A Trip to the Stars Read Online Free

A Trip to the Stars
Book: A Trip to the Stars Read Online Free
Author: Nicholas Christopher
Pages:
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pad.
    I watched her for a long time. After she had smoked another cigarette and crumpled and tossed away a few more pages from the pad, I called out her name as I entered the living room. She was startled, and turning to me, covered the legal pad with her arm. In the morning I would find one of the crumpled pages under the table: a tortured page of computations, figures everywhere, many of them crossed out, at the center of which was a list of expenditures—
rent, utilities, car insurance, food, clothing, medical
—below my name and hers. She had been trying to draw up a bare-bones budget for the life she thought we might be sharing. It pained me at that moment to think of her plight:twenty-one years old, with barely any money and her whole life ahead of her, suddenly burdened with what must have felt like a bag of bricks around her neck. After I had smoothed out that page, it was hard standing there in the dining room, watching the sun, the color of ice, rise through the frozen trees, and trying to understand how Alma must feel. At the bottom of the page there was a small annotation, obviously an afterthought to all the arithmetic:
Find a job & learn to cook
.
    I hardly knew Alma, but I had always liked her in the way kids like relatives they seldom see. She was beautiful, smooth and elegant in her movements, with piercing blue eyes, long chestnut hair, and lips that made the back of my neck tingle whenever she planted a kiss on my cheek. To me she had always been a mysterious, even exotic figure. Wearing sunglasses and a suede coat and a beret when she came home, and always some flashy earrings. She smoked and played blues records on the old phonograph in her room, and after one or two nights she’d be gone. Probably I liked her for the very reasons my grandmother so disapproved of her. Alma certainly didn’t like to cook: this was one of my grandmother’s pet grievances about her. As well as the fact that Alma didn’t relish housekeeping in general, or socializing with my grandmother’s friends, or family holidays, or attending church. My grandmother’s all-purpose modifier for Alma was “no-good.” When she was feeling more generous, she limited herself to “wild.”
    I, on the other hand, could do no wrong in my grandmother’s eyes. I enjoyed keeping my room in order (how could I not when having a room at all was such a novelty) and raking leaves and drying dishes and even going to church, where I loved listening to the choir sing hymns. I was at that time, in my Brooklyn life, a quiet and orderly boy who had already had a bellyful of being tossed around on rough seas during my years with Luna and Milo.
    All the more reason that I should so admire Alma’s attitude. And her independence, which was so much more solid and real to me than Luna’s scattershot rebelliousness that never took her anywhere. Luna was constantly returning home and then taking off again in a huff. Alma just stayed away. And when she did show up, say for Christmas, she never took the bait when my grandmother tried to provoke her. About her studies:
You can’t become a priest, yet all you study is
Latin
; her private life:
Your sister had bad taste in men, too, but at least one of them married her
(I was still trying to figure that one out); and her appearance:
If that skirt gets any shorter, and you grow your hair any longer, you won’t need a skirt at all
. I realized soon enough that Alma hadn’t always been so composed in the face of such attacks, that she had come by her detachment the hard way—after years of heated arguments and recriminations—and I respected her all the more for it. Despite my dependence on, and loyalty to, my grandmother, I resented her meanness toward Alma. I had developed bonds with my grandmother, I loved her, but I also felt most uncomfortable with her when Alma was around. So I kept my mouth shut and, to make it easier on myself, stayed out of the way—even out of the house—during Alma’s
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