A Trip to the Stars Read Online Free Page A

infrequent visits. This was another reason we felt like such strangers when we were thrown together for that brief period after my grandmother’s death.
    My room in that house had been Luna’s room before she ran off with Milo. It still had the same pale blue walls and blue drapes, the narrow bed and low chest of drawers of matching cherry wood, and the full-length mirror screwed to the back of the door where Luna had primped herself and combed her hair. That afternoon, before Alma and I left for the planetarium, I dressed before that mirror. There were many things my grandmother had done for me in my two and a half years with her which were brand-new to me and for which I hope she knew I was grateful: laying out a hot supper, however bland, every night; buying me new shoes and sneakers in the fall; and, unlike Luna, making sure that the shirts I wore to school were not only laundered, but also the right size. I pulled on the last of these from my top drawer, a blue turtleneck, creased neatly where she had folded down the sleeves and tucked them under.
    I heard Alma start up her car in front of the house, so I hurried, throwing on my pea coat and pulling on my woolen cap. As I locked the front door, she was gunning the engine, trying to get the heater warm, her breath misting up the windshield and the car’s exhaust fumes sputtering into the snowbank along the curb. She had the radio turned on, and the announcer went from the escalation of troops in Vietnam—fifty thousand to be shipped out right after Christmas—to the launching that morning of the Pioneer 6 satellite from Cape Kennedy. I had seen the satellite on television the night before, atop a tall white rocket on thebrightly lit launchpad, and now I closed my eyes and imagined it streaking out of the earth’s atmosphere.
    After lunch, during the drive to the planetarium, we hardly talked. There were snow flurries, and then it snowed harder, but the snow wasn’t sticking on the highway. Alma seemed far away, rarely looking away from the road. I was sure she was still preoccupied with those figures I had seen on the scratch sheet, still trying to make it all add up in her head so that the two of us wouldn’t end up in the poorhouse.
    Just before she parked the Impala in a lot near the planetarium, I felt I had to speak. “Alma,” I said, “I wanted you to know that Grandma loved you, even if she didn’t say so anymore.”
    Her eyebrows went up. “It’s okay if she didn’t love me,” she replied. Then she softened her voice, and added, “But you may be right. Maybe she did in her own way.”
    I nodded.
    “The fact is, Loren, she was a different person after you came into her life.”
    I wasn’t sure this was true, but I said nothing.
    “You know,” Alma went on, “Mom and I got off to such a bad start. She never saw my father again before I was born. She must have been angry about that—frustrated, at the very least—but she never talked about it, ever. She just held all that in, and then she and I went at it over the years.”
    I thought about this. “I don’t know my father, either. You know, my real father. Maybe he’s dead, too, and that’s why I was put up for adoption.”
    She switched off the ignition and dangled the keys thoughtfully. “Maybe so. But, you know, sometimes I feel like I know my father just as if I’d met him.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, it’s like I actually remember him.” She was gazing out the window. “I spent so much time trying to imagine what he was like.” She patted my shoulder. “But that’s because I had nobody else. That won’t happen to you. You’ll have other people to love.”
    Again I nodded my assent, though I was thinking: And who will they be, these people I’m going to love? It felt like, in ten years, I had already used them all up.

4
Spiders
    Zaren Eboli was holding up a large glass jar in both hands and speaking to me loudly over the rain that lashed the windows and drummed