Light from a Distant Star

by Morris, Mary Mcgarry

  “Charlie!” She couldn’t help it. “He never talks, not to me, anyway.”

  “He’s just kinda worn out, that’s all. Early morning, now, that’s his good time.” He laughed. “Four-thirty, five, come then, he’ll fry up a sunny side and tell you whatever you need to know.”

  “About what?” she scoffed, making his eyes flash.

  “All the stuff you don’t get in books,” he said sharply.

  “Like junkyards?” She squirmed with her own smart-assiness, but talking to Max was different from talking to most people. She’d pushed past some barrier. And he liked her for it.

  “Yeah. And, like, how everyone’s always after him about it, but like Charlie says, here we are on a dying planet, and they just keep on making things to break down, for the economy, so if it wasn’t for him, where would it go, all the broken stuff? Everything’d be an even bigger mess when you think about it.”

  She tried considering Charlie in such heroic light, unappreciated and performing a service to humanity with his haphazard mountains of useless goods right in the heart of town. But she couldn’t get past the cranky old man part, the grandfather who’d admitted he didn’t like kids.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, wanting to turn the conversation back to herself and Max, “that thing with Henry, I mean, you were really brave, and me, I just froze. I couldn’t do anything.”

  “Just wasn’t your time, that’s all,” he said as Boone began to bark.

  “Hey!” Dolly was at the screen door again. “Hey, can you give me a hand?” Her car wouldn’t start. She’d called her girlfriend for a ride, but she wasn’t answering her phone.

  “How ’bout I take a look?”

  “Yeah. Jesus, that’d be great. Stupid car. I been late so many times now, it’s not funny.” She followed Max outside, then went into her apartment. Nellie stood on the side of the driveway while he tried to start her car. But Dolly was right. It was dead. Boone watched from inside the truck, frozen in chastisement, though alert to Max’s every move. When Max climbed back in, Boone sat so close the two dark profiles appeared to be one as Max inched the truck nearer Dolly’s car. He got out and popped the car’s hood then attached jumper cables from his battery to hers. That done, he sat in her little car, one long leg stretched through the open door. He turned the ignition. Nothing. He kept getting out, adjusting clamps, going back, sliding half onto the seat—still wouldn’t start. He turned off the truck, then asked Nellie for a cloth and some rubbing alcohol, so she ran inside.

  She hurried back with a bottle and rag. Dolly came out then and Boone’s head rose through the window in a whiny howl.

  “Quiet!” Max snarled and the gleaming black dog froze. Nellie stuck her hand in and stroked Boone’s warm silky ear. Poor animal. He hadn’t done anything wrong. All he’d wanted was a little attention. Some kind of connection. And Nellie knew that feeling well, the dull ache of the ignored. There was Dolly chattering away at Max, who would have picked up her car and carried her to work in it if she wanted, while Boone and Nellie looked on.

  Dolly waited with her arms folded while Max leaned over her engine cleaning the leads on her battery with the alcohol soaked rag. She was telling him how the club was just temporary, for now. Her agent in New York really wanted her to come back. She was still thinking it over. The thing is, she’d needed a break.

  “You’re going along fine, and all of a sudden it’s like, whoa—I don’t want to do this anymore. You know what I mean? People’re going, ‘Don’t quit! C’mon! I got this great gig for you.’ So you leave what you’re doing and after all the rehearsals with hardly any pay, you end up in this show and it only goes for six days. Crazy!” she sighed. “Just crazy, the whole thing. But that’s what happens.”

  With the uplift in her voice, Max turned. He covered his mouth, smiling so hard his eyes were all crinkled up.

  “Sounds pretty exciting, though,” he said behind his hand.

  “Being paid woulda been even more.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He chuckled.

  “Hey!” Dolly grabbed his wrist.

  “What the—” Max growled, recoiling as if he’d just been stung. He seemed startled, as much by her touch, as by his anger.

  She twisted his hand to see his watch. “Jesus!” she squealed, her hand still on his. “I didn’t know it was this late!”

  A coldness had overtaken him, and for some reason, Nellie thought of Patrick Dellastrando’s ignoring her on the street yesterday when she made a point of saying a loud and pointed hello to him and his girlfriend.

  “Get behind the wheel,” Max told Dolly. He walked quickly back to his truck and started it. He gestured over the wheel for her to turn the key. When she did, her engine sputtered to life. She backed out of the driveway onto the street.

  “No!” Max yelled out his window, waving for her to stop. “Let it run a minute!”

  But she was on her way, then gone.

  Chapter 5

  JESSICA WAS AWAY AT CAMP, “SPECIAL” SUMMER CAMP, SHE’D told Nellie bitterly. The seven Cooper kids had always gone away together for the same two weeks: Camp Lewis, somewhere up in New Hampshire. But this year Jessica was being sent to a camp for special-needs kids—one more reason to hate her mother. Nellie felt bad for Jessica being singled out like that, but she knew her brothers and sisters were probably relieved. Nellie certainly was. As much as she missed keeping up with her shows, she didn’t miss Jessica. Right before she left she’d been acting so nasty that Nellie’d hide in the house when she came banging on the door. Her moods were hard to take, especially when Nellie was feeling pretty low herself.

  The “hot” bikes, as she now thought of them, were still in the barn, hidden way in back, omens of disaster. Somehow they had to get rid of them, but Henry wouldn’t even discuss it with her, much less do anything about it. Ever since the incident in the woods all he did was work on his tree house. Life was changing all around Nellie, and no one was doing anything about it. Her family was coming undone. Or at least that’s what it felt like. All Ruth cared about, besides finding her “real father,” was getting Patrick Dellastrando to notice her. She traipsed around the house in bright red lipstick and black mascara so thick her lashes would actually get stuck together. Dolly Bedelia had shown her how to highlight her mouth with deep purple liner, which gave her a kind of clownish desperation and made Nellie sad to look at her. She went out at night in tight halter tops and skimpy skirts with half her butt hanging out. She got away with it by leaving the house wearing a loose shirt and pants over everything. Her sister was teetering on the edge of a dark abyss only Nellie seemed aware of.

  Meanwhile, her father was clueless, racing against time, working day and night to finish the history, as if that would solve all their problems. Nellie was beginning to think her mother didn’t want to know what was going on. In fact, she’d even started saying it, that there was only so much she could handle. Because it was summer, business at the beauty shop had slowed down, but the bills hadn’t. Dolly came over all the time now to use their shower. Her hot water was just too rusty, which probably meant a new hot-water tank, her mother worried. The latest bad news came when the store’s ancient key-cutting machine “started going on the fritz.” Key cutting had never been a big moneymaker, but it did bring in customers, who’d roam the aisles while her father fiddled with the temperamental settings, and sometimes they’d even buy things they hadn’t even known they needed. The repair estimate was almost as much as buying another machine, which her mother said made no sense when they’d be selling the place soon. It was clear that their future was in Mr. Cooper’s hands, though he still hadn’t called. Every day when her mother raced home from work to check the answering machine, Nellie wished she’d been nicer to Jessica. Maybe this was her father’s payback.

  Even Dolly Bedelia had lost some of her mystique now that she was coming over so much. She loved hanging around the kitchen talking to Nellie’s mother, or if she wasn’t home, to Ruth, who was beginning to
laugh just like her and throw up her hands in the same fluttery exasperation when she couldn’t quite get the right words out. Yesterday Ruth had even ordered Nellie out of the room so she and Dolly could speak privately. Nellie tiptoed down the creaky cellar stairs, then teetered on a milk crate directly below them, with her ear at the musty old beams. It was hard to hear much. Dolly was doing most of the talking. About protection. Nellie knew exactly what that meant, and it made her stomach queasy.

  THE JUNKYARD HAD been in the news again. One of the mountains of rubber tires had caught fire—arson, Charlie insisted, people trying to drive him out of business, mainly the Shelby twins, he told his daughter, which made little sense beyond the fact that their family’s property abutted the far end of Charlie’s. The Shelby twins were Nellie’s age and generally regarded as odd. In school they spoke only to each other, so they were pretty much ignored, but she’d been studying them for years and knew they were harmless. Roy and Rodney had dark hair and identical cowlicks. They towered over everyone else and were the clumsiest boys she’d ever seen. Gym classes were agonies of tripping and falling. They always seemed to be getting hit by balls. They weren’t the best students, though their flashes of genius and wit intrigued Nellie. Their science-fair projects might combine the usual elements but in the most unique ways. When their volcano erupted, the spew of colored lava launched a rocket hissing through a tunnel out onto a pad that began to play the “William Tell Overture.” Their mother was at least six feet tall; her white hair was pinned back in a messy bun and she wore yellow tinted aviator glasses. She picked the twins up every day after school and the minute they climbed into her ancient tan Cadillac, Nellie just knew they morphed into different people. She would see them drive off laughing and talking, two of the handsomest and cleverest boys a mother could have, Mrs. Shelby surely thought. It made Nellie feel better knowing that in the safety of their home, Roy and Rodney were gregarious and funny, probably computer geniuses who would someday be programming the universe. For her, it was all part of needing to know people’s secrets, filling in the backstory, as her father called it. Because in the end people were always more than they seemed to be. But then she was often the only one who recognized the “more.” By investing even the most difficult people with some measure of hope and dignity, her own guilty inertia was somehow diminished. And that way she could continue to distance herself from Roy and Rodney. Jessica Cooper was all the burden she could handle.

  Acrid smoke from the smoldering tires enveloped the downtown streets for days until a twelve-hour torrential downpour doused the last of the fires. Investigators discovered countless safety violations, which were bad enough, given Charlie’s many citations through the years, but the worst blow of all was what they dug up about Max. Before drifting into Springvale, he’d been in jail. Her mother told Charlie he had to let Max go. People in town were upset enough about the junkyard, but an ex-con in their midst was just too much.

  “That was three years ago,” Charlie scoffed.

  “And what was that for?” her mother sighed. She was getting worn out. Her father’s gall bladder was acting up again. He’d had two attacks in one week, but refused to go to the hospital.

  “A fight or something,” Charlie said. “But it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Get rid of him,” her mother said.

  “He saved your son’s life.” With his sly look he might have been haggling over the price of a tin pail or a new car. Charlie was master of the upper hand.

  “He’s a criminal!”

  “I judge a man for who he is. Not what he was,” he declared in his loftiest tone. The truth was that he’d found someone with a strong back willing to work for a roof over his head and the privacy of the fenced in junkyard for him and his dog. Kind of like jail, in a way, or so it seemed to Nellie.

  “You enjoy this, don’t you? You’re just asking for trouble and you know you are,” her mother warned in a low voice. Max was by the front gate, helping a man push two large cast iron radiators up a ramp into a plumber’s van.

  “You sound like your mother.” He grinned, savoring, if not his daughter’s misery, then the memory of some familiar rebuke.

  “Please, Dad. People’re just looking for something, a way to get rid of you, you know they are.”

  Charlie chuckled and looked around. “Well, Charlie’s got a surprise for them. Little something up his sleeve.” He motioned her closer. “I’m in negotiations.”

  “What do you mean? For what?”

  He held out his arms. “This. All of it. Andy Cooper. Don’t say nothing, but he wants to turn this into one of those intown malls. Two stories. Fancy shops, places to eat.”

  Instead of going home as planned, Nellie and her mother walked quickly to the hardware store. Surprisingly enough, there was a customer. They waited at the end of the scarred counter. The young man kept glancing at her mother and smiling while her father dropped the four toggle bolts he’d bought into a small paper bag.

  “Three dollars and fifteen cents,” he said, not even bothering to ring up the purchase. The young man paid him and her father slipped the money into his pocket.

  “Hey,” the young man said to her mother as he started to leave. “Sandy, right? You cut my hair. Couple weeks ago. I’m Anthony, Lizzie’s friend.”

  “Oh sure,” her mother said, distractedly. “I remember. Still looks pretty good.”

  “Getting a little scruffy.” He touched the back of his neck. “How ’bout tomorrow? Got anything at four? That’s when I get off work.”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe you should call.”

  “Okay!” He flipped the bag of clinking bolts in the air and caught it. “What’s your number?”

  “Call the shop—that’s what I meant.” Her mother’s face was red.

  “Okay, I’ll do that then,” he said.

  Her father’s long stare at the departing young man confirmed Nellie’s uneasiness. It bothered her that someone other than her father found her mother so attractive, though it had certainly gotten her father’s attention. “Anthony. What’s his last name?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember,” she said with a little smile. “Why?”

  “Nineteen thirty-nine!” He tapped the side of his head. “It just came to me. Before you came in we were talking about the old Brewster Bridge—he used to live near it—and I couldn’t remember the year it was rebuilt. Oh well,” he laughed. “I guess he’ll just have to buy the book.”

  “Ben, you’ve got to call Andy. He’s trying to buy the junkyard. I just found out. That’s why we haven’t heard anything.” She relayed Charlie’s news, though her version contained big-name stores like Gap and Talbots, as well as an expensive French restaurant.

  “Well, that’s exactly what this town needs. New blood. A rising tide to lift all our ships. It’ll be a boost for everyone, including this place,” he said.

  “Wait outside, Nellie,” her mother said through tight lips.

  She did but watched through the front window, long ago lettered PECK HARDWARE in shaded gold leaf with black edging. With one hand on her hip and the other pointing, her mother appeared to be shouting. Whatever her ultimatum, it was just a while later that Mr. Cooper came to the house. He was still interested, though not at the price he’d originally quoted. Too much time had passed. All the banks, appraisers—it was the same story everywhere. The market was shaky and real estate had taken a nosedive in the last year.

  “Everything’s down. Way down,” Mr. Cooper said.

  “That’s the truth,” her father agreed. “I see it every day. People trying to—”

  “How down?” her mother interrupted. “What do you mean?”

  “Twenty, maybe even twenty-five percent.”

  “So how much is that?” she asked.

  “A hundred twenty, anyway,” Mr. Cooper said. “And dropping by the day.”

  Her mother was stunned. A hundred twenty thousand dollars, which meant what, the store was only worth five hundred thirty thousand
? If that, Mr. Cooper sighed, thumbs working his fancy cell phone. And don’t forget, as part of the original offer he’d naturally calculated the worth of the business itself. Which was a lot less now with all the big box stores. Not to mention depreciation, the equipment, inventory.

  Into the silence, like the beat of a distant heart, pulsed the faint thump thump thump of music from the third floor. Ruth had bought an iPod with her tip money. Nellie was the only one who knew because she’d seen it. And Henry, whom she’d sworn to secrecy. And Dolly, because Ruth told her everything. All the late-night confidences, the coveted daily reports from her teenage wasteland, she now shared with Dolly.

  “No, Andy.” Her father leaned forward on the table. His dark eyes gleamed, and she was struck by how handsome he was. And how stern he sounded. “That wasn’t part of it. All we talked about was the property, the building itself.”

  “That may be your recollection, Ben, but that’s not how it went.” Mr. Cooper almost seemed offended.

  “That’s exactly how it went.” Her mother’s voice trembled. “I remember that day. Every detail. Ben came home and he said you’d been in the store buying a new drill and, by the way, you said, if he ever wanted to sell the building you’d pay him six hundred and fifty thousand for it. There was nothing about—”

  “Three years, Sandy. Those were the good times. A lot’s changed since then. I’m sorry.” Mr. Cooper checked his cell phone. Mrs. Cooper had just texted him again. She was waiting to be picked up. They had early dinner reservations at the Crestshire Club, then afterward a movie. Nice to have a night out without worrying about babysitters, he sighed. Her parents looked up, their expressions numb, lifeless. Nellie was trying to remember the last time they’d gone to a movie together or out to dinner. “It’s still not a bad offer,” he said. “Talk it over, the two of you, and let me know. We can do this.” He opened the door. “Just don’t wait three more years, my friends,” he said with a quick glance back. “Or months even.”