“Even Grandma?”
“Especially Grandma. She’s so worn out trying to be the grownup she don’t know what end’s up.”
“I thought you was the grownup, baby. You always have been.”
“I’m even more tired of being the grownup than Grandma is. I’m not even twelve years old, Mama. I’m not supposed to be the grownup. That’s your job.”
“I might not get the chance, Angel.” She lifted a hand, with a tube attached, about an inch and then let it drop weakly onto the sheet. “I’m messed up pretty bad inside—”
“You get well, you hear? You don’t have any right wimping out on us. You’re the mother!”
“Okay, baby,” she said. “I’ll try. Promise.”
Angel wanted to cry. The tears were burning in her eyes, but she wasn’t going to go soft. Verna had to get well, and tears might make Verna think she could give up, quit trying. Angel wasn’t about to give her leave to do that.
“I’m telling you, Verna Morgan, I don’t want any of your promises. You gotta get well and come home. I’m not going to let you do anything else. You hear?”
“Okay,” she said, a flicker of a smile on her dry lips. “Okay, baby. You’re the boss.”
“I am not the boss. I’m just the kid. Hear?”
“I hear you.” She was really smiling now, her eyes open, with a spark of something like life in them.
***
An inch or two of snow had fallen during the day, lending the junk-filled yard a frosted elegance. After she had shoveled a path a few feet from the house into the yard, Angel carried a kitchen chair out and put the quilt from Bernie’s bed on it. Bernie’s leg was still weak, and he couldn’t stand for too long at a time, but it was going to be a night starry enough for Galileo Galilei, and she needed to share it with him. She helped him hobble out the door and sit down. Then she wrapped the quilt around him.
“You’re not too cold, are you?”
“Nah,” he said. “I like it out here.” He looked around him at the snow-covered humps of discarded junk and then up at the star-spattered sky. “Wish on the star, Angel!” he said, pointing.
“That’s not a star, Bernie. It’s a planet.”
“It is, too, a star, and I’m going to wish on it, and you can’t stop me.”
There was no need to give Bernie lessons in astronomy tonight—no use, really. “What are you wishing for, Bernie?”
“That when Mama comes home tomorrow, she won’t ever go away again.”
“That’s a good wish.”
“What do you wish for, Angel?”
“I wish we’d all be happy together—you and me and Mama and Grandma and Miss Liza and Eric and—”
“And Daddy, too?”
She took a deep breath. “Yeah,” she said. “Daddy, too.”
“You ’member when I wished he wouldn’t ever come home?”
“Yeah.”
“That was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Well, you hardly know him. He’s been in jail so long.”
“I bet he likes me better than Jake did.”