A Bridge to the Stars Read Online Free

the
rolled-up sea charts, but he doesn't find anything.
    Has he taken the photo into the forest with him? he
wonders. Why is he keeping it from me?
    He decides to ask his father that the moment he
comes home, before he's even had time to take off his
woolly hat.
    It's my mum after all, he thinks. Why is he keeping
her from me?
    But when he hears his father's footsteps coming up
the stairs, he knows he isn't going to ask him anything.
    He daren't. Instead he asks his dad to repeat the
story about the enormous water lilies that only exist in
the botanical gardens in Mauritius.
    Samuel sits down on the edge of Joel's bed.
    'Wouldn't you rather hear about something else?' he
asks. 'I've told you about the water lilies so many
times.'
    'Not tonight,' Joel tells him. 'Tonight I want to hear
something I've heard about before.'
    Afterwards he lies down in the dark, listening to the
beams twisting and creaking.
    Something's got to happen, he tells himself before he
dozes off with the sheets pulled up to his chin.
    He suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night.
And that's when, as he gets out of bed and tiptoes over
to the window, he sees that solitary dog running off
towards the stars.

3
    There are two things Joel Gustafson wants.
    A new stove and a bicycle.
    He can't quite make up his mind which of those is the
more important. He realises that two things can never be
equally important at the same time, but he's unsure
when it comes to choosing between the stove and the
bicycle.
    He knows of nobody apart from himself and his father
who cook food on an old iron, wood-burning stove.
    Everybody has an electric cooker nowadays. Nobody
but him has to chop up kindling, carry in firewood and
wait for ever and a day until the so-called hotplates have
heated up sufficiently to boil the water for the potatoes.
    It is a real pain, having to stand by the stove every day
after school, making sure the fire doesn't go out. That's
the kind of thing people used to have to do. Not now,
though, not in the spring of 1956.
    One day he plucks up enough courage to ask his father.
    The wood had been damp and wouldn't ignite. In
addition, he'd burnt himself on the pan when the
potatoes were finally ready.
    'Don't you think we should get rid of this old stove?'
he says.
    Samuel looks up from the kitchen bench, where he's
lying down and thumbing through a newspaper.
    'What's wrong with the stove?' he asks. 'Has it
cracked?'
    What's wrong with it? Joel asks himself. Everything
is wrong with it. The biggest thing wrong with it is that
it's not an electric cooker.
    'Everybody has an electric cooker,' he says. 'Everybody
but us.'
    His father peers at him over his reading glasses.
    'How many people do you think have a model ship
called Celestine ?' he asks. 'How many apart from us?
Should we get rid of that as well? So that we are like
everybody else?'
    Joel doesn't like it when his dad answers a question
by asking another one. That makes it hard to stick to the
point that really matters. But this time he's going to be
insistent.
    'If I'm going to have to carry on boiling potatoes, I
want an electric cooker,' he says.
    Then he says something he hadn't intended to say
at all.
    'If I'm the mother in this household.'
    His father turns serious, and looks at him long and
hard without responding.
    Joel wishes he could read his father's thoughts.
    'An electric cooker is quite expensive,' says Samuel
in the end. 'But we'll buy one as soon as I've saved up
enough money. I promise. If that's how you feel.'
    At that moment Joel loves his father. Only somebody
who's been a sailor understands immediately what you
mean, he thinks. Only somebody who's learnt how to
make important decisions while terrible storms are
raging on the seven seas understands when it's time to
throw out an old wood-burning stove.
    At the same time he's a bit sorry he didn't start by
mentioning the bicycle. Now it's too late. Now he'll
have to wait with that for a few weeks at least. You can't
ask for