Ham found me sitting on the curb outside his place. When he drug me to a booth in the back of the diner and set a cup of coffee afore me, part of me wondered if he was buttering me up for a wish.
Later, when he was closing shop—and it must’ve been much later, seeing as how it was getting dark out—he pressed a paper bag into my hands. I didn’t thank him then, either, but he seemed to understand, and only patted me on the head and told me to “git on home, now.”
I couldn’t even rally myself to look him in the eye. I just got.
Outside my door, I found a pile of yarn, three casseroles, and a card addressed to The Sweet Family. I tore it open with a bitter chuckle.
The card had a seagull on it, flying over a blue sea at sunset. It read, Deepest condolences in one of those gold, curlicue scripts. Inside, Handyman Joe had written something sincere and sad. I tossed that card onto Pa’s apple crate, which was currently unoccupied.
Just because it seemed like a waste to let food go bad, I walked the casseroles and Ham’s paper bag to the fridge. It was strange to see how much grub had collected there since . . . that night. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d sat looking at that empty refrigerator, my stomach rumbling, wishing for something more than thin broth and beans.
For a glimmer of a moment, I almost, almost felt grateful.
Almost.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the electric bill poking from beneath the living room lamp. I stormed over, hefted the lamp, and snatched up the slip of paper.
Unfortunately, we do not accept payment in the form of goods and/or services. . . . Please note your current bill is three days overdue.
I squeezed my eyelids together and crushed the letter in my hand.
It was time for a reckoning.
20
A Reckoning
THE CLEARING WAS EMPTY AND THE NIGHT WAS quiet. Squirrel Tail Creek carried pebbles and silt to a river that flowed to the Atlantic. Overhead, the stars went on with their beaming as they did night and day, regardless of who laughed or cried, lived or died.
“I want you to know something!” I shouted at the sky. “I remember Gram’s story about the man from Fenn. How he felt all deprived when everyone but him got their wishes filled, and how it turned out badly when he started fetching wishes for himself. People cursing his name and whatnot. I remember every word of it!”
As you might expect, there was no reply.
“Let me tell you a story, stars! Once there was a girl. She was poor, but she was a wish fetcher. And she granted some wishes, and yeah, some people did her a good turn as a result. At least she wasn’t hungry no more. She should have been pleased, right?”
Twinkle. Twinkle.
“But that’s not the whole tale. Because this girl lost her ma, you see. And her pa’s a drunk and a lout. And however much she fetched lost treasures or paired folk up with their soulmates or helped her best friend’s ma get a good job in town, she couldn’t bring her own ma back. Her father was still a stinking boozer. Sounds nice, don’t it?
“But that’s just the icing on the cake, stars! Because the real treat at the heart of all this wishing was that, for some blame-fool reason, the girl started to believe that everything was gonna be all right. All shall be well, you said! All manner of thing shall be well!
“So well that she never did turn up the money to pay the electric bill. So well that she went to Penny Walton’s bedside instead of staying home where she belonged. So well that while she was gone, the electric went out and the snow began to fall and her most perfect gram lay there in the dark, alone, getting colder and colder—until she died!
“What do you think of that story, stars?”
My voice echoed in the empty night.
“So here’s how the story ends. The girl says, No more! I’m not playing by your rules anymore!”
I held up my wish cup and whistled to the stars. “Y’all come, now. Y’all come.”
My voice was bitter, but the stars didn’t seem to mind. At last, and in their own way, they replied.
Even through the haze of my heartsickness, I had to admit it was as beautiful as ever, the quicksilver flow of starlight pouring down from way up on high. As the cup filled, I felt the impossible neither-cold-nor-hotness of it through the plastic against the skin of my hand. It defied every word of description I possessed, and all I could do was gape in wonder.
But if you think I was swayed by that splendor, you’re wrong.
“Thank you kindly,” I said.
I took that cup of starlight and drank it down.
I’ll tell you straight up, there’s no way I can make clear what it felt like, drinking that stuff. My knees nearly buckled; I know that much. A delicious chill rushed through me, from my tailbone up to the very top of my head. Around me, the edges of things—the trunks of the trees, the moonbeams, even the leaves and pine needles on the ground—turned vivid, their colors sharper, even through the dark. I breathed, and the air was me and I was it, and I could feel it fill up every part of me, every last cell.
But perhaps the real wonder was, in the face of all that rapture, I still managed to do the thing I’d come to do: balance the books.
“I wish for money!” I screamed into the night. “Lots of it! And a better house and a sober pa. I wish a ma for every baby and for no one ever to go hungry. And most of all—you hear me, stars!—most of all, I wish for my gram back!”
I knew it the second the last words left my lips. I knew it before I held up the cup and tried to call down some more starlight—though I did do that, out of spite, maybe. I knew it as sure as I knew Pa would be drunk tomorrow and Gram would still be dead. I knew it.
The magic was gone.
Feeling little else but tired, I curled up on Gram’s bed with her Farmer’s Almanac. It talked about the stars and the seasons and the right days for planting all sorts of crops. Everything had its own special time.