My Name Is Venus Black(60)

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TESSA WAKES UP before her alarm goes off. Her father is already gone. She feels his absence in a way that is different from when she knows he’s just gone to the shop early. She pictures him on the highway, driving to Seattle. She worries that he’ll get lonely. Or that his truck will break down.

In a few moments, she hears Leo getting in the shower. He doesn’t need an alarm. He always wakes up in time to get in the shower at 7:00 A.M.

As she dresses for school, Tessa thinks that sometimes she envies Leo. She doesn’t think he ever worries about other people. She’s often asked herself if Leo loves her. If he’s capable. Sometimes she tells him, “I love you.” But he never answers.

She knows they could teach him to—just like they’ve taught him a whole bunch of other responses, like “you’re welcome” and “thank you” and even “I forgive you.” But it wouldn’t be the same, wouldn’t seem right, if you taught him to say, “I love you, too.”

At breakfast, Leo is difficult. He is upset that the milk is not the same brand her father always buys. They must have been out, because her dad knows better than to change anything. “Milk is milk, Leo,” she says firmly.



“It’s the wrong kind,” Leo insists.

Tessa is almost tempted to swear. She wonders if she should start swearing, if that would make boys like her more. “Darn it, Leo! Not this morning,” she says.

“Why not this morning?”

Tessa sighs. “Leo, would you like me to make you eggs instead? They’re the right kind, I’m sure.”

Leo considers. “No! I want my Rice Krispies.”

Tessa pours milk on her own cereal. “See, Leo? It’s exactly the same milk. The milk is the right white. That’s what matters, not the name on the carton.” She begins to take bites. “It tastes exactly the same.”

Leo pours the milk. Looks at it. Takes a bite. Tessa is relieved, because she didn’t want to make eggs.



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DURING ART, THE teacher lets Leo’s class draw whatever they want. Today, Leo draws the strange building from Seattle called the Space Needle. In his mind he sees it from a car window. But he also sees it when he’s close and looking up at it. His mother from before asks, “Do you want to go to the top?”

Venus says that she wants to go up. He follows when they tell him to come. They go into a small room with windows. Other people are in the room, too. It jerks and starts moving up in a scary way. Leo cries and hits his head on the windows, and his mother says, “Stop, Leo! How embarrassing.” Leo doesn’t know embarrassing.

“What’s that, Leo?” asks his teacher. She is leaning over him. She is interrupting. He ignores her. He is unsure how many windows to draw in the part that is like an upside-down bowl at the top.

“Is that the Space Needle, Leo?” his teacher is interrupting again. But Leo knows those words. Space Needle. From before. He nods his head and hopes she will go away.



“Have you been to the Space Needle, Leo?”

He ignores her. He doesn’t want to talk. She is interrupting!

When he is finished with his drawing, he puts his pencils away. The teacher comes by and tries to take the drawing. Leo doesn’t want her to. He holds it away from her and says, “No!”

She finally passes by. He opens his science book. He finds the right page with the planets. He folds his drawing in half. He puts it in the book next to Venus.





Tony is glad that Everett is pretty much a straight shot up I-5. He makes good time until he hits snow in the Siskiyous. Then his driving slows to a crawl and he can no longer find a radio station. Alone with his thoughts, his mind goes to Maria and what she’d think of the mess he’s in.

Would she be angry that he’d compromised Tessa’s happiness by taking in Leo? Tony doubts it. There was no one more compassionate than Maria Delgado. He was convinced she’d have done the same.

Tony never could understand why such a wonderful girl would marry a bozo like him to begin with. He and Maria had met in high school, where she was a star student. And Tony…Apart from secretly loving art class, he excelled at nothing, except maybe baseball. Even there, he’d been an alternate pitcher, not the star. But he could run like the wind and he could hit, too. By his senior year, though, drugs and alcohol had started to get in the way.

It was Maria who helped him turn a corner. He still wonders where he’d be now—one of the strung-out addicts he sees on the street—if he hadn’t married her. And yet, falling in love with a Mexican girl brought challenges. Maria’s parents were strict Catholics and had immigrated to the United States when Maria was young. They vehemently opposed the match, perhaps because he was neither Catholic nor Mexican. But now he realizes it was more than an issue of religion or race. He had no plan, no real means of securing a future.



And yet, blinded by love, he’d felt no guilt marrying Maria. He was young enough to think life would naturally bring what a family needed to grow. Looking back, he’d been so in love that he couldn’t imagine a future without Maria—or a version of life that wouldn’t be kind to her.

Maria wasn’t perfect, of course. She had a tendency to overspend and she loved to gossip with her girlfriends. She hated housework, but she was always impeccably dressed—in fact, ironing her clothes had been the only housework she had the heart for. When someone would stop by the apartment unexpectedly, she’d race around the house, picking up. Once, he heard her actually scrubbing the toilet while he got their guest a drink.