“This is starting to sound like reality TV,” said Roo.
“You didn’t think the heavens just managed themselves, did you? You didn’t think all the night fairies did their whole lives was tease poor Grumwald? They had to see that the stars came out on time, sparkled as appropriate, dimmed so the moon didn’t get pissed off when it was full, fell just when wishers were watching. This was a stressful job—way more stressful than SGA president or even prince—because there are a lot of stars out there, and Stephanie was in charge not just of making sure they were behaving properly but also that they were happy.”
“How do you keep stars happy?” Claude whispered.
“Well, exactly,” said Penn. “It was a big job. A big, big job. Stephanie and the other night fairies started every evening at dusk, and it often took until nearly dawn to get everything set. ‘Look alive there, Sirius. A little more light, please, Centauri. How do you feel, Ross 248? Anything we can do to make you more comfortable?’ So by the time dawn came, Princess Grumwaldia Stephanie was exhausted and ready for bed. Just like all of you.”
Ben and Roo went off to finish homework, but the little ones were ready, and Claude was already mostly asleep. He stirred when Penn transferred him to his own bed to ask, “Can I stay up till dawn too, Daddy? To help with the stars?”
“Sure, sweetie.” In the few seconds that passed while Penn fumbled with the nightlight, Claude was already fast asleep, lavender nightgown bunched up around his waist, not so tea length after all.
Absent her usual nightshirt, Rosie came to bed that night in a button-down of Penn’s which, like Princess Stephanie’s, was short enough to leave her legs free for fleeter flight. And like two-fifths of her sons, she had nothing on underneath.
*
Through that whole winter and spring, Claude came home every day from preschool, shed his clothes, and put the princess dress back on. And there at the beginning, after the first afternoon or two, no one—not Claude, not his brothers, not his parents—gave much thought to his dress, for he was still and always just Claude, and was it any stranger, really, than Roo performing a séance in the downstairs bathroom or than Rigel licking the spine of every book in the house to prove he could taste the difference between fiction and nonfiction? It was not.
Then summer arrived and with it the boys’ grandmother, and everything got even better. Improbably, Rosie’s mother’s name was Carmelo.
“Like the candy bar?” Penn had asked the first time.
“Not Caramello. Carmelo,” said Rosie, as if the former were ridiculous but the latter as reasonable as Anne or Barbara.
Roo, because he was the eldest, had an opportunity to intervene and rechristen her something normal. Instead, he’d gone with Carmy, some combo of Carmelo and Grammy, which truly sounded like something chocolate-covered. But she was not a chocolate-covered sort of grandma. She did not bake. She did not inveterately hand out sweets. She loved from a different place than that, better for the teeth. She was always threatening to move to be nearer to Rosie and the boys, but Wisconsin was—obviously, nonnegotiably, self-evidently—too cold. So she stayed in Phoenix and held the weather to her heart as a talisman, clutched to her breast against all counteroffers.