Know the Stars
Daddy? Hi, it’s me, Angel.” She was keeping her voice low, so as not to get Grandma upset.
“What’s the matter, baby?” Wayne’s voice sounded pinched, like Bernie’s when he was scared. “I tried to call you back soon’s I got your message, but whoever answered wouldn’t take the call.”
“I don’t want to worry you, Daddy. Me and Bernie are okay, but we’re not in Burlington anymore.” Angel sneaked a glance at Grandma. Bernie was showing her the Stupids book and poking her, trying to make her laugh at the pictures. Angel cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. “We’re at your grandma’s house.”
“You’re where? At Grandma’s? Well, where the hell’s Verna?”
“That’s what I’m calling about, Daddy. Remember when we came to see you? Well, she brought us here that day. Then she left, and she hasn’t come back.”
“Well, where’s she at, then? Did you call the apartment?”
“The phone’s been disconnected.”
She could hear him curse under his breath. “Jeez—just dumped you kids there with that old witch and took off?”
“I don’t think she meant to—”
Grandma looked up from the book. “Who’s on the phone?”
“It’s Daddy.” That “not on your stuffed cabbage” look began to creep onto Grandma’s face, so Angel hurried on. “I’ll pay for the call, promise.”
Grandma muttered something, but she didn’t say “Hang up,” so Angel turned back to the phone. “I thought you ought to know where me and Bernie moved to.”
“I don’t understand what’s got into her. I told her there’s a good chance I might get put on an outside work crew, and she just takes off. I swear I could kill that girl!”
“No, no, Daddy. Don’t blame Verna. She’s been under a lot of stress.” Angel tried to go around the corner, but the phone cord was too short. It kept her smack in the doorway.
“She’s been under a lotta stress! She should trying sitting in the stir for a few years if she thinks she knows anything about stress. Judas Priest!”
“I guess you don’t know where she’s at, then?”
“I wish I did, baby doll, I just wish I did. I’d get the law after her faster than you could say ‘child neglect.’”
“Oh, Daddy, please. Don’t tell anyone she’s gone. They’d send Welfare out here and take us away.”
“Well, how are you kids going to stay with that old bat? She near ran me crazy when I was a kid, and that was years ago. You can’t tell me she’s improved none with age. You and Bernie’d be better off if Welfare did come and get you.”
“No, we wouldn’t.” Why had she been so bent on talking to Wayne? “No, we wouldn’t. Don’t you see, Daddy, they’d separate us, and who would take care of Bernie then?”
“I swear. Verna must be out of her cotton-picking head—dumping my son and my daughter on the very woman I hate the most in the frigging world. I get in the least little trouble, and my own grandma throws me and my whole family out of her stinking trailer. She’s probably the one sicced the cops on me, the old witch. I know she’s the one turned my daddy in and run my mama off. I swear I’m calling Welfare.”
“Daddy. Daddy! Don’t call anybody. Please. We’re okay, really we are. Besides, I can take care of Bernie. He’s behaving himself real good right now. Okay? Don’t worry about us, okay?” The frantic whispering was making her throat raw. “Okay? You just take care of yourself. Bernie and me will be fine. I promise. Bye, now.” She hung up the phone, hoarse and wet with perspiration. That would teach her to use up all her money to make a stupid longdistance call.
Angel turned from the phone to see that Grandma was directing her full attention at her. “So?” the old woman said.
“He doesn’t know where Verna is, either.”
Grandma snorted. “I figure that rascal’d be the last person on earth she’d want to know her whereabouts.” Angel sighed and slumped down on one of the kitchen chairs. “I was just hoping—”
“If I was you, Angel, I’d pour my hopes into some other bucket. Those two are leaky as sieves.” Grandma was in a good mood again. It was almost as if other people’s failures and misfortunes cheered her up. “Now,” she said, “how about you fixing us up some nice fat ham sandwiches for lunch?”
“I hate ham,” said Bernie, but when Angel made a sandwich for him he ate it with hardly a whimper.
***
It was cloudy that night. No use going out to look for the star man. She waited until Bernie was asleep, then took her library book across the hall. No use looking for Verna, either. Angel pulled on the overhead light. It was another naked bulb hanging down from the ceiling, so dim she’d probably put her eyes out, but never mind. She stretched out on the bed and opened the worn paperback called Know the Stars. “Few people,” it began, “can tell one star from another, yet it is not difficult to know them....”
Angel blinked at the wonderful first sentence. She was ignorant, but she was not alone. The writer of this book, H. A. Rey, thought she could learn, not like the guy who wrote the encyclopedia article, who thought she had to know everything first before she could understand anything. The writer went on: “Simple shepherds 5000 years ago were familiar with the heavens; they knew the stars and constellations—and they could not even read or write—so why don’t you?”
A feeling totally unknown to her flooded her with warmth. Maybe it was what some people called “love at first sight.” She loved this writer. She loved his book. He knew her and he didn’t sneer. He was going to help her. There were lots of pictures that the writer had drawn himself. He loved the night sky and he was going to teach her all about it. Between H. A. Rey and the star man, she was going to delve into a realm of mystery so huge that the disappearance of Verna Morgan would look like nothing. Wouldn’t it?
***
The cookbook choice had been a mistake, for when she tried to follow the directions it gave for making gravy, it didn’t work. It wanted her to use fancy ingredients that she didn’t have, like steak sauce and a special kind of flour. The only flour in Grandma’s house had little mealworms crawling about in it. Even when Angel tried her best to pick them out and use the flour anyway, the gravy she made turned out tasteless and lumpy. Maybe Miss Liza knew how to make gravy, but if she went back to the library, she’d have to return Know the Stars, and she needed its explanations and pictures with the dotted lines to make sense of the constellations.
She had wanted to surprise the star man by pointing out the Big Bear with the Big Dipper riding like a saddle on its back. But when she looked at the real sky, which didn’t have any dotted lines connecting stars into constellations, she couldn’t even find the Little Dipper with Polaris, the North Star, at the end of its handle. Polaris was practically the most important star in the whole sky, and she had pointed at Venus and said it was Polaris.
“Don’t worry,” the star man had said. “It’s hard for everyone at first.”
She would have given up without H. A. Rey and the star man. They both thought she could learn the map of the sky, but she’d need Mr. Rey’s book for longer than two weeks, that was for sure. Besides, the sky was changing all the time. When fall came, everything would be different. It was already getting dark sooner, which was good for looking at the sky but a reminder that she had to think of other things—mostly, school. If only she and Bernie could just not go. But if they didn’t go, Welfare was sure to find out, and then they wouldn’t have a prayer of staying here with Grandma and the star man.
Angel didn’t have any idea what day school began, but August was more than half over. It was bound to begin soon. She’d just have to ask Miss Liza. That was it. As soon as the blinking check came, she’d have to go to the village.
Grandma sent Angel to the mailbox every day. “It ain’t ever been this late,” she’d say. When it came at last, Grandma signed the back with a shaky hand. Now they could go to the store and get food in all five food groups instead of gettin
g by on what Santy Claus left on their doorstep.
“What did you do before?” Angel asked Grandma.
“What do you mean, ‘before’?”
“I mean, who cashed your check and brought you groceries before me and Bernie came?”
“Santy Claus.”
It was no use. Maybe the star man had done that, too. By now, Angel had figured that it was probably the star man who left the occasional bag of groceries at the door and cut and stacked the wood in the pile next to the house. She wondered how he knew they needed help. He might as well have been Grandma’s Santy Claus. He was as hard to believe in, a mysterious figure of the night. Angel refused to let herself think of him in earthbound terms, even though in one part of her mind she knew he lived in a broken-down trailer and seemed to go to work every day in a rusted-out car. And she wasn’t going to ask Grandma about him and have the old woman sneer and call him Santy Claus. Of course, she could have asked the star man about school, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want him connected to anything so ordinary as school.
***
Funny, she was nervous about seeing the librarian again. The books were only one day overdue. Still, nice as Miss Liza might seem, she was a librarian, and librarians could be very fussy about getting books back on time.
“I don’t want to take my books back,” Bernie said.
“You have to. They’re overdue.”
“I don’t care. I’m never taking them back. Never. Never. Never.”
Angel sighed. She would have yelled if she hadn’t been so sympathetic. “Maybe Miss Liza will find you some other books. She said she would.”
“I like these.”
It was all Angel could do to put Bernie’s shoes on him, wrestle the Stupids out of his hands, and drag him out the door and down the road. He complained all the way, but she paid him no attention. She was making the list in her head of things to ask Miss Liza. Could she renew Know the Stars even if she was bringing it back late? Would Miss Liza find her a better cookbook with no fancy ingredients? When did school start? And where was it? She plotted her strategy. First they’d go to the library, get things straight with Miss Liza, and then they’d go to the store. It was a big check—three hundred sixty-four dollars. She could buy only what she and Bernie could carry between them, but the idea of carrying that much money scared her. This was what you needed grownups for—these kinds of things. Every time she thought about it, she got mad.
The door to the library was unlocked, just as if Miss Liza were expecting them. The bell rang when they pushed the door open. “Come on in!” Miss Liza’s crackly voice called from the back. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be right out.”
Bernie zoomed across to the picture books. He knew right where Miss Liza had found the Stupids, and before she emerged from the back, he had settled down happily on the floor, books strewn all around him.
Miss Liza shuffled in, reminding Angel less of a witch than of a crab, coming with her head sideways so she could see something besides the floor. “My favorite people!” she exclaimed. “Angel and Bernie!”
“I need some more Stupids!” Bernie said. He jumped up and ran to her, grabbing her clawed hand to lead her to the picture books.
“Looks to me like you already found them,” she said, her eyes wrinkled up in smiles. “And what about you, Miss Angel? What do you need today?”
“I was wondering—I know everything’s overdue, but, well, would it be okay if I renew the star book?”
“Keep it as long as you need to,” Miss Liza said. “If someone else comes in wanting to borrow it, I’ll let you know. All right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” They smiled at each other, Angel realizing at once that the likelihood of someone else wanting that particular book was very slim.
“How about the cookbook? Was it any help?”
“Well, it wants you to have stuff we don’t have.”
“So, something simpler that doesn’t call for fancy ingredients?”
Angel nodded.
“Hmm. Let me think.” She didn’t go to the cookbook section but to a part of the children’s section and brought out a paperback book that had a spiral binding. “Here’s one the 4-H Club put out with someone just like you in mind.” She handed the book over to Angel. “I should have thought of it last time.”
“Thanks. And I got another question. It—it looks like we’re going to be at Grandma’s longer than we first thought. Mama thinks we ought to go ahead and start school.” She looked over at Bernie to see if he was going to say anything, but he was happily leafing through a Stupids book. “She wanted me to find out when school starts around here.”
“Well, that’s an easy one. A week from today, the day after Labor Day.”
“I’m sure Mama knows, but Bernie and me was curious as to where the school building is. I mean, do we walk, or take a bus, or what?”
“I’m afraid they closed down the school here in the village a few years ago. Tell your mama”—she looked closely at Angel as she said the word, as though she was suspicious about Mama but too polite to question—“I’m sure your mama remembers that the school’s in Chesterville now.” Miss Liza sidled over to the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a thin yellow phone book. “I’ll write down the number of the school for you. Then they can tell you where to catch the bus, that sort of thing.”
“Thank you. C’mon, Bernie.” Bernie stooped down and began picking up every book he’d yanked from shelves earlier. When he stood up, books were falling out from under both his arms. “You can’t take more than two. We still got to carry the groceries.” He started to argue but sighed instead. After a long time of examining every book, he carefully chose the same two books he’d taken home the time before. She opened her mouth to suggest that he might want a new one, but Miss Liza shot her a warning glance. “I thought you didn’t like books,” Angel said.
“I don’t,” he said. “I only like Stupids.”
Miss Liza stamped the cards and handed them their books. Then she leaned down in her dangerous way that made Angel fear she’d topple over, and pulled something out of the bottom drawer. It was an almost new-looking canvas backpack. “Somebody left this here two or three years ago,” she said, pushing it across the desk toward Angel. “Why don’t you take it? It might come in handy.” A real backpack! She wouldn’t be so weird at school if she had a backpack like everyone else. “Are you sure it’s okay if I take it?”
“Positive,” Miss Liza said. “And if you have any problems, with school or anything else, call me. All right, Angel?”
“Thank you. I’ll, I’ll tell Mama you offered.” Nobody in town, even somebody as nice as Miss Liza, could know that Mama was missing. Sometimes the people with the kindest hearts caused the worst trouble for kids.
Angel planned the next steps carefully. First she cashed Grandma’s check and bought each of them a Popsicle. “We’ll be right back to get groceries,” she explained to the clerk. “We got to eat these first.”
“Suit yourself,” the woman said.
They sat on the steps of the store and ate the Popsicles. “Bernie, you can’t look at your book and eat your Popsicle at the same time. You’ll drip all over it,” Angel said.
“You are so mean.” But she knew he didn’t mean it.
She stretched out her feet in dirty sneakers with no socks. The sun was warm on her bare ankles. A fly buzzing over a drop of melted Popsicle that had dripped on the step was the loudest noise to be heard in the late-summer morning. She licked contentedly. “This is great, isn’t it, Bernie?”
“I wanted grape,” he said.
“Well, you should have said so, Bernie. I asked, and you said ‘orange’ plain as day. I can’t read your blinking mind.”
“I know,” he said happily.
Everything was going to be all right. Oh, they had parents that acted like spoiled babies and a great-grandma who needed a mother as much as they did, and in this immense universe they weren’t even specks of dust, but some
how, somehow, they were going to make it. She knew it, sitting on those steps eating a cherry Popsicle, a real backpack on her back with books inside waiting to be read, and groceries in all five major food groups waiting to be bought. She didn’t have anything to worry about today, and she wasn’t going to get all stressed out about tomorrow. Not while she had the chill syrupy taste of a cherry Popsicle in her mouth.
THIRTEEN
To School We Go
She put off calling the school. She even asked Grandma to do it. “Not on your stuffed cabbage,” the old lady said. “I don’t mess with the authorities.” Angel practiced deepening her voice in her chest, saying things like, “This is Mrs. Verna Morgan. I intend to enroll my children in your school.” Or “Excuse me, please, but where does the school bus stop on Morgan Farm Road?” But even in her own head she sounded like a kid playing grownup. So she gave up trying to imitate Verna and just called. The school phone was busy. It stayed busy. She’d almost lost her nerve and decided to forget about school when suddenly there was a long ring at the other end and a voice barked, “Chesterville Union Elementary School.”
“Uh—”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“I need to know about where the bus stops.”
She could hear a sigh at the other end. “Honey, the buses stop all over the district. You got to pick a spot.”
“On—on Morgan Farm Road.”
“Wait a minute. I got to check the map.” She came back after what seemed to Angel halfway to forever. “No stops on that road. No kids.”
“Yes, there are. Me and my brother. We just moved here...my mom, too, only she’s real busy right now and can’t come to the phone. Or else she’d be—”
“Okay. Okay. Where do you live?”
“Well, my mother and my brother and me are living with my grandmother, my great-grandmother. For right now.” The voice got very stiff, like somebody had told the woman to practice being patient with slow learners and she didn’t like having to do it. “I don’t know your greatgrandmother, honey. So you need to tell me who she is and where she’s at.”