Man in the Moon Read Online Free

of there and got back to bed in a hurry. Sweat or no sweat, I covered up tight, my mind as tangled as a cobweb.
    All sorts of notions ran through my brain. Why would a man stay up at night, looking plumb dead, yet happy at the same time? Mama says there’s no such thing as monsters, but I’m not so sure. I should have checked to see if he had fangs. Could Mr. Lunas be a vampire?

Phase Three—First Quarter
    I t turns out, Mr. Lunas wasn’t a vampire at all. I saw him walking around in the daylight, eating everything he could get his hands on. Mama said Daddy needed to find a job fast, just to support that old man’s appetite. He could really put it away!
    I decided to avoid him. I still hadn’t gotten over him laying out on the ground at night, staring off into the sky like some lunatic. I took to propping a chair under my doorknob before bed, just in case he wasn’t in his right mind. I sure didn’t want him getting in.
    It was easy to stay out of his way for the next few days. He spent the whole weekend following Daddy around. They drove off in the Chevy a lot, and late at night they sat behind the chicken coop, drinking beer. Of course they waited until Mama was asleep. She didn’t allow alcohol around the house, so Daddy had to sneak it whenever he could.
    He’d put off looking for a job for nearly a week and couldn’t put it off anymore. He was gone when I went in for breakfast. Only Mama and Mr. Lunas sat at the kitchen table. Ricky was still in his room, snoozing.
    “So what do you see in that teacup, Adele?” Mr. Lunas asked, his breakfast plate clean as a whistle.
    Mama raised her eyebrows, but not her eyes. “James needs work. Ricky needs an operation. I need rest.” She didn’t say anything about me.
So what else is new?
    Mr. Lunas gave off one of his glowing grins. “Do you really need tea leaves to tell you that?”
    “You asked me what I saw in the cup, not what it tells me.”
    Mr. Lunas crossed his arms and leaned on the table. “What does it
tell
you?”
    Mama’s face grew dark and somber. “That something big is going to happen. Something we can’t avoid. It tells me that my family will be turned upside down and cattiwhompus. It’s big, Mr. Lunas. Real big—like the seven plagues in the Bible.” Mama caught me staring and shushed up real fast.
    Mr. Lunas chuckled and pointed down into the cup. “I wouldn’t put much stock in what those tea leaves say, Adele.” Then he pointed to his heart. “This is what you need to be listening to.” He scooted away from the table and went out the back door.
    Mama shook her head. “What I didn’t tell him was that the first plague would probably be famine. If that old coot keeps eating like he does, the rest of us are going to starve to death.”
    Ricky dragged into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes and scratching himself. “Mr. Lunas is getting fat,” he said, looking toward the back door.
    “I wonder why!” Mama said, throwing her hands in the air. “Sit down and I’ll see if he left anything for you to eat.” She took the last honey muffin from the baking tin and handed it to Ricky with a bottle of white syrup. “Grab a plate,” she said, nodding toward me.
    I did. She put the muffin on it and handed it to Ricky.
I sure hope Mr. Lunas is getting fat,
I thought, looking down at my toothpick legs and knotty knees.
’Cause he should get something good out of eating
my
breakfast.
Just then Mama pulled another tin of muffins out of the oven.
    “I hid ’em,” she said, smiling at me.
    Ricky mashed up his muffin with a fork and poured on a river of syrup. It looked like something that’d already been chewed and spit out. “Can I go outside today?”
    Mama stopped for a minute, like she was considering it. “I think it’s just too hot out there. It ain’t ten o’clock yet and I bet you could already fry an egg on the sidewalk.”
    “If we did, Mr. Lunas would just eat it,” I said.
    Ricky laughed so hard muffin mush leaked out of