Under the Christmas Star (Crossroads Collection)

by Amanda Tru

  And that gets me to the questions in your last email, the one about how my parents met. Mom does a way better job telling the story than I could. In fact, if you did come over Sunday for lunch and really wanted to know about it, I think you should probably ask Dad first on account of Mom taking a couple hours to tell the whole thing start to finish but Dad being able to do it a lot shorter than that. I wasn’t around when they were dating obviously, but I’ve heard them talk about it some.

  I forget if I already told you this, but my parents are actually old enough to have grandkids even bigger than me. And now that I’ve remembered to use my manners and not only talk about me, that gets me wondering how old you are, Miss Sheldon? And I’m glad that you told me you’re a Miss and not a Mrs. or something else on account of me not wanting to get it wrong. So I kind of picture you in my head as a young woman who maybe just hasn’t had the time to find herself a husband yet, but I suppose you could be a widow like Miss Roberts, the new church secretary, and she’s even older than my mom, so old that even some of her grandkids have babies of their own now.

  So, if you remember, you’ll have to tell me which kind of a Miss you are, a young one who just doesn’t have a husband yet or maybe one who’s so old your husband’s died. Or I guess you could be like the lady who lives on our street who isn’t really old or really young and just never got around to marrying because she says men are too much trouble.

  Anyway, you wanted to know how Mom and Dad met, and I can see how that might be helpful for you to know so you can pick out just the right ornament for Mom. I know Christmas is getting closer, and I want to make sure you have plenty of time to make her just the right one. Last year, I didn’t have much money saved up on account of me not being big enough to babysit yet, so I didn’t have a whole lot of choice about what I could buy for Christmas. I ended up writing Mom a story about a little orphan boy who finds some nice parents, and they gave him a nice big house with a room of his own and all the cereal he could eat whenever he feels hungry.

  She really liked it and even got it turned into a real-life book on account of one of her grown-up foster kids being a writer and knowing how to do that sort of stuff and nonsense. Mom thought it was so good she even asked me if I wanted to send it to this adoption magazine that sometimes comes in the mail, but I don’t know if she ever sent it to them or not. She never said.

  Anyway, that was Mom’s Christmas present last year, and it didn’t cost me anything on account of me already having paper and pencils in my room. And Dad’s gift wasn’t hard either because Mom helped me make him a tie he can wear when he preaches. It’s got a pattern that I made in a computer art class Mom made me take back when I was in homeschool. It ended up really nice, even though what looked brown on the computer turned out kind of purple in real life, but Dad says that purple is a fine color for a pastor to wear even though I was afraid he might think it was too girly, and that’s the tie he puts on about once a month for preaching in. If I remember right, it was even the same tie he wore that day he got the fancy piece of paper from the Bible college except I’m not totally sure on account of him wearing that big graduation robe over his regular clothes.

  All that is to say is last year I didn’t have to spend any money getting Christmas presents because I made Mom’s story all by myself, and then Mom was the one who got my pattern printed onto a tie for Dad. And now that I think about it, I’m sure it cost money to do that, only she was the one who paid for it on account of me not having a credit card of my own.

  Which reminds me, I guess I should have asked you if there’s any way I can pay you without using a credit card on your website. I’m not allowed to share my address on the internet either, so what I was thinking was if it was okay with you, I could tell Auntie what I’m doing and see if she could write you a check and I can give her the money I’ve saved in the envelope I keep in my sock drawer. Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned where I keep my money on account of Mom and Dad always telling me to be really careful what kind of information I give to strangers online, so you have to just pretend like I never told you that part.

  Anyway, I don’t know how I got started talking about all these other things when you just wanted to know the story of Mom and Dad getting together, but my computer time is already almost up for the day, so what I think I’m going to do is send this email to you now, and then tomorrow I’ll write more about the way they ended up married to each other. Except now that I think about it, I have a research paper due the day after tomorrow so I might be busy. It’s all about Martin Luther King Jr. Have you heard of him? He’s not the Martin Luther who nailed those things to the door of that church, even though Dad says that he was super important in history too.

  My research paper’s about the one who helped teach black and white folks how to get along way back in the olden days. All that to say if you don’t hear from me tomorrow, it’s just because Mom doesn’t let me do any computer time if I haven’t finished my homework. And the computer time that I do get, I may need to spend it all on my research. I found a website that has a lot of information, but it’s a little hard to know just what parts I should put in to make my social studies teacher happy. (His name is Mr. Sheen, by the way. Did you ever have him for a teacher?) Anyway, that’s what seems to be taking so long for my report. Sometimes, I start to write about one thing, and then half an hour later, I realize that I’m talking about something else and haven’t even mentioned the first thing I wanted to say. Does anything like that ever happen to you?

  Well, I guess I’ll do my best to talk to you tomorrow, but if that doesn’t work, I’ll be sure to write more after I’ve turned in my report. Bye!

  Woong

  Dear Miss Sheldon,

  Just me again. Woong Lindgren. Sorry it’s taken me a few days to write you back. We’ve been really busy, but something pretty amazing just happened!

  My mom gets really into visiting with people and stuff and nonsense like that. It’s part of being a pastor’s wife, I think. It means she works hard to find ways to get us to big crowds where she can talk with people and invite them to church and pray with them. My mom is always praying with people. Like once, we were at the grocery store to pick up some hams for this big church potluck we were doing. And usually when it’s a potluck and you’re a normal, everyday person, you might bring like a cake or some soup or a crockpot full of hot dogs. But not my mom. When she goes to a potluck, she usually brings either a ham or a turkey (sometimes both), and she cooks bunch of other things to go with it too, including her favorite kind of bread rolls she makes. Except now that I think about it, she doesn’t cook those quite as much anymore on account of my dad having that disease that gets too much sugar in your blood, so Mom doesn’t bake quite as many bread rolls as she used to, but that’s not the part of the story that I meant to tell you.

  Well, we were at the store picking up our hams for this big potluck. I forget just now what the occasion was. It could have been all the way back to last Easter because we always have ham then, and she was getting something like six or eight of them all at once, which probably meant we had to stop by the church directly after the store on account of us not having a fridge big enough for that many back home, but I can’t remember if that’s how it really happened just now or not.

  Anyway, the lady who was checking out our groceries looked just like a normal worker to me, but Mom thought she looked sad and said something like, “Been a long day?” or one of those kinds of things she says to get folks she doesn’t even know to start talking to her. And this checker lady started telling Mom about how her dad had that old timer’s disease that makes you so forgetful, and he got himself lost that morning before this lady had to come into the store. And she wanted to stay home and look for him, but she had some money troubles and couldn’t afford to skip a day, but she was awful worried.

  So Mom asked what her dad’s name was, and then she asked if she could pray for him, and the lady said yes. I kind of thi
nk the lady was expecting Mom to just pray all quiet-like the way most folks do when they tell you they’re going to talk to God about you because she looked plenty surprised when Mom shut her eyes and then made this big long prayer asking Jesus to look out for this old lost daddy.

  Well, even if that checker was surprised at first, she seemed mighty thankful in the end that Mom would pray with her like that. She started to sniffle a little, and Mom gave her a hug and invited her over for church on Sunday and said we were having a big potluck. So we bought the hams, and Mom cooked them up, and sure enough that Sunday this checker lady came to church, her and her dad both. He got found, by the way, although I never did learn where he ran off to or what he did when he went missing. She’s a Christian now too, the checker lady I mean, and she’s one of the ones who comes over to have tea and prayer time with Mom so they can study the Bible and eat some of Mom’s muffins.

  So, I’m telling you this just to explain the kind of person Mom is. You know, the kind who’d pray with a stranger in the checkout line, and maybe that will help you understand why I’ve been too busy to write you for a couple days. See, Mom’s part of this adoption group, where it’s all these parents and all these kids like me who come from other countries. And we get together sometimes, like for picnics or costume parties or park days in the summer. It’s not all that bad except a lot of the kids are really little, so I’m one of the biggest ones there now. Mom still likes to keep getting together with them, though, so when I complained that there are hardly any other junior highers, she said I could invite a friend.

  And you know what, Miss Sheldon? That’s exactly what I did.

  I asked Mom if she thought it’d be okay, and then she had to ask Dad, and once Dad said it was all right with him, Mom had to go and make another phone call, but in the end it all worked out. So last night me and Becky Linklater went to the ice-skating rink with all the other adoption kids. Becky said she didn’t know there were so many kids like me, and at first I was a little nervous because I thought she might want to ask me all sorts of questions about the orphanage or stuff and nonsense like that, but mostly we just talked about Star Wars.

  Becky’s a real Star Wars fan, by the way. Maybe if you think about it, you could tell me whether or not you have any Star Wars ornaments because if I have any money left over after buying a present for Mom, I might want to get Becky something special. Like maybe you could make her a Death Star ornament. Except I don’t think that’s very Christmassy, do you?

  Well, I had so much fun with Becky. I’ve known her forever. Back when I was brand new to Medford Academy, right after I moved, she was the first person in my class to be nice to me, and she’s been my best friend ever since. She’s a really good skater too. She even knows how to go backward really fast and do jumps. Before her parents got divorced, she took lessons so she could grow up to be one of those fancy skaters you see on TV, but then when her dad moved away, her mom ran out of money to keep paying her teacher, so that’s kind of too bad because I know Becky would have made a really good professional skater. She can even do some of the twirls. That gives me a really good idea, by the way. If I end up with extra money and you don’t think Star Wars feels enough like Christmas to make a good ornament, maybe Becky would like a pretty pair of ice skates. Not real ones, I mean, just the kind she could put on her Christmas tree for decorations to remind her of how much she liked to do her lessons before her mom ended up too poor. What do you think?

  Well, when Mom was driving us home from the ice skating party, she told us both a story. I guess when my big brothers and sister were younger, like about the age I am right now, that was the first time Mom and Dad decided they wanted to adopt. They always wanted to have lots and lots of kids, but something went wrong when my big brother Justice got born. You know that thing vets will do if you don’t want your pets making babies? The doctors had to do that same kind of operation on Mom even though she really wanted to keep on having lots and lots of kids and at that time she only had three. So she and Dad prayed and decided that what they wanted to do was they wanted to go to one of those countries where people are really poor, and they’d pick a baby from there who needed a good home.

  I think it’s a great idea, don’t you? Except all this happened quite a long time ago, and it was so long ago in fact that it was still during that time when sometimes black people weren’t treated very fairly. And do you know what the adoption folks told my parents? They told them that since Dad’s got dark brown skin but Mom’s is peachy that they weren’t allowed to adopt. It would have been fine if they were both brown or if they were both peachy, but since my parents were one of each, these people said they wouldn’t be allowed to adopt after all.

  I think it really hurt Mom’s feelings because even though that was so long ago, she started to cry when she was telling us about it in the car. Later when I was saying goodnight to Dad, I asked him if Mom was still sad that she didn’t get to adopt back then, and Dad said no. Because even though that one agency wouldn’t let them find a baby, Mom and Dad started doing foster parenting, and they actually ended up adopting quite a few kids from that, and then they have even more kids who weren’t ever adopted legally but Mom says they’re soul-adopted. That just means they call them Mom and Dad and stop by to see us and send us letters when they have babies or when it gets close to Christmastime like now. So Mom and Dad got their big family after all, even though I’m the first kid they adopted from another country. Which I guess just goes to show how far things have come from back then in the olden days when people got treated so unfairly just for the color of their skin.

  I’m glad that if Becky and me grow up and decide to get married, and if Becky has to have that operation where she can’t make any babies either, people wouldn’t tell us we couldn’t adopt a baby because our skin colors don’t match. Because Becky’s got really light skin. It’s so light that if she’s out in the summer for more than an hour or so, she has to use sunscreen. She told me that before her parents divorced and she had to be poor, she went on a vacation once to Florida and got such a bad sunburn she had to go the emergency room because the blisters got so bad her parents were worried she’d get an infection.

  I’ve never had a sunburn, but I got frostbite one winter when I was an orphan, and it’s hard for me to know which is worse —being so burned your skin blisters open and gets an infection or else getting so frostbitten you can’t feel your toes. But my toes are just fine now, and Becky’s skin’s all better too, so I guess neither of us have anything to complain about.

  You know, talking about Mom and Dad and how they wanted to adopt but couldn’t reminds me I was going to tell you about when they met, because that was back in the olden days when people still thought it was wrong for black people to fall in love with white people and the other way around. And did you know even a lot of churches felt that way too? Like you remember that adoption agency I just mentioned, the one that hurt Mom’s feelings so bad she still cried a little yesterday when me and Becky were in the car? It was a Christian adoption agency. Kind of hard to believe, isn’t it, that Christians would do something so mean and hurtful like that?

  I’m glad things are so much better now. And when I mean better, I don’t mean they’re perfect. Like once, someone broke into this new pregnancy center Mom and Dad just started, and they wrote a really bad word about Dad on the wall. It happened a year or two before they adopted me, back when I was still living in Korea, but I heard Mom talking about it to one of my big sisters, and I know it was scary for her and made Dad pretty angry.

  I sometimes get teased too. Like there’s this boy at school, Chuckie Mansfield, who likes to call me Slanty Eyes, and sometimes he pretends to talk in a stupid-sounding voice that he says is Chinese, even though I’m not Chinese. I’m Korean. But he’s probably too dumb to even know the difference. He said a bad word once about Dad being black, but he got in really big trouble and had to talk to the lunch lady and then the teacher and then all the way up to the princi
pal, so I doubt he’ll be using words like that again any time soon.

  Even though things still sometimes happen, it’s not nearly as bad as it was when Mom and Dad first met. But I’ve actually already used up all my computer time for the day, so I’ll have to finish their story later. It shouldn’t take me so long to get back to you next time on account of Mom not having anything special planned for the rest of the week and Becky Linklater spending the weekend at her dad’s, so I won’t be busy with any more ice-skating parties (even though that would be fun too).

  Remind me when we talk next to tell you about what Dad told God the first time he saw my mom. I bet it’ll make you laugh. And maybe when you write back, you can tell me what color your skin is, but only if you want to. Just like Mom and Dad say, it doesn’t change who you are on the inside, but sometimes it’s nice to have a picture in my head.

  If you don’t want to tell me about your skin color, maybe you can tell me why you named your website Little Star. Is it because a lot of your Christmas ornaments have stars on them?

  Talk with you later.

  Woong

  Hi, Miss Sheldon!

  I had a lot of fun reading about how you named your webpage. I like looking at the constellations just like you, but you can’t see them as good from where we live on account of the street lights always being on in Medford. But even when I can only see a couple stars out, I still like the way they make me feel.

  It kind of reminds me of a time when I had to sleep outside, back when I was homeless and before I got myself adopted. And I was so lonely, but the stars were really bright, and I didn’t know anything about Jesus or God yet, but when I looked at the stars, I had a knowing. Have you ever had a knowing? If you haven’t, I’m not sure I can explain it all that good, but it’s basically where you just know something even if you don’t know how you know it. Like back in Korea when I was looking up at the stars, I knew Jesus loved me and was looking out for me, which is kind of funny on account of me not even learning about Jesus until way later.