The Same Stuff as Stars

“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.