Object of Desire Read Online Free PDF

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    â€œYou can’t have a birthday party without a HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign,” Mom declared.
    â€œIt’s for little kids, Mom.”
    She sighed dramatically, folding the sign back up. “First, no pin the tail on the donkey. Next thing he won’t want a cake.”
    â€œWhere’s Becky?” Nana asked again.
    We all looked over at her.
    â€œMommy, Peggy just told us,” Aunt Patsy said gently. I’d always thought it odd that a grown woman still called her mother “Mommy.” “Becky’s in town, getting the balloons for Danny’s party.”
    â€œOh,” Nana said. “That’s right.”
    Nana had been getting forgetful. She sometimes confused my father with her late husband, Sebastian. Sometimes she repeated herself several times a day, asking the same questions over and over. Dad remembered his own grandmother, Nana’s mother, getting the same way. Eventually, they had to put her in the state hospital, where she died, crazy as a loon. I looked at Nana and felt very sad. I knew she was thinking about her mother, about the state hospital. She wasn’t so forgetful that she’d forgotten about that. She knew what was happening. Nana caught me looking at her and seemed startled. Then she winked at me.
    It was getting close to three o’clock. I wished that Katie had been able to come over earlier. I headed back upstairs and sat on my bed, my back against the wall.
    â€œThis might be the last time we see each other,” I’d said to Katie almost every day since the end of eighth grade.
    She’d always scold me. “Stop saying that. It’s not like we’re moving away. We still live in the same town.”
    Should I have asked Katie to be my girlfriend then? If she were my girlfriend, then we’d have a connection, something to really bind us together. I sensed it would be good insurance to have a girlfriend upon entering high school. It would offer some kind of protection, I suspected, but just what kind, I wasn’t sure.
    And yet I hadn’t asked her. It would have seemed odd after all these years. She probably would have laughed at me. Now, sitting on my bed, I wished I had.
    My eye caught movement outside the window.
    Chipper Paguni was pulling into his driveway in his rebuilt, repainted gold metallic 1971 Mustang Mach 1, with the black stripe down the hood. I leaned forward to get a better view. The door on the driver’s side popped open, and Chipper emerged in a white T-shirt and shiny black parachute pants. I knew he wasn’t wearing underwear, and my cheeks flushed a little as the thought crossed my mind. I waited for the passenger’s side door to open and for Becky to get out, but nothing happened. Chipper paused to inspect something on the side of his precious car—a dent? a ding? a scratch?—then headed into the house.
    I was scared.
    Had he seen me out by the pond?
    And what had Chipper thought when he couldn’t find his underwear?
    It didn’t even cross my mind to wonder where Becky was.

PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA
    I headed up our walkway just as the sprinkler system kicked on, a small, insistent hiss under the bushes, a soft spray of mist across the dry purple night.
    We weren’t meant to be here. Humans weren’t designed to live in deserts. But we did, anyway. We pumped in water and planted bougainvillea. We built swimming pools and golf courses and laid out vast stretches of grass. We put up shopping malls. We did it because we could. But that didn’t change the fact that we were not meant to be here.
    In the air hung the fragrance of dry sage. I paused, looking up at the sky, a vast dome of indigo studded with thousands of stars. At night the desert’s stillness never lost its power to astonish me. A quarter of a million souls resided under that big sky, but at night I heard only the rustle of dried weeds. From somewhere far away came the crackly, impatient