Stars in the Grass

by Ann Marie Stewart

A black limousine waited for us. I slipped in behind the driver, who looked like he was paid not to smile. I hoped Matt would climb in after me but Mom followed, sliding her long legs into the roomy interior. Dad and Matt sat in the front. A chain of cars lined up behind us, flicking on their lights as if we’d become separated on the four-mile drive from church to cemetery. No one spoke.

  As we drove into Shady Springs Cemetery, I looked out the limousine’s tinted windows to see a green tent and chairs. We emerged from the black car into bright sunlight to find a dark pit. I had never been to a graveside service.

  A man I didn’t know said words about a little boy he didn’t know, and I can’t remember any of it. Matt was silent, staring out at the field dotted with tombstones. I could read a few nearby. Millers, Smiths, Hughes, Wilmoths. None of them were our family names until now. Polly, Jonathon, William, Sarah. For some reason it was their first names that made me sad, and I didn’t even know them.

  I heard them crank down on a handle, and the little box lowered into the ground. My heartbeat quickened. The box disappeared. Someone passed out a few roses. Joel always picked the neighbors’ roses and brought them to us as gifts. Now we were supposed to give them back. Mom’s hand trembled as she dropped her flower into the hole that swallowed my brother. When she gasped, Matt took her arm. My father stood behind them. He coughed to disguise his groan. Dad looked unfamiliar to me—so old and bent. When it was my turn, I kept my flower. No more death upon death.

  Before we went back to the car, Uncle Troy took me aside. I looked around for Miss Mary Frances. Why wasn’t she here? She was more than just my piano teacher; I always thought she considered me the child she never had.

  “I have something for you,” Uncle Troy said as he opened his car door to show me a red helium balloon. His big fingers fumbled with the knot until he had the string loosened. Then he handed it to me.

  “You know what to do.” He pointed upward. “This one’s for Joel,” he added softly. Together we watched the balloon clear the branches of the great oak tree, rising slowly until it became a dot in the sky, and then nothing.

  Our house was filled with families and food and words, but I felt lonely and slipped out the alley gate and into Rita and Miss Patti’s backyard. Rita was my best friend; our houses stood side by side, like twin sisters.

  Now Rita and I climbed down beside the house and played the game of Life under her front porch while everyone at my house played death. Through the latticework, I could see the legs of Bethel Springs come and go. Car doors slammed, voices murmured, “Let us know what we can do…. I’ll be over this week…. You need any help … Must be so hard for the kids …,” followed by what I knew to be hugs with the obligatory pat pat pat to signal Let go now.

  After most of the guests had left, we still hid out in our fort. Miss Patti’s screen door slapped shut. I heard her support hose scratch together and her shoes squeak above my head as she shuffled along. I was probably supposed to leave, but I didn’t want to.

  “You girls want some dinner?” she drawled in her thick chocolate-milk voice after knocking on the side of the house and pausing respectfully.

  Rita was a girl of few words. She turned to me, raising her eyebrows. I nodded and she shook her bobbed head as if her mom could see her answer. “We don’t wanna get out, though, Mama,” Rita added, as if reading my mind.

  “That’s why I brought it to you!” Miss Patti said, her vowels long and warm.

  When I was little, I asked Mom why Miss Patti talked funny, and Mom said she was from the South. At the time I thought that odd because Rita said they came from North Carolina.

  Miss Patti bent slightly to slip a plate under the deck and above the latticework. Rita reached back up for our glasses of milk. As Miss Patti shifted her feet, the deck groaned under her weight.

  Rita’s mom was fat. Since her name was Patti, there was the inevitable neighborhood rhyming chant Fatty Patti, Fatty Patti. I heard Fatty Patti, Fatty Patti in my head even when I didn’t want to think it. I just hoped I never accidentally called her that.

  I even asked Mom for a new word, anything not to call her fat, but Mom wouldn’t play the word game with me unless I told her why. Matt looked up words in the thesaurus and found corpulent and obese. I thought they sounded much worse than fat. Finally he suggested rotund.

  But Rita’s mom was not just a little fat, and she wasn’t rotund; she was enormous, and I told her so when I was going on five. It was no surprise to her—neither my observation nor that I would actually tell her. She had been kind enough to take Rita and me to the movies. There were no seats in the theater that fit her, so she brought her wheelchair and scooted up to where I sat on the aisle.

  “You’re big,” I said, frowning.

  “Yes, I am,” she said very seriously, nodding in agreement.

  “I mean, you’re huge,” I continued. Rita leaned forward next to me as if she needed another look at her mom.

  “Yes, Abby. I am,” she said as respectfully as if I had asked, “Are you Rita’s mother?” Maybe she sensed I was just a curious four-and-a-half-year-old, or maybe she didn’t want her daughter to lose her best friend. Or maybe she appreciated honesty.

  “How’d you get so fat?” I asked, as I opened my box of Dots, pouring out two orange ones for Rita and holding out my empty hand for a trade of her Raisinets. Miss Patti paused and then leaned closer to me as if this was a secret for only the two of us.

  “I have a monster gene.”

  I paused mid-Raisinet. This was something new. I had never heard of a monster gene. If someone could make being fat sound positive, Miss Patti sure could.

  “A monster gene?” I pursued.

  “Every once in a while, in my family, one generation has one enormous person,” she continued. “I’m it,” she added matter-of-factly as she picked up her soda. “Seems some of us just grow and grow and grow. Unusually large,” she added before taking a long drink of Coke. I turned to Rita, who shrugged. I tried not to cringe, but the thought of a monster gene growing and growing and growing, blowing up like a balloon, scared me. Miss Patti held out her hand for a Dot.

  “Yellow, please.”

  “How do they weigh you?” I asked, imagining her teetering on our little bathroom scale.

  “Two scales. I put one foot on each.” I looked down at her two swollen feet as I sucked on a red Dot, my favorite. “I just add up the total of the two scales,” she concluded.

  “Just how much do you weigh, anyway?”

  “Well, let’s see,” she said, studying me before she winked. She seemed less willing to share this part of the secret. “Guess,” she said at last, with a smile. “Just how much do you think, Miss Abigail?”

  I had weighed thirty-nine pounds for the last three months. Even when I jumped on the scale I couldn’t get it to stick on forty.

  “Seven hundred and thirty-nine thousand pounds,” I blurted out with little calculation. I loved big numbers as much as big people and so I shot high. Miss Patti considered this for a minute, respectfully giving credence to my outlandish guess.

  “Well, at last count I weighed four hundred and eighty pounds. I can only hope it’s gone down or I might be half a grand.”

  “Hmmm.” I nodded, almost disappointed with the truth. Miss Patti grinned and put her arm around me as Mary Poppins began. Her hand was as soft as Play-Doh and she smelled of pine like her kitchen. Oh, how I loved her. “I think you’re more than half grand,” I said with a smile.

  Apparently Rita did not have the monster gene. I used to check her daily, but Rita remained one of the shortest, smallest, and skinniest kids in our school. And if Rita was embarrassed of Miss Patti’s size, she never let on. Maybe because in so many ways Miss Patti was the kind of mom everybody needed.

  Today she was just what I needed. As well as her offering of macaroni and cheese.

  “You girls want anything else?” she asked from above. I looked at Rita and shook my head.

  “No, Mama, we’re fin
e,” Rita answered. I swallowed half the cup of ice-cold milk and took a bite of the mac and cheese. Miss Patti’s macaroni and cheese is full of real cheese and butter, and it slides down your throat in warm and comforting gulps. I haven’t tasted better macaroni and cheese.

  “You girls thinking of having a sleepover?” Miss Patti suggested. My eyes went big and we nodded to each other.

  I pointed to my house and shrugged my shoulders.

  “Could you call her mom?” my spokesperson asked, vocalizing our shared wish. And I began hoping beyond all hope that Miss Patti would say yes and convince my mom to say yes and give me the gift of one night away from everything Joel. One night away from the longing to remember and the fight to forget.

  FOUR

  Mom had painted the beadboard ceiling of the porch a pale blue to look like the sky. Lying on the porch swing, I surveyed her world without clouds. Nearby, a few old quilts hung on a rack for cooler evenings and brisk mornings when Mom and Dad did their checking in with one another. That’s what they called it when they had their private chats on the porch. They hadn’t been checking in with each other for some time.

  Back and forth, back and forth, the swing swayed. Five more minutes at the candy shop. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked for candy. Did I walk too fast? If I had held his hand, then maybe it would have been me and I wouldn’t be here today.

  Or maybe, worst of all, maybe it happened because there were days I wished Joel had never been born. I stopped rocking and sat up, nausea overcoming me.

  Guilt is even worse than fear. Guilt gnaws and makes me wonder if I have the flu. But I knew I couldn’t take medicine or hug the toilet and have my mother massage my head with a cool wet rag. I was in this by myself.

  If one bad thing can happen, I knew we had to be careful. Dad left every day for a few hours, running somewhere all by himself no matter the weather. Was he safe? I didn’t like the boys Matt was hanging around with. Would he get hurt? And when Mom got in the car, I wanted to go with her in case something happened. I didn’t want to be left alone.

  Rita ran up the front steps holding an envelope I immediately recognized to be the annual school letter. I usually counted down the days until school ended each spring and then ironically the days until it began each fall. Then I begged for a new outfit and all new school supplies and couldn’t wait to find out which teacher I had. Not this year.

  “I got Mrs. Clevenger!” Rita said, waving the envelope proudly. “Who do you have?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think Mom’s gotten the mail.”

  “I’ll get it,” she announced as she ran back down the front walk and opened our mailbox. I knew I had Clevenger or Simpson. More important to me was whether Rita was in my class. “Can I open it?” she called out, waving the envelope like a banner, her excitement so unfamiliar. This was as enthusiastic as Rita got, her smile surrounded by her new haircut, which looked like someone had stuck a bowl on her head and cut around it.

  She didn’t even give it to me; she just ripped it open in our front yard. I think that might be illegal. “Clevenger!” she called out. “We’re in the same class!” She ran back up the front walk and sat down beside me on the swing. “See, here’s where it says it. Clevenger,” she said, pointing at the name as if I needed proof.

  “Okay.” I smiled slightly. At least she was excited.

  “Aren’t you glad?” she asked. “We’re in the same class. Just like in first grade!”

  “I’m just not quite ready for school,” I tried to explain.

  “I don’t like it when summer ends either,” she sympathized.

  Rita folded the letter, put it back in its envelope, and handed it to me. I felt like she wanted to ask a question, but she didn’t know what it was; and I wanted to help her out, but I didn’t know the question and probably not the answer either.

  Four days before the dreaded first day, Mom went up and down the grocery aisles of Food Mart and I followed in her shadow. Her hollowed eyes seemed too full to hold more sadness. She mechanically pushed the grocery cart past rows and rows of food, up and down the aisles, her heels clicking on the gray linoleum. I looked for a good time to tell her what was bothering me, but I never found it. When we got in the checkout line, Mom’s grim stare suddenly turned to grief, and I looked around to figure out what had happened or who or what she’d seen.

  “I don’t need this stuff,” she whispered to me, biting back the tears, her hands outstretched over the groceries, her fingers holding air and quivering. She looked shocked. “I was just shopping like usual. That’s all. I didn’t think,” she said, as if trying to convince me. Mom was fragile. She was falling apart, and I didn’t know how to help her.

  Mom backed out of the line, then pushed her cart behind a rack of bread, hidden, as if unsure where to go next. She grew flustered, blushing as she studied the cart’s contents.

  “I’ll have to put these things back,” she said. “I can’t believe I did that.” Mom began yanking out specific items and stacking them in the place where Joel used to sit in the front of the cart: Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, a bag of orange circus peanuts, a new bottle of orange shampoo, the Bugle chips he liked to stick on his fingers. “We don’t need these things,” she whispered. The word anymore hung unspoken as she blinked back her tears.

  There was no more talk as we hastily went down and up the aisles, returning the items made unnecessary by Joel’s absence. I kept my head down but looked out the corners of my eyes to see if anyone thought it strange we were undoing our cart. As we left the store, our load was smaller, but it didn’t feel lighter.

  The dreaded bad day arrived, my first day of fourth grade.

  “Do you think people will ask lots of questions?” I asked, sitting on Matt’s bed in my pajamas.

  “I dunno.” He shoved his gym clothes into his backpack. How I used to envy that backpack, wanting so badly to be big enough to have lots of homework to carry around.

  “What should I say?”

  “I dunno, Abby,” he repeated.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said.

  “Then don’t.” Matt was developing a contradictory nature. At least that’s what Mom called it. Contradictory or antagonistic. New words for a new season.

  “You know I don’t have a choice,” I reminded him, slowly dragging up the sheets on his unmade bed.

  “Look, I don’t have all the answers, Abby,” he said quietly. I looked away. “You go to school and figure out what you have to do.”

  “Will you be home after school?” I asked at last.

  “No, I have football.”

  “And then you’ll come right home?”

  Matt didn’t answer. That meant no.

  “Matt, please?”

  “Mom’ll be home.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, realizing she wasn’t enough anymore. Just as we weren’t for her.

  “You’d better get out of those pajamas,” he scolded. I nodded and went back to my room as he swung his backpack over his shoulder and headed downstairs without me.

  Mom didn’t buy me a new lunch box or pencils or pens or a new outfit or even get me new hand-me-downs for the first day of school. And I didn’t ask for them. I dug out a few dresses from last year and hoped they still fit, even though nothing really fit anymore.

  By the time Mom called for breakfast, almost everything I owned covered my bed and floor and I was back in my pajamas. I wanted to hide underneath the blankets and sleep all day.

  “Abby, the bus’ll be here in ten minutes,” Mom yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “Come and eat!” I traced my fingers along the chenille tracks of my bedspread. Joel used to run his cars along the pattern as if it were a highway.

  I shouldn’t leave Mom alone all day. I didn’t need all the first day introductions, rules, and the stacks of papers for Mom to sign. And if I didn’t go the first day, everybody might just forget all about firsts and leave me alone on the second day. But then again, maybe I’d be the only new person on the
second day and I’d really stand out. The third day was probably the best day to start.

  By now the kids were lining up for the bus, holding new tin lunch boxes, looking down at their new clothes, and talking about who had which teacher. They were excited to be in a new grade. They were glad to be a year older. They’d go to school and come home to a snack instead of to a mom who may or may not have gotten dressed that day or to a dad who seemed like a stranger.

  “Abby! Come down now!”

  I really thought about pulling on my clothes but crawled back in bed instead. When the bus honked, Mom opened my door and gasped.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t feel very good.”

  I wasn’t very good at lying, and so I hoped this semi-honest answer would pass. Her hand was cool.

  “You don’t feel warm. Is it your tummy?” Mom sat down on the bed and smoothed her hand over my hair. Well, maybe it was my tummy or my head or maybe it was all of me. But somehow I knew she’d never understand what made me sick.

  “I could drive you. Dad won’t need the car.”

  “Still?” I asked, thinking that if we went back to school, he should go back to work.

  “Dad’s taking a sabbatical.”

  Sabbatical had something to do with the word Sabbath, the day of rest. How ironic that a man whose calling demanded working on the day of rest, needed a sabbatical to rest.

  “Should I bring you a glass of orange juice or something?” She stroked my arm.

  I shook my head. Orange juice wasn’t going to fix anything. Suddenly her hand stopped.

  “Abby, what’s with all the clothes on the bed?” She stood up and surveyed the room, then looked at me with a frown. “This whole morning thing doesn’t have to do with being embarrassed about what to wear, does it?”

  “No. I don’t care what I wear.” Did she think I could be that silly?

  “Are you really sick, Abby?” she asked, biting her lip.

  “I didn’t say I was,” I answered truthfully.

  “But …?” Mom began.