The Moon Over High Street

  IX

  WITH GRAN EXPECTED the very next day, there was a lot to do to get ready. But chores were the easy part. The hard part, for Joe and Aunt Myra, was to leave it all unspoken—not mention what was happening, not discuss Mr. Boulderwall’s plan, not try to figure things out together. Because it was better to wait for Gran. Gran would know how to handle things. They agreed on that without a word. And anyway, what could they have said to each other now? What could they have said that would help? When the world you’re used to, that same old world you thought you knew so well, turns itself suddenly upside down, what can you do? Everything comes tumbling off the shelves of your expectations; nothing fits anymore. So they didn’t say what they wanted to say, or ask each other any of those questions, the questions that were popping in their heads like flashbulbs. Instead, they kept their eyes away from each other and concentrated on the easy part: the chores.

  “You’d better sleep in the guest room, Joe.” This from Aunt Myra. “It’s what I said before— it’ll be better for Gran if she doesn’t have to climb any stairs.”

  Joe said, “Sure—that’s all right. And don’t worry about my stuff—I’ll take care of it.”

  But he didn’t ask her, “Do we have to do what Mr. Boulderwall says? What if I don’t want to get adopted? Would I have to go live in that stuck-up house on High Street? Would I be really rich? Would that be good? Or bad?”

  Aunt Myra said, “I guess we’d better strip your bed now, Joe, and I’ll make one up for you in the guest room. That way, there’ll be less to do in the morning. Does that sound okay? You can have either one of the guest beds.” And then she added, “When that’s done, I think I’ll call Vinnie and see if he can find us an air conditioner for Gran, in case the nights start getting warm.”

  But she didn’t say, “I can’t let them take you away … I want you too much … I need you to finish doing your growing up right here, with me.”

  IN THE MIDDLE of the afternoon, Joe was collecting things to carry upstairs when Vinnie struggled through the door to his room, Gran’s room now, hauling an enormous cardboard carton in his arms—a carton labeled FAN-FAIR Whisper-Cool, and below that, Window Air Conditioner. “Hey there, kid,” said Vinnie. “Looky here! I got ’er cheap! Last year’s model.” He bent with a groan and lowered the carton carefully to the floor. “This’ll keep yer granny perked up. Myra says the old girl busted a bone.”

  Joe was relieved to have something to think about, something to talk about, that didn’t involve Mr. Boulderwall. He sat down on the bed beside his half-full suitcase and said to Vinnie, “I never broke a thing. Did you?”

  Vinnie knelt on the floor and began to pry open the air conditioner carton. “As a matter a’fact I did,” he said, “but it wasn’t that big a deal. I was just a little kid. Five or maybe six. Fell off the roof in a thunderstorm and busted my arm.”

  “You were on a roof in a thunderstorm?” said Joe, amazed. “You must’ve been really scared up there!”

  “Scared? What for? Nuthin’ t’be scared of. I climbed up outta my bedroom window so’s I could see the lightning better. I was hangin’ on to the chimney bricks when I lost my grip and slid backwards right off the edge. Landed down below in a wheelbarrow fulla rain.” He grinned, remembering. “My maw really come unglued that time. She nailed my window shut!” He began to pull packing paper out of the carton, and soon, when the air conditioner was freed, he lifted it out and kicked the carton aside, setting the machine under one of the windows. “Now, there’s one doozie of an item!” he said, staring down at its many slits and shutters and knobs, and its classic rock-gray color. “These contraptions pull alotta juice, once they get goin’. It’s worth it, though, if we get one a’them hot spells.”

  “Sure. But, Vinnie,” said Joe, “tell me more about lightning.”

  Vinnie eased himself down into the desk chair and rubbed his shoulders. “Not much t’tell,” he said, gazing off into the distance. “It’s just I always kinda thought it was beauty-ful. Ya know? And sudden … and scary! I really liked the scary part. I was always lookin’ for someone to tell me how it worked. Had to wait for high school till I found any answers. Turned out it’s just—plain old electricity! That’s all it is. But them bolts can be hotter than the outside part of the sun, didja know that? And we didn’t invent ’em or nuthin’. They’re just … there, doin’ their thing.”

  “And now,” said Joe, “electricity’s your whole business!”

  “Yep,” said Vinnie. “That’s about the size of it. So—how about you, kid? What gets you goin’?”

  Joe hesitated, and then said it straight out: “I want to do some kind of science about the moon. To save it from getting any more bashed up than it already is.”

  “Try t’keep them sky rocks from rammin’ inta it,” said Vinnie, nodding. “It sounds good, but ya better hurry up, kid. That moon a’yours might need more savin’ than ya think, and not from no sky rocks, neither. There’s alotta talk about goin’ up there in rocket ships and walkin’ on it, takin’ pictures ’n collectin’ stuff ’n figurin’ it all out. Next thing, they’ll find a way t’get some air up there for breathin’, and then they’ll start movin’ people in. And once they do that, the Gobble House folks’ll be right behind ’em. Oh yeah. Openin’ up for business. I can just see it. Moonburgers! Sky Fries!” He sighed and shook his head. “We oughta leave stuff alone. New don’t always mean better. Oh, well, I guess I should get this gizmo set up.”

  Joe stuffed a pile of socks into his suitcase, and then he said, “Vinnie, where’s the house you lived in when you fell off the roof that time? It’d be fun to go look at it. Is it on this street?”

  Vinnie had opened a window and was standing in front of it, hands on hips, matching it to the air conditioner with one eye open, one eye closed. “Nowhere near,” he said. “That was clear over t’Zanesville, where I grew up. Too long a drive from here, just t’go look at a roof. I didn’t move t’this town till …” He paused, and then finished: “Till after that war we was in.” He turned and, coming over to the bed where Joe was sitting, plunked down beside him. “Listen, kid, Myra says she told ya about her other Joe, that she was gonna marry,” he said. “So I been thinkin’ ya oughta know that him and me got t’be friends when we was in the army together, in Korea, way before I ever knew Myra. He talked t’me a lot about her. He was a great guy—one a’the best I ever knew. He got hisself killed keepin’ a few of us safe with grenades when we was attacked in the dark one night. After, when I got outta the service, I come down here t’Midville t’find Myra, ’cause I wanted t’talk to her, face to face, about him. She was workin’ over to Sope Electric back then, some kinda secretary, savin’ her money to go to teachers college over to Miami. She was as glad to see me as I was to see her. She fixed me up in the same job I got now, workin’ with Gil. It’s a good job, and I’m real happy with it. Been there more’n ten years, believe it or not. Myra and me, we don’t talk much about Korea no more. We said it all to each other, long time ago. But it don’t go away. It’s still out there, holdin’ on between us. So—we’ll always stay friends.”

  THAT NIGHT, Joe carried his suitcase upstairs to the guest room. He’d chosen the bed that was nearest a window, for he wanted to be able to see the night sky while he was going to sleep. But would treetops block his view? No, it was all right: not a leaf or a branch in the way. And there was the moon, ready to be admired, faintly pinkish and showing only half of its circle of a self. But that was the way it was supposed to look, this time of the month. It always looked the way it was supposed to look. Joe sat down, satisfied, and was leaning his arms comfortably on the windowsill when there was a tapping and Aunt Myra’s voice: “Joe? It’s me. How’s the room working out?”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Come on in if you want to.” And as she stepped through the doorway, he added, “I like it up here.”

  She crossed the room to the window beside him and looked out. “Nice moon,” she said.

  And he
said, “Uh-huh. Just fine.”

  Aunt Myra sat down on the foot of the bed. The light was dimming now, inside and out, but Joe could sense that she was studying him. The uneasiness of the day, between them, was still there; they weren’t any closer to relieving it. He sat back from the window, wondering whether he should switch on the floor lamp that stood between the beds. Maybe a bright light would help … but leaving it off might be better. Maybe, if it was really dark, Aunt Myra would go to bed. He hoped so. Otherwise, she might want to talk to him about Mr. Boulderwall, and he wouldn’t be able to think of anything to say. Or at least he couldn’t think of how to say anything that mattered.

  But Aunt Myra seemed to want to talk about something. Not lawyers and adoption, however, or Mr. Boulderwall’s money. Instead, she asked him, “Joe, were you always interested in night sky things?”

  He had begun to feel his irritation once again, after many days without it, but it backed away. Night sky things—that seemed like a safe subject. “I guess I was always interested,” he told her. “Near as I can remember, anyway.”

  “Then maybe you’ll be the one to study astronomy,” she said. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? You instead of me! Except, it’s mostly the moon you pay attention to, isn’t it? You don’t seem to care all that much about stars.”

  “Well, they’re kind of little,” he said, and then added quickly, “I know they’re not really little—but that’s the way they look from here.”

  “Yes, they don’t seem very important,” she said. “They’re too far away. But the moon—well, everybody knows about the moon. I remember, a long time ago, if someone asked my mother to do something hard, she used to say, ‘Why, I could no more do that than fly to the moon!’ And now it looks like we’ll all be flying to the moon one of these days, if we want to.” She paused, and then she said, “Joe, why do you suppose it matters so much to you?”

  “The moon? Oh—I don’t know,” he answered. “Gran says it’s always been that way. I never especially thought about why. It’s just … well … it’s nice to know it’s always there. That makes me feel good. I don’t like things to keep changing.”

  “But, Joe!” she protested. “The moon changes! It changes all the time! That’s what it’s famous for!”

  “I guess,” he said. “But it doesn’t go away.”

  There was a moment of silence. And then she said, “No, it doesn’t go away,” adding, in a lower voice, “People do, though.”

  Joe knew what she was talking about, but he asked her anyway: “How do you mean?”

  “I just mean,” she said, “people go away and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. You can’t depend on anyone to always be there.”

  “Gran says,” he told her, “when it comes to people, you can’t count on anyone but yourself. But the thing is, I think you can always count on the moon. For it to be there, I mean. Sure, it changes, but the changes are always the same.”

  Aunt Myra stood up, then, and looked once more out the window at the moon. “Will you want to go up there in a rocket ship someday, do you think?” she asked him.

  Joe laughed. “Nope,” he said. “Not ever.” And he told her what Vinnie had said about Moonburgers.

  Aunt Myra laughed, herself. And then she told him, “Joe, I didn’t come in here meaning to be gloomy. I’m just worried right now. I hate not knowing what to do about this business with Mr. Boulderwall—it’s got me totally confused.”

  “Gran will know what to do,” said Joe.

  “Yes, that’s right. Gran will have the answers,” she said. “Get some sleep now, Joe, if you can. It’s going to be a big few days coming up.”

  And then she was gone. Joe climbed out of his clothes and found a nightshirt, and was soon back sitting on the edge of his bed. Yawning, he looked out at the moon. Even with half its face in shadow, he liked to imagine that it knew they were there for each other—that he could ask it for advice and it would always know what was right. He could ask it to tell him if being rich would be a good thing—or bad. If he was very rich, could they still be friends? Then, drowsily, he stretched out under the sheets, already half asleep, and in his rising dreams he seemed to hear, from very far away, the answer to his questions: “You can have the moon or money. Money or the moon. There’s no such thing as both.”

  X

  THE TELEPHONE RANG around one thirty on Saturday afternoon. Gran. “I’m in a phone booth in Springfield,” she announced to Myra. “Helen put together a picnic for our lunch and we’ve been eating in the car. But we’re ready to get back on the highway now. Whew! Four hours is a lot of driving! But one more hour ought to do it—it’s about fifty miles from here down to Midville, near as I can tell from the map.”

  “Oh, Gran! I’m so relieved to hear from you!” said Myra. “How’s your hip? How’re you holding up?”

  “Me? I’m doing all right,” she responded. “Better now that I’m not just sitting around the house all upset and mad as … well, never mind what I’m mad as. Helen’s doing all right, too, bless her! We got stopped for speeding when we were making that curve around Columbus, but she sweet-talked the officer. Apologized, and called him ‘dear,’ and told him how handsome he looked in his uniform. I don’t think I ever saw a policeman try so hard not to smile! He let us off without a ticket. How about that! All we got was a warning. So … how’s Joe?”

  “He’s fine,” Myra told her. “I’d put him on, but he got restless and went out back to clean up the yard. And, Gran, we haven’t talked about that letter you got. I told him what Mr. Boulderwall wants to do, but we haven’t actually talked about it.”

  “Well,” said Gran, “that’s all right. Probably just as well. What I’m thinking is, we’ll talk it through when I get there, up one side and down the other, see what we all think, and then I’ll make an appointment with that Boulderwall man for tomorrow. I’d better get off this phone now—there’s a crabby-looking girl waiting for it. So—all right! See you in an hour!”

  BY THREE THIRTY they were together in the Glen Lane living room—Myra, Joe, and Gran, with Gran unpacked and settled in the downstairs bedroom. Mrs. Mello had helped her out of the car and walked close beside her into the house, just in case, for Gran was stumping along by means of the walker—a strange-looking, three-sided metal cage sort of thing, waist high, of no weight at all but very strong, that she could lean on and clank about in. “Why, there you are, you dear, plucky lad!” Mrs. Mello chirped when she saw Joe. And to Myra, “You must be that sweet girl Berta is so fond of! My, my! What have we here? Three Casimirs in one room! I wish I could stay and chat, but I have to get on over to Oxford to my own treasures. So I’ll turn your honey of a grandma over to you both and see you later on, when it’s time for us all to go home. Toodle-oo!” And off she went.

  Now, with peace restored and the walker tucked into a corner, Gran was happy to claim a normal armchair at last. She sank down into it carefully, with a sigh. “Joe,” she said to him, “I’ve missed you like crazy, but it’s clear everything’s been okay down here with Myra.”

  “Yep,” said Joe. “It’s been good.” And then he added, “I was kind of worried, but you look just like always, Gran. I’m really glad you’re okay.”

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I’ll be more okay when we figure out this adoption business. I was really in a rage yesterday when I read that lawyer’s letter, but now, well, I realize it isn’t just a casual suggestion, it’s a flat-out offer of a completely new life for you—a kind of life I don’t know anything about. I mean, it’s so huge, I can’t see all the way around it! So what I need to know is, what’s on the other side? Once you get past the money, if you can get past the money, what are these people really like, these Boulderwalls? Joe, you talked to Mr. Boulderwall when you went to his house for tea, right? Tell me what you thought of him.”

  Joe frowned, thinking back to Mr. Boulderwall’s face, the squinting eyes examining him, the short, determined questions, and at last he said, “Well, gee, I
don’t know, Gran. He’s old, but … it’d be easy to be scared of him. I guess he knows what he wants, all right. But he wasn’t mean or anything. He just had a bunch of questions about school, stuff like that, and he said we should be friends because he doesn’t have a son and I don’t have a father.”

  “Nothing about adoption?” she asked him.

  “Nope,” said Joe. “Not a word.”

  “I can’t understand it,” said Gran, shaking her head. “But, Myra, you talked to Mrs. Boulderwall. What about her? What about the way they live?”

  “Their house is really beautiful,” said Myra. “Very big, everything perfect. I liked it. But Joe didn’t. He said it looked like a house in a movie. It had everything but the cameras. And in a way he was right! Mrs. Boulderwall reminded me of an actress in a movie. She didn’t seem real. Her clothes were too elegant, and the things she said were like lines she had to learn for the part she was playing. She’d make a remark and then she’d look at me to see if I knew my lines and could answer back. I felt like a real clunk. That was just me, though. It’s not as if she was exactly rude or anything. Still, it’s funny … I kept thinking she was trying so hard, she didn’t have time to be friendly.”

  “Maybe it’s hard work to be rich,” said Gran. “Or maybe they’re just not used to ordinary people like us. Do they have any children of their own?”

  “They have a married daughter up in Cleveland, but no grandchildren,” said Myra.

  “There’s no one to take over the business, then,” said Gran. “That could explain a lot. Except—why choose Joe? Why not somebody with experience, somebody the right age now? And what about our family? There’s just the three of us, sure, but family is family … and, Joe, do you know anything about those little machines Mr. Boulderwall makes?”

  “Swervits,” said Joe. “Remember? You got a new one for your car last year.”

  “Well, but, Joe,” she pressed him, “would you like a job like that? Being the boss in a factory?”