"Swear on the Bible?"
I put my hand on it. It could have been the phone book for all I cared now. "I swear to God," I said.
SHE NEVER CALLED Children's Services, but she watched my every move, every gesture. I wasn't used to being watched, it made me feel important. I sensed a layer of myself had been peeled off that day in her bedroom, and what was under it glowed.
One night she was late getting dinner, and as we were finishing, Uncle Ray glanced at the clock. "You're going to be tardy if you don't get a move on."
Starr leaned back in her seat and reached for the coffeepot behind her on the counter, poured herself a cup. "I guess they can get on without me for one night, don't you think, baby?"
The following week, she skipped two more meetings, and the third week, she actually missed church. Instead, they made love all morning, and when they finally did get up, she took us all out to the IHOP, where we ate chocolate pancakes and waffles with whipped cream in a big corner booth. Everyone was laughing and having a good time, but all I could see was Ray's arm around her shoulder on the back of the leatherette booth. I felt strange, and moved the waffle around on my plate. I wasn't hungry anymore.
THE RAINS PASSED, and now in the nights the new-washed sky showed all its stars. The boys and I stood out in the darkest part of the clay-muddy yard, listening to the runoff on the Tujunga out in the dark beyond the trees. Heavy pancakes of mud congealed around my boots as I craned my head back in the vapor-breath cold and tried to pick out the dippers and the crosses. Davey's books didn't show so many stars. I couldn't separate them.
I thought I saw a streak of light. I wasn't sure if I even saw it. I gazed upward, trying not to blink, waited.
"There!" Davey pointed.
In a different quadrant of the sky, another star broke loose. It was eerie, the one thing you didn't plan on, stellar movement. I tried to keep my eyes open without blinking. When you blinked, you missed them. I held them open for the light to develop on them like a photograph.
The little boys shivered despite the jackets over their pajamas and muddy boots, chattering and giggling in the cold and the excitement of being up so late as they gazed at the stars that started pinging like pinballs, mouths opened in case one should fall in. It was completely dark except for the line of Christmas lights that twinkled along the edge of the trailer porch.
The screen door opened and slammed. I didn't have to look to know it was him. The flare of a match, the warm stinky pot smell. "Ought to take down those Christmas lights," he said. He came out on the yard where we were, the ember glow, and then the sharpness of his body, the smell of new wood.
"It's the Quadrantid shower," Davey said. "We'll be getting forty an hour pretty soon. It's the shortest-lived meteorite display, but the densest except for the Perseids."
I could hear the mud sucking at his boots as he shifted his weight. I was glad it was dark, that he couldn't see the flush of pleasure on my face as he drew closer, looking up at the sky, as if he cared about the Quadrantids, as if that's why he'd come out.
"There!" Owen said. "Did you see it, Uncle Ray? Did you?"
"Yeah, I saw it buddy. I saw it."
He was standing right next to me. If I shifted just an inch to my left, I could brush him with my sleeve. I felt the radiant heat of him across the narrow gap between us in the darkness. We had never stood so close.
"You and Starr having a beef?" he asked me softly.
I exhaled vapor, imagined I was smoking, like Dietrich in The Blue Angel. "What did she say?"
"Nothing. She's just been acting funny lately."
Shooting stars hurled themselves into the empty places, burned up. Just for the pleasure of it. Just like this. I could have swallowed the night whole.
Ray toked too hard, coughed, spat. "Must be hard on her, getting older, pretty girls coming up in the same house."
I gazed up as if I hadn't heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it.
"She still looks good," I said, thinking that it wouldn't be so hard on her if he didn't follow me out into the star-filled night, if he didn't watch me the way he did, touching his mouth with his fingertips.
But I didn't want him to stop. I was sorry for Starr, but not enough. I had the sin virus. I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.
Dear Astrid,
Do not tell me how much you admire this man, how he cares for you! I don't know which is worse, your Jesus phase or the advent of a middle-aged suitor. You must find a boy your own age, someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered, someone whose fingers are a poem. Never lie down for the father. I forbid it, do you understand?
Mother.
You couldn't stop it, Mother. I didn't have to listen to you anymore.
IT WAS SPRING, painting the hillsides with orange drifts of California poppies, dotting the cracks in gas stations and parking lots with poppies and blue lupine and Indian paintbrush. Even in the burn zones, the passes were matted with yellow mustard as we jounced along in Ray's old pickup truck.
I told him I wanted to see the new development up in Lancaster, the custom cabinetry he 'd been working on. Maybe he could pick me up after school sometime. "You know how funny Starr's been," I said. Every day I came out of school hoping I would see his truck with the feathered roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror. Finally he had come.
The development itself was bare as a scar, with torn and dusty streets of big new houses. Some were already roofed and sided, others finished to the insulation, some skeletal and open to the sky. Ray led me through the house where he was working, clean, the exterior finished, smelling of raw sawdust. He showed me the solid maple cabinetry in the eat-in kitchen, the bay window, the built-in bookcases, the backyard gazebo. I felt the sun glinting off my hair, knew how my mother felt that day long ago at the Small World bookstore, when she had seen my father and stood in the window, beautiful in the light.
I let him show me around like a real estate agent — the living room's two-story picture window, the streamlined toilets in the two and a half baths, the turned banister, the carved newel post. "I lived in a house like this when I was married," he said, running his hand along the flank of the heavy banister, pushing against the solidity of the post. I tried to imagine Ray in a two-and-a-half-bath life, dinner on the table at six, the regular job, the wife, the kid. But I couldn't. Anyway, even when he was doing it, he was going to the Trop instead of coming home, falling in love with strippers.