Imperfections Read Online Free PDF

sometime after summer vacation, which was still three weeks away. After that, the world did not even register.
    As I grew older, I would start to learn that the more I knew the less I really knew. I would learn that there are things going on all over the world that conspire, in time, to contribute to a moment and that connectedness of things. If you could follow all the details, they would comprise the anatomy of that moment, and could be used to predict the future. Leonard would figure this out in fourteen years or so; I would figure it out too late.
    As for now…
    I had no idea that in Hamilton, at the same moment Leonard pushed me from the sidewalk and into traffic only to pull me back just before getting hit by a car, a big, maroon Monte Carlo was rolling off the assembly line.  
    â€œSaved your life.” Leonard grinned and squeezed my arm hard.
    The engine, a big, mean, Mad-Max ian, eight-cylinder engine under the hood was so clean that it shone on its own. The low-grade nylon carpet in the trunk had a plasticky new car smell. This car was being shipped to Toronto; a sixty-eight-year-old lady named Margaret Koshushner ordered it from Franco Popodini’s Niagara Escarpment Pontiac Chev-Olds dealership with the inheritance money from when her husband died in a Pinto accident.
    â€œNow I own you until you repay the debt.” Leonard’s grin spread at the thought of having an indentured servant.
    Leonard was always saving my life. I guess I had to be thankful.
    Margaret Koshushner had little knowledge of the Grimshaw vs. Ford Motor Co. product liability case that had gone on in California, in which Ford paid over $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages because a Pinto exploded and someone died and someone else burned.
    And why did Leonard own me?
    â€œIt’s a Ninja Code thing.” Leonard lunged up the front stairs to his house two at a time. “I saved your life and now you have to be my servant until you save mine or one of us dies, whichever comes first.” He was big into ninjas.
    I wasn’t sure the Ninja Code applied if you almost killed someone just so you could save them so I couldn’t argue the point.
    Margaret Koshushner’s husband didn’t die in a Pinto explosion, though. He had been warming up the car when he died. He had just forgotten to open the garage door.
    Leonard burst through the front door of his house calling, “We’re home.”
    Leonard lived in a new two-storey house on a cul-de-sac about five blocks from school. There was a garage attached on the side and a dusty gravel alley behind. My house was about another five blocks, past the 7-Eleven where we got Slurpees and across the soccer fields where we rode our bikes.  
    Mother and Father always drove over to visit Auntie Maggie and Uncle Tony. They never walked. They were already there, I could hear Father mumbling in another room and the tinkle of ice in a glass of something that would undoubtedly be amber-coloured. That would be Mother.
    â€œBoys,” Auntie Maggie called from the back room.
    Leonard led the way.
    â€œJesus Christ,” Father said. “Leonard, you get bigger every time I see you. Look at the size of that son of a…”
    â€œHi, Dad,” I said.
    Mother sat at the end of a brown and tan paisley couch with a glass in hand. She was glazed, her eyes fixed on the sunlight coming through the window to the backyard.
    â€œShush, guys,” Uncle Tony said. He got up from his recliner and crossed the room to turn up the television.  
    The newscaster announced something about Pan-Am flight 759 crashing in Louisiana and killing everyone on board. There was a video of a panicked crowd and some wreckage and then a still shot of a hospital. Father and Uncle Tony sat on the edge of their seats, elbows on knees and beer bottles held in prayer between hands. They muttered at each other periodically.  
    â€œSonofabitch.”  
    â€œBound to