Verna had taken them trick-or-treating last year. It had been fun—mostly. Bernie had gotten wild. He always did when he had too much sugar. Verna just laughed when Angel said that, and when Angel tried to make him save some of his candy for later, Verna called her a party pooper. So he ate way too much and began zooming around, screeching, acting like a crazy thing until Verna lost her temper and smacked him. Then he screamed and screamed and couldn’t be shut up or calmed down for anything.
She mustn’t think about things like that. Verna would’ve learned her lesson by now. She’d be a great mother, and Bernie himself was doing way better these days. Why, he’d be so happy to be with his mama again that he’d behave so well he’d never even meet the social worker at his new school. You got to take him to school the first day, Mama. You got to see he gets settled in good. That’ll get him off on the right track. It’s important to start out right in a new place. Even Grandma in her crazy way had given Bernie a good start here. You wouldn’t want Grandma to do better than you, now, would you, Mama?
She lifted her eyes from the road and looked at the trees beside it. Could anything on earth be so beautiful as a sugar maple in the fall? She took a deep breath. The smell of frost was in the air. See? She wasn’t going to stew about Bernie all day. She was going to trust that Verna had turned over a new leaf and was starting out as a first-class mother. But much as she tried, it was hard to pull her mind away from what had actually happened. Just like a kidnapping. Verna’d gone to the school and yanked him out and driven away, never even stopping at the house to get his things. I would have given him Grizzle. He couldn’t even say goodbye to Grandma, let alone me. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings. That’s why she did it that way. Because she was afraid that if she had to tell me that she could take only one kid, I’d cry or complain that she was leaving me and choosing Bernie. But I would’ve understood, really I would’ve. Bernie is the baby. I wouldn’t have cried. I’d have said, “Sure, I understand.” And she would have said that as soon as she was on her feet she’d come and get me, too. Wouldn’t she have?
She had to stop thinking. She was long past the broken house where they’d stopped for directions that first day and almost to the village. She had to get herself under control. She was swollen with tears trying to bust out, and she didn’t want to be boo-hooing in front of Miss Liza, not to mention in the middle of the general store. Well, she wouldn’t be buying another box of those expensive Sugar Pops. That would help with the bill.
Funny, it was the thought of not buying Sugar Pops that burst the dam. She stood in the middle of the road and sobbed. Finally, she pulled a ratty tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose and wiped her eyes the best she could. Oh Lord, they were nearly out of tissues. She’d have to buy more. She concentrated on making a mental grocery list, so that by the time she got to the library, she was feeling if not better, then at least not on the verge of exploding into a Mississippi flood.
“Why, Angel, dear, what on earth is the matter?” Miss Liza asked the minute she saw Angel’s puffy face. So Angel blurted it all out, how Verna had come and taken Bernie away. Soon they were sitting side by side on the low children’s chairs in the picture-book section. Miss Liza had her head bent sidewise and her sharp little bird eyes on Angel’s face, following every word of the long recital of events. “I’d just like to know where he’s at and that he’s okay,” Angel said finally.
“Of course you would,” Miss Liza said, handing her a fresh tissue. “So would I.”
“But we can’t call Welfare,” Angel said quickly. “They won’t know where they are, but if they think Verna is acting crazy, they’ll hunt her down and take him away.”
“Are you sure?”
“They did it before.” Angel blew her nose. “She had a hard time getting us back.” She needed to remember that—that Verna had fought like a wildcat to get them back. Bernie hadn’t been much more than a baby the first time, and the last time Welfare had put them in two different foster homes. Home, ha! More like a reformatory. Angel had gotten whacked every time she’d turned around. She told the social worker, too. She heard one of the social workers say that Bernie had cried the whole two months they were separated. Maybe that’s why Welfare gave them back to Verna in the end, because they’d made a mistake, putting her and Bernie into bad situations. She didn’t tell Miss Liza all this.
“The other thing is...” Angel needed to word this carefully. “When Bernie doesn’t show up at school on Monday, well, they may give it a few days, but then they’re going to start calling and asking where he’s at. Then what do I do?”
“That is a problem,” Miss Liza said.
“Grandma—they won’t talk to me, probably—Grandma can lie and tell them he’s sick for just so long before they’ll send someone out to investigate.” She wished she hadn’t said that about Grandma lying, but Miss Liza didn’t remark on it.
“Are you thinking they might take you away, then?”
“It doesn’t really matter about me.”
“Yes, it does,” Miss Liza said.
“I do need to stay on here for Grandma. You wouldn’t believe what she eats when nobody’s looking out for her. And she hardly gets out of her chair. She didn’t get any exercise at all until she started walking Bernie to the bus stop and back. Now...well, if I’m not there to make her get out of that rocker...She really needs me.”
Miss Liza smiled and patted Angel’s knee with her crooked, brown-spotted hand, the veins standing up like blue ribbons under the papery skin.
“I’ve got an idea. It might not work...” She’s scared I’ll get my hopes up. “But I know the woman who is in charge of school libraries for the whole state. I’ll ask her to find out if—that is, where—Bernie is enrolled. I’ll tell her—oh, I’ll tell her he failed to return a library book of mine. That’s actually the truth.”
“They go after kids for not returning library books?”
“Of course not. But I’ll say, and I won’t be lying—it’s an absolute fact—that he’s got a book that’s hard to replace, so would they ask about it.”
“Will that work?”
“Probably not. But I don’t have a better idea.” She sighed and patted Angel’s hand again. They sat there, hearing no noise but their own breathing, until the wind blew a branch clattering against one of the windows. “How’s the stargazing going?”
“Okay, I guess. I’m learning a lot from your book. It really helps.”
“I miss it.”
“I can bring it back.”
“Oh, not the book. The sky.”
Angel was confused. “The sky? How come?” The sky wasn’t like some overdue library book. It was always right there.
“My silly back,” she said. “I can’t turn my head up to see it properly.”
“Oh.”
“I can remember the stars. You mustn’t feel bad for me.”
“They’re so huge, so far away. Sometimes,” Angel said, “sometimes, when I think of them, I feel like I’m nothing at all.”
“‘When I consider thy heavens, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him?’” Miss Liza was quoting something. Angel waited until she paused. She figured Miss Liza would explain. “It’s from the Bible,” she said. “The eighth Psalm. I used to recite that to myself when I was studying astronomy. What is man—and of course the writer means all of us puny little insignificant creatures—what is a mere human being that God who made the immense universe should ever notice?” She chuckled. “The sky does take you down to size.”
“Not even big as bugs. Not even a speck of dust to the nearest star,” Angel agreed.
“But the psalmist answers his own question. ‘Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor....’”
“What?” Angel asked, not sure she had heard right.
“A little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.”
“The real angels?
Do you believe that?”
“Yes, Angel, I do. When people look down on me, and these days”—she laughed shortly—“these days everyone over the age of five does. When people look down on me, I remember that God looks at this pitiful, twisted old thing that I have become and crowns me with glory.”
Angel could hardly speak. There was pain in what Miss Liza said, terrible pain, but something else, too. Something Angel knew only when she turned her face to the stars. An awesome stillness. What was that word? A glory.
She left the library with three books and a heart too full to speak. In the grocery store she bought what she needed, wondering if the clerk and the three customers who were in and out noticed anything different about her. She felt so different from the girl who had left Grandma’s house an hour or so before. Couldn’t they see a little streak of shining in her, a bit of the glory Miss Liza had passed on to her?
Even when the clerk asked the very question she’d dreaded, “Where’s your brother?” she looked her straight in her friendly, round face and said, “He’s with my mom today.” She didn’t even have to lie.
***
“I brought you some ice cream, Grandma.”
The old woman opened her eyes and roused herself up a bit from the chair. “It’s probably cream soup by now,” she grumped and closed her eyes again.
“No. She wrapped it special for you, so’s it wouldn’t get soft. Feel.” She took the insulated bag over to the rocker.
Grandma touched it with one finger. “Hmmph.”
“Want some now?”
“We ain’t had our lunch yet.”
“Dessert first, then lunch.”
“What? I never heard such foolishness!” She let a ghost of a grin escape. “Where’s Miss Five Major and Go Easy on the Sugar today?”
Angel giggled. “I sent her off on a little vacation. I figured you and me need a treat once in a while.”
“Ohhhh-kay.” Grandma pushed herself up out of the rocker. “Let me at it.”
It was Rocky Road, with bits of marshmallow and nuts and streaks of dark chocolate through the milk chocolate.
“Hmmph,” Grandma said. “Whoever heard of ice cream you have to chew? This is almost too much work for an old lady.”
“You want me to finish yours for you?”
“Not on your stuffed cabbage.”
They chewed and slurped the Rocky Road. “I guess there weren’t any calls while I was gone.” She knew there hadn’t been, but still, just in case...
Grandma shook her head.
“I didn’t think so.” Did Bernie even know the number here? That was it—he didn’t know the number. Otherwise, he would have called, wouldn’t he? He wasn’t tied up and gagged. He wasn’t a prisoner. But he couldn’t call because she’d never taught him Grandma’s number. She should have taught him Grandma’s number. They always tell you to teach little kids their address and phone number in case they get lost. She’d been too busy bossing him around to remember to teach him his own phone number. “I never taught him the phone number,” she said aloud.
“Well, there, you see? How’s he gonna call us if he don’t know the number?”
They didn’t eat much lunch—too filled up with Rocky Road. But it was just this once. She wouldn’t do it again for a long time. Just once was okay, surely.
Angel got up to wash the dishes, trying to keep her mind off Bernie, trying to concentrate on what Miss Liza had told her, when Grandma’s voice interrupted from the rocker: “You reckon I should buy a TV, Angel?”
“I don’t know, Grandma. You want a TV?” Can you afford a TV was more like it. But she wasn’t going to ask that.
“I used to have one, but it broke and I never missed it much. You can’t get much up here in the country unless you pay for one of them dishes, and that costs more’n my grocery bill for a year.”
“You don’t need a TV.”
“Well, I was thinking, maybe if I’d had a TV, Bernie would have stuck around. It’s boring for a kid out here in the country, nobody to play with, nothing to do.”
“I don’t remember Bernie complaining about having no TV.”
“Then you wasn’t listening. He mentioned it to me nearly every day. I told him if I did have one, only thing he’d see was snow, and if he’d hold his horses for a couple of months, he’d see more snow than he’d ever want to.” She shook her head. “I think he missed watching. I should have tried to get him one.”
“Grandma, Bernie didn’t leave because you didn’t have a TV. He left because Mama came and took him. I bet he didn’t even want to go.”
“Yes, he did. He missed his mama. He told me that, too.” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “I never was much of a mama, Angel.”
“I bet you were, too. I bet you were a great mama.”
“Jimmy and Ray, both my boys, spent time in jail. Now they’re both dead. I don’t know what I did wrong. I did the best I could.”
“It’s not your fault. Sometimes people are just unlucky. Or their children get in with the wrong crowd or something. You can’t take the blame for that.”
Grandma didn’t seem to be listening. “I was on my own. My husband died when they was hardly more’n babies. I was trying to run this farm and raise two boys—I tried, Lord knows, but I guess I didn’t have what it took. And then there was that damn war.”
Angel kept scrubbing the same pot, trying to think of something to say, but no words came.
“Maybe they should have died over in Vietnam, but they didn’t. They come home, both of them all messed up with drugs. Jimmy has to get married, but the baby’s no sooner born than he’s got himself in jail. Next thing I know, Ray’s in jail as well. I couldn’t understand that. Ray was smart. He was supposed to go to college.” She closed her eyes and rocked, muttering something about the damn war before she continued. “So, my two boys are in jail, I got Jimmy’s wife and baby living here—you want to talk about hell on earth—but it didn’t last long. Just before she drives me stark raving crazy over the cliff, that no-count woman runs off with the cattle feed salesman and leaves Wayne behind. She didn’t even change his diaper before she took off. Oh Lordy. I’d already failed with my own two boys. I guess I should have learned something, but”—she sighed deeply—“looks like I didn’t. I’s’pose it’s a good thing Verna come and took Bernie off. I wouldn’t want to ruin another generation of Morgans.”
How could she comfort the old woman? Miss Liza had sat beside her and told her she was crowned with glory—but Angel wasn’t Miss Liza. She didn’t have the words to give Grandma. Finally, she said the only thing she could think to say.
“I’m still here, Grandma.”
Grandma sat up a little and opened her eyes. “Yes, you are, ain’t you?” She looked at Angel and nodded her head. “Can’t be all bad if you got yourself an angel. Kinda bossy angel”—she glanced skyward—“but I guess I better not complain.” She heaved herself out of the chair. “I’m going to bed. If the phone rings—”
“I’ll get it. Don’t worry.”
SEVENTEEN
Galileo Galilei
“Oh, this is a good night for viewing,” the star man said, without even moving his eye from the telescope. “Come here.” Angel went close enough to hear his breathing, which was raspy in the chill night air. He ought to dress more warmly and wear a hat. He ought, for heaven sakes, to stop smoking, but she might as well save her breath. He wouldn’t listen.
“Now find Polaris.”
It was easy for Angel to find the North Star now. Why had it seemed so hard last summer? You find the Big Dipper and let the two stars on its outer side point you straight to the North Star. There.
“Okay, look.” His right arm swung upward beside her ear. “Up, up, almost straight up.” She followed the sweep of his arm. “Can you see it? That little fuzzy patch up there? That’s the Andromeda Galaxy. Want to see it in the telescope now?”
She nodded, too dazed to speak. She’d read about it in her book, bu
t now she was actually seeing it. Andromeda! A whole other galaxy, a million—no, two million—light-years from earth, with a hundred billion stars swarming around inside it. She gasped at the beauty, the glory of the night.
And then the sharp pain of the days cut in. Bernie might as well be two million light-years away. “My brother’s gone,” she said.
“Oh?”
“My mom went and picked him up at his school and just took him away without telling me or Grandma.”
He didn’t say anything at first. Maybe he didn’t care. She’d never mentioned Bernie to him before. He probably didn’t even know Bernie existed.
“How’s the old lady taking it?”
“Grandma?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s really upset. She and Bernie were good friends. They had a lot of fun together.”
“He must have been good for her. Too bad he’s gone.” He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and stuck one in his mouth. “I know I shouldn’t,” he said, as though to keep her from objecting, “but at least it’s a legal addiction.” He lit up and inhaled.
She watched the smoke coming from his mouth. Grownups had no sense. They didn’t care what was good for them or bad for them. How did they ever get to be in charge of the world? “I got to go in,” she said. “I haven’t done my homework.”
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “Your mom shouldn’t have done that, should she?”
He didn’t know how to say things the way Miss Liza did, but she could tell he wanted to help.
“No,” Angel said, “she shouldn’t have. Sometimes she doesn’t figure things out right. She tries, but she just can’t figure stuff out.”
“I know how that is,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of bad figuring myself.” His voice sounded sad and tired. She wished she knew how to help him.
“It means a lot to me,” she said, “you showing me the stars.”
“It means a lot to me,” he said, “you wanting to see them.”
***
Every day when she got off the bus she hoped Verna’s pickup would be parked by the house. Surely Verna would come back. She had never been able to manage Bernie on her own. She’d always left most of the responsibility to Angel. Bernie was, well, difficult to manage in the best of situations, and it was hard to imagine Verna in the best of situations. She’s changed. She’s turned into a really good mother. She always loved Bernie. She always liked him better than me. Maybe I was the problem. Maybe without me butting in, she and Bernie are getting along just fine. The thought was no comfort.
The Same Stuff as Stars Page 13