The Same Stuff as Stars

“I’ve got an idea. It might not work...” She’s scared I’ll get my hopes up. “But I know the woman who is in charge of school libraries for the whole state. I’ll ask her to find out if—that is, where—Bernie is enrolled. I’ll tell her—oh, I’ll tell her he failed to return a library book of mine. That’s actually the truth.”

“They go after kids for not returning library books?”

“Of course not. But I’ll say, and I won’t be lying—it’s an absolute fact—that he’s got a book that’s hard to replace, so would they ask about it.”

“Will that work?”

“Probably not. But I don’t have a better idea.” She sighed and patted Angel’s hand again. They sat there, hearing no noise but their own breathing, until the wind blew a branch clattering against one of the windows. “How’s the stargazing going?”

“Okay, I guess. I’m learning a lot from your book. It really helps.”

“I miss it.”

“I can bring it back.”

“Oh, not the book. The sky.”

Angel was confused. “The sky? How come?” The sky wasn’t like some overdue library book. It was always right there.

“My silly back,” she said. “I can’t turn my head up to see it properly.”

“Oh.”

“I can remember the stars. You mustn’t feel bad for me.”

“They’re so huge, so far away. Sometimes,” Angel said, “sometimes, when I think of them, I feel like I’m nothing at all.”

“‘When I consider thy heavens, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him?’” Miss Liza was quoting something. Angel waited until she paused. She figured Miss Liza would explain. “It’s from the Bible,” she said. “The eighth Psalm. I used to recite that to myself when I was studying astronomy. What is man—and of course the writer means all of us puny little insignificant creatures—what is a mere human being that God who made the immense universe should ever notice?” She chuckled. “The sky does take you down to size.”

“Not even big as bugs. Not even a speck of dust to the nearest star,” Angel agreed.

“But the psalmist answers his own question. ‘Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor....’”

“What?” Angel asked, not sure she had heard right.

“A little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.”

“The real angels?

Do you believe that?”

“Yes, Angel, I do. When people look down on me, and these days”—she laughed shortly—“these days everyone over the age of five does. When people look down on me, I remember that God looks at this pitiful, twisted old thing that I have become and crowns me with glory.”

Angel could hardly speak. There was pain in what Miss Liza said, terrible pain, but something else, too. Something Angel knew only when she turned her face to the stars. An awesome stillness. What was that word? A glory.

She left the library with three books and a heart too full to speak. In the grocery store she bought what she needed, wondering if the clerk and the three customers who were in and out noticed anything different about her. She felt so different from the girl who had left Grandma’s house an hour or so before. Couldn’t they see a little streak of shining in her, a bit of the glory Miss Liza had passed on to her?

Even when the clerk asked the very question she’d dreaded, “Where’s your brother?” she looked her straight in her friendly, round face and said, “He’s with my mom today.” She didn’t even have to lie.

***

“I brought you some ice cream, Grandma.”

The old woman opened her eyes and roused herself up a bit from the chair. “It’s probably cream soup by now,” she grumped and closed her eyes again.

“No. She wrapped it special for you, so’s it wouldn’t get soft. Feel.” She took the insulated bag over to the rocker.

Grandma touched it with one finger. “Hmmph.”