The Missing Person Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’d thought that one day it would come into focus; in the same way, I’d always assumed that eventually I’d be able to read the whole book, decipher its diagrams and equations, resolve it into meaning just as I was learning to read harder, longer words as I got older.
    But this never happened. As a teenager, I decided I wasn’t interested in science. I didn’t like math and especially hated physics, and my father’s job was some unknown, boring thing he did for the government in a windowless office. The fact that he was a scientist was one of my many grievances against him, not because he was involved in anything sinister— although for all I knew, he was; I really had no idea what he did at work all day, and often into the night—but because of his scientist’s geekiness, the knee socks he wore with shorts, his taupe-colored shirts that never seemed to fit right, the way he sometimes talked with his mouth full, all his embarrassing habits that potentially incriminated my own awkward teenaged self. After I graduated from high school and left home, this attitude mellowed, and I might even have got around to asking him about his work. Now there seemed no point. Yet it pleased me to think of him living on in the screen’s digital glow, almost as much as the yellowing copy of the book itself in the stacks.
    At noon I headed downtown to my mother’s office. Around me sunlight glinted off lowrider fenders, cholos staring out from behind the steering wheels, their music pounding down the streets. Farther west, slender shadows bordered the boxy, old-fashioned buildings of the tiny business district.
    Inside Worldwide Travel, the air was conditioned to a glacial level, and I had to stand still for a second just to readjust. Sweat cooled to ice on my skin. My mother was in her office explaining something to a large, burly man with an equally burly mustache. I sat down in the carpeted lobby underneath a poster of Greece, a bone-white beach against the turquoise Aegean, and waited for her to finish with her customer. I could hear their voices but not what they were saying. Francie Garcia, my mother’s partner, sat talking on the phone behind the glass door of her office. Other phones rang distantly, were answered, rang again.
    Francie came rushing out, jiggling car keys and smiling mechanically at the top of my head. “Someone will be with you in a moment,” she said, and then, “Lynn!”
    â€œFrancie, how are you?”
    She smiled. She was in her late forties but looked younger, with long, curly hair and circles under her eyes. For reasons I never understood she always wore bright blue eye shadow.
    â€œWell, I’ll tell you, honey,” she said, shaking her head and tucking the keys into her large black purse. “At least I have my health.” She said this all the time.
    â€œThat’s good, Francie.”
    â€œAnd how’s life in the big city?”
    â€œIt’s all right.”
    â€œYou should come by and see Luis while you’re here. He’d love to hear all about New York.” Luis was her son, and around my age. During high school we’d had one disastrous, parentally induced date. “He’d love to see you.”
    â€œHow is Luis? Is he married?” This was how I pictured everyone I knew from high school who’d stayed in Albuquerque: living in a prefab house in one of the new West Mesa suburbs, with a brood of children playing on a swing set stuck crookedly into the rock lawn. It was unfair to generalize, but on the other hand, it was generally true.
    Francie threw me a sideways look. “Luis? No. I don’t think he’ll ever settle down.”
    I wondered what not settling down implied about someone who’d lived in the same town, surrounded by his entire family, for his entire life.
    â€œListen, honey, your mom’s waiting for you with her friend, so I’ll let you go.” She kissed me on