Read Online Lost Stars by Lisa Selin Davis - Free Book Online Page B

during summer break, was reading a book by the physicist who used to consult on
Star Trek
and
Doctor Who
called
Black Holes and Other Mysteries of the Universe.
I loved that book. He sat in the living room, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He’d aged a thousand years since Ginny died.
    â€œThis came for you,” he said, handing me an envelope that smelled sharply of caraway seeds, as had the others in the last three months. His face bore no reaction.
    â€œOh,” I said. Beside him sat the other envelope, addressed to Rosie and, I knew, filled with rosemary seeds. I could imagine the garden my mother had harvested them from out there on the chilly mountaintop monastery. There was never enough sun here for her to grow her herbs. The wild ginger fared okay in the shade, and her pots of mint sort of limped along, but the rosemary she tried to cultivate failed to prosper, and I supposed she just couldn’t look at those wilting, browning needles anymore after Ginny was gone. What was left of her attempts were a few unruly bushes at the front of the house.
    â€œYou’re not going to open it?” he asked.
    That sharp, nutty smell made me recall the whole thing over again: the day Ginny died, the way she died, the subsequent implosion of my family, my mother fleeing to her “temporary meditative retreat” so she could hide among the herbs and vegetables and flowers and cold stone walls instead of people. “I hate people,” she’d said to me once, when I found her crying on the floor of her closet. She, like my father, loved stars, the sky, the immutable sun and all its nuclear power. She loved plants and the science of cooking. Since our first family trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City when I was five and I had flipped out (in a good way—​
We’re on a ball hurtling through space and forever circling a ball of fire while a giant rock is forever circling us
), they had plied me with all this information about the universe and its workings. Then they had dumped me here on Earth. I shook my head and started up the stairs.
    â€œNah,” I said. “I know what’s in it. And I don’t actually like the way they taste. Maybe you guys should have named me cinnamon. Now, there’s a spice.”
    This totally weird and foreign thing called a smile crept onto my father’s face. “Thank you,” he said.
    I scrunched up my nose at him, skeptical. “For what?”
    He lifted his book back up, done looking at me, done trying for the night. “For coming home.”

Chapter 5
    For a treat, we were having tool lessons. Lynn, of course, really saw this as a gift as he strewed warped pine boards, screws, drills, screwdrivers, and hammers over the lawn in front of the park offices. He held the items up one by one, asking if we knew what they were. I, unsurprisingly, did not know the name of an unwieldy-looking piece of equipment with a round blade and terrifying-looking curved teeth.
    â€œIt’s a circular saw,” Tonya called out gleefully.
    Well, I couldn’t judge Tonya for knowing this. My idea of a good time used to be similarly nerdy, involving peering into a telescope for an embarrassingly long time.
    Lynn passed out screws to each of us so we could feel them, hold their weight in our hand, he said. “There’s not going to be a test, but I’d like you to familiarize yourself with the different sorts of screws.” The drywall ones were thin and had flat heads, larger than the others. There was a wood screw, a deck screw, and what he called a self-countersinking screw. Whatever that was, I probably needed it. Or maybe I
was
it.
    He explained that he had a particular fondness for drywall screws, not just because they were inexpensive but because, contrary to popular belief, they could be gentle on wood. But if you were screwing two pieces of wood together, he cautioned, you should always go with a wood