The Constellations

Eric and Cammy listened

Eric and cammy lisTEnEd hopefully to the whir-whir from the car, less concerned with the walk to the road than with the color rising in their father’s face.“Piece of shit,” he finally said and he slammed his hands against the steering wheel. For a moment he stared straight ahead,and Eric watched the red fall down the back of his father’s neck and into his shirt,like a thermometer during the passage of a cold front. “Well, we’re going to have to walk,” Roy said. “It’s a mile,” Cammy whined. “It’s a quarter mile.” “Is a Ford a bad car?” Eric said. “This one is,” Roy said.“Come on. I need to loosen up this leg anyway.” The eastern sky paled. Crows cawed to one another across the fields; a late-arriving owl glided into the trees beyond the garbage pit. Eric saw the first bright leaves of pricker plants spreading among the wildflowers and prairie grass alongside the driveway. During walks the previous summer Aunt Phyl had identified many of the flowers.He still recognized the young rhubarb and the spray of leaves of stray corn that had blown over from the fields. Cammy stopped and called back.“Does your leg hurt?” “It’s stiff, is all,” Roy said. The cast had come off three days earlier. Putting his leg under the shower afterward ranked among the five most glorious moments of his life.The muscles refused to loosen, defied Phyl’s vigorous applications of liniment, a surprise to Roy, considering she had loosened up a horse or two in her day. He found it hard to believe he would be able to climb back onto a roof come Monday morning. Roy lit another cigarette.“What’s your book, son?” “It’s about comets,” Eric said.“I have to return it to the library.” Kevin Cunningham 7 “Didn’t you go out looking for a comet during the winter?” “Comet Kohoutek,” Eric said. “That’s right.” They stopped at the end of the drive. Eric shaded his eyes to look for the bus. In his opinion he needed to catch a bus before seven like he needed a rash, but he conceded that getting up early helped with studying the universe. A lot seemed to happen in the hour before sunrise. Meteor showers intensified. The next season’s constellations appeared like coming attractions. It was easy to find whichever planet served that day as the inaccurately named morning star. He hoped astronomers stayed up late. That he could do. “There’s the bus,” Cammy exclaimed. Cammy always worried the bus wouldn’t come. Eric always worried it would. Since his mother died, he did not like to leave his father alone. ...