The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer Page A

hip-deep in this swamp of thistles; he merely looked out of place, determined, fixed on crossing. Just as Lydia herself might look. And that was it: He was ordinary. Here was that rare thing in her father’s crowd: an ordinary man.
    Soon he was in the barn, and his easy breaths made it clear he’d forgotten all about the weeds. “Tycho!” he yelled, hands around his mouth in a cone. “Tycho!” Lydia kept silent above (as silent as she could, though one foot kept nervously tapping against the straw). He was calling for her dog.
    In the granular darkness of the barn, his hair had lost its metallic shimmer and looked dull, brown, with the vague swirl of a bald spot. He was young, though—just thirty this month, newly a father, with the glow that only a young man would have at being a father— amazed, glad at his own life, that he has come to this. He had never enjoyed the instability of youth, the hidden parts of love, and was relieved to have arrived here: a son, a wife, a house. They gave him a contentment he would not relinquish easily. Lydia saw none of this—she saw an adult calling foolishly into an empty corner, hay dust settling on his head. In a moment, she leaned over the loft and shouted “Boo!” so that the man fell back against a post, facing her astonished, hands limp. Above them, alive things shifted. And then the retriever came bounding in, barking because he was missing something here, and pounced carelessly on the man, who rolled him over on the ground and scratched him.
    “There you are!” the man yelled in a childish voice. “I got you!”
    “Who are you?” Lydia was leaning fully over the loft now, aware of the danger, aware of how she might seem dangerous to this new person.
    He didn’t look up, but kept petting the dog, as if she weren’t noticeable, as if she weren’t amazing and frightening up there in the loft, as if he were through with her. “Who wants to know?”
    “That’s my dog, and he doesn’t like you to scratch his ears.”
    He paused for a moment. “Does he bite?” he asked. Tycho whined.
    She tossed straw down and watched it float in the air, hoping it would reach him, land on his shoulders; but it took off under her, out of her sight. “Oh, come on,” she said, then asked, “What’s your name?
    “Adam. What’s yours?”
    “Alice,” she told him plainly.
    He smirked and stood up, letting the dog lick at his fingers. He said, “Well…
Lydia …
they sent me to get your dog.”
    She was furious; she’d tried this trick before, and it had worked. Now she was embarrassed and felt like scooting to the back of the loft. “Why?” she asked. “I wanted him in here with me.”
    Adam was poking through a box of tools now, pulling out rusty objects, not looking at her again, and it made her more furious. He said, “Your dad wanted him to do some tricks for us, so he sent me up to get him. Is that your hideout?”
    “Oh, come on, I’m eleven. I don’t have a hideout,” she said, pulling out her Kim voice. “It’s a barn.”
    “Sorry. What are you hiding up there, though?”
    She struck a formal pose, hands on her knees, rolling her eyes. She had found a new tack here. “Are you one of my dad’s students?” she asked regally, looking away from him. “I
adore
students.”
    “I’m not a student. I don’t know anything about astronomy. I’m Dr. Lanham’s husband.”
    “You’re Denise’s husband.”
    “That’s right. You know her?”
    It was funny—she didn’t, though she had of course just now said her name. It was something Lydia would learn, later, that everyone she’d met before she was fifteen would diminish in her memory into just three aspects. Manday, whom she knew so well and talked with often at the university, would become just a funny man with a birthday cake; a wad of blue cotton candy beneath a Ferris wheel; a dark, fat body in a swimsuit near the ocean. The rest would all disappear. Denise was the same—a necklace, a book, a