She pulled at the brown tassels of spider plants over her head, plucking the dried leaves and throwing them off the porch, her breasts pushing out of the V neck. "Look at you, smoking in front of the kids. You always were a bad influence." But she smiled when she said it, soft and flirting. "Do me a favor, Ray baby? I'm out of cigs, could you run down to the store and get me a carton?" She flashed him her flat wide smile.
"I need some beer anyway," he said. "You want to come, Astrid?"
As if her smile couldn't stretch anymore, it sprang back to the center, then she stretched it again. "You can go yourself, can't you, big boy? Astrid needs to help me for a minute." Pluck, pluck, tearing the baby spiders off with the dead leaves.
Ray got his jacket and ducked out under the waterfall of water coming off the corrugated steel porch roof, the jacket pulled up to cover his head.
"You and me need to talk, missy," Starr said to me as Ray closed the cab door to the truck and started the motor.
Reluctantly, I followed her back into the house, into her bedroom. Starr never talked to the kids. Her room was dark and held the smell of unwashed grown-ups, dense and loamy, a woman and a man. The bed was unmade. A kid's room never smelled like that, no matter how many were sleeping there. I wanted to open a window.
She sat down on the unmade bed and reached for the pack of Benson and Hedges iocs, saw it was empty, threw it away. "You're having a good time here, aren't you," she said, peering into the drawer of the bedside table, rummaging inside. "Making yourself at home? Getting comfortable?"
I traced the flower pattern on her sheets, it was a poppy. My fingers followed the aureole, and then the feelers in the middle. Poppy, the shape of my mother's undoing.
"A little too darn comfortable, I'd say." She shut the drawer, the little ring of the pull clicking. She tugged the blanket up, so I couldn't trace the flower anymore. "I may not be some genius, but I'm getting your game. Believe me, it takes one to know one.
"One what?" I couldn't help but be curious about what I was that Starr recognized in herself.
"Going after my man." She straightened out a cigarette butt from the plaid beanbag ashtray on the nightstand and lit it.
I had to laugh. "I wasn't." That was what she saw? Bang bang bang, Lord almighty? "I didn't."
"Always hanging around, handling his 'tools' 'What's this for, Uncle Ray?' Playing with his guns? I've seen the two of you. Everybody asleep except the two of you, cuddling up, just as sweet as you please." She exhaled the stale butt-smoke into the close, humid air.
"He's old," I said. "We're not doing anything."
"He's not that old," Starr said. "He's a man, missy. He sees what he sees and he does what he can. I've got to talk fast before he gets back, but I got to tell you, I decided I'm calling Children's Services, so whatever you were thinking, it's all over now, Baby Blue. You're history."
I stared at her, her furry lashes. She couldn't be that mean, could she? I hadn't done anything. Sure, I loved him, but I couldn't help that. I loved her too, and Davey, all of them. It was unfair. She couldn't be serious.
I started to protest, but she held up her hand, the butt smoldering between her ringers. "Don't try to argue me out of it. I got a nice thing going here now. Ray's the best man I ever had, treats me nice. Maybe you haven't been trying, but I smell S-E-X, missy, and I'm not taking any chances. I lived too long and come too far to blow it now."
I sat like a fish in that airless room, flopping, as the rain battered the metal roof and walls. She was kicking me out, for nothing. I felt the ocean tugging me from my tiny little place on the rock. I could hear the river, carrying its tons of debris. I tried to think of an explanation, a reason that might satisfy her.
"I never had a father," I said.
"Don't." She crushed the twice-smoked butt out in the ashtray, watched her fingers. "I've got myself and my own kids to worry about. You and me, we hardly know each other. I don't owe you a thing." She looked down at the front of her fuzzy sweater and brushed at some ash that had fallen on her full breast.
I was slipping, falling. I had trusted Starr and I'd never given her a reason to doubt me. It wasn't fair. She was a Christian, but she wasn't acting on faith, on goodness. "What about charity?" I said, like a falling man reaching for a branch. "Jesus would give me a chance."
She stood up. "I'm not Jesus," she said. "Not even close." I sat on the bed, praying to the voice in the rain. Please, Jesus, don't let her do this to me. Jesus, if you can see this, open up her heart. Please Jesus, don't let it be like this.
"I'm sorry, you were a good kid," she said. "But that's life." The only answer was rain. Silence and tears. Nothing. I thought of my mother. What she would do if she were me. She would not hesitate. She would spare nothing to have what she wanted. And thinking of her, I felt something flow into my emptiness like a flexible rod of rebar climbing up my spine. I knew it was evil, what I was feeling, self-will, but if it was, then it was. I suddenly saw us on a giant chessboard, and saw my move.
"He might be mad," I said. "You thought of that? If he knew you sent me away, because you were jealous."
Starr had been halfway to the door, but she stopped and turned around. She looked at me as if she'd never seen me before. I was surprised at how fast the words poured out of me then. I was the one who never had words. "Men don't like jealous women. You're trying to make him a prisoner. He's going to hate you. He might even break up with you."
And I liked the way she flinched, knowing I had caused the lines in her forehead. There was power in me now, where there had been none.
She pulled down her sweater so her breasts were even more prominent, glanced at herself in the mirror. Then she laughed. "What do you know about men. You baby."
But I felt the doubt that had made her turn to the mirror, and kept going. "I know that men don't like women who try to own them. They dump them."
Starr hovered by her dresser, uncertain now whether she should stop listening to me and get rid of me quick, or let me go on mining the possibilities of her doubts. She busied herself looking for another butt in the ashtray, found one that wasn't so long, straightened it out between her fingers, and lit it with her powder-blue Bic lighter.
"Especially when there's nothing going on. I like you, I like him, I like the kids, I would never do anything to screw it up. Don't you know that?" The more I said it, the less true it was. The angel on her bureau looked down, ashamed, afraid to see me. The rain drummed on the roof.
"Swear you're not interested in him?" she said finally, squinting against the vile smoke. She grabbed the Bible off the bedside table, a white leather Bible with red ribbons and a gilded edge.
"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.