud about them: “I saw Barbara outside again today. I went down to the edge of the water and we had a nice long chat. She seems like really a very friendly woman.” She’d heard from some ladies in town that Barbara was from a prominent Shreveport family, but you could tell just by talking to her that she came from quality. Very gracious, very well mannered. “Honestly, I’m ashamed I haven’t bothered to introduce myself before now. I mean, I see her out there all the time.”
    About Frank, she hadn’t heard so much. “Someone said he used to play football for that college up in Shreveport. What is it? Northwestern? Louisiana Tech? Anyway, he used to play football there, and then he worked at Shell for years and years before he was transferred down here.” From what people said, she understood that Frank was pretty high up in the company—regional vice president or something like that. He was in charge of the whole area now.
    “Have you met him yet?” she asked my father across the table.
    He looked up from his plate. “Met who?”
    “Frank. Frank Martello.”
    “Where would I have met Frank Martello?”
    “I don’t know. You go into town, you might see him around.”
    “Nope. Haven’t met him.”
    “What about Gabriella?” she asked, turning to me. “What’s she like? You must know her pretty well by now.”
    I blushed at the mention of her name. “Not really.”
    “But you’re in the same class, aren’t you? And you don’t talk to her? Why not?”
    What a horrible, awkward question to ask, I thought. Wasn’t it obvious? Just look at the Martellos and then look at us. I would have liked to talk to Gabriella, sure, but in the one month we’d been sitting in classes together, we still hadn’t exchanged two words. I doubted she even knew my name. It wasn’t that she was standoffish; on the contrary,she seemed quite friendly. The problem was that I was still too shy, too much in awe to approach her. I could still only watch her from a distance, admiring the tilt of her head, her queenly walk around the school grounds at recess.
    My mother went on wondering aloud about the Martellos like this for several days, speaking as much to herself as to the rest of us, sounding as if she was circling around and around some notion she had but was too timid to articulate: Didn’t Barbara get bored in that big house all day long? It must’ve been hard for her, not knowing anyone here. She really would’ve liked to have gone on chatting with her that afternoon, but she felt like a hillbilly shouting across the water at her like that.…
    Until my father, looking up from his lesson plans one evening, said, “Good lord. You should just invite them over if you’re so all-fired eager to meet them.”
    “Oh, no, we couldn’t do that,” she answered reflexively.
    “Why not? Just call them up, tell them to come over. They can come and fool around with the telescope some night. Come and check out the comet.”
    My mother dismissed this outright as a ridiculous idea. “You can’t be serious, can you? Invite the Martellos to come here and play with your telescope?”
    “Sure. Everybody likes that kind of thing. A stargazing party.”
    “A stargazing party. Where’d you get that idea? Good lord. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.” She shook her head at my father’s hopelessness. “A stargazing party.”
    But later that same night, after she’d cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen and put away the dishes, she said that it might not be such a bad idea after all.
    I looked up from my homework, my father looked up from his papers, not quite sure what she was talking about.
    “I mean, why shouldn’t we be friendly?” she said, standing in the doorway with a dish towel in her hands.