Read Online The Letters by Suzanne Woods Fisher - Free Book Online Page B

I’ve found for studying the planets. Usually I come at night, but lately I’ve been coming early in the morning. Looking for Saturn. It’s just starting to be visible in the east. Since I keep my scope outside but covered, it remains the same temperature as the air. Otherwise the lens can get fuzzy.”
    He stepped away so she could look through the eyepiece. He had it centered on the thin moon, rising in the east. It was amazing to see it through a telescope—even in the daylight, she could see the faint tracing of the dark side of the moon.
    “That’s called earthshine,” Danny said. “A few days after a new moon, when there’s just a very slim crescent, you can sometimes see earthshine on the unilluminated portion of the moon. Earthshine is caused by sunlight reflected off the earth and onto the moon.”
    Fascinating facts! “I’ve never noticed earthshine before, but I’ve never looked through a telescope before, either.”
    “You can use binoculars. Beginning astronomers don’trealize they don’t need an expensive telescope. Really, just a dark night and sharp eyes. You don’t need much else.”
    She straightened. “Danny, do you want to be an astronomer?”
    He pushed his glasses up the ridge of his nose. He hesitated, as if he was weighing whether he should admit something of such great importance. “No. I want to be an astronaut.” He took off his hat. “Almost. I want to be almost-an-astronaut.”
    The sun had already begun to set by the time Mim parted ways with Danny and walked up the driveway. There had been a spurt of snow the day before, and a little of it lingered in shady places. It crunched under her feet as she approached the house.
    Her mind was filled with the moon and school and facts. Mostly she thought about Danny, stargazer and mouse rescuer. Danny with the lovely blue eyes and the glasses that were held together at the hinges with a paper clip.
    Mim stood outside her mother’s room, watching her fold a mountain of laundry that was on top of her bed. Her sleeves were pushed up past her elbows, her curly brown hair wild around her face. By her mother’s feet there were laundry baskets, one piled on top of another, clothes pouring out, one basket filled to the brim with socks.
    “Ah! I see you there.” Her mother smiled at her.
    Ask me. Ask me about being in love. “Hello.”
    “You look as happy as Christmas morning,” her mother said, turning her attention back to the laundry basket. “You must have had a good day at school.”
    Just as Mim opened her mouth to tell her about why it was a good day, about Danny Riehl and his telescope, a ringing bell sound floated up the stairs. Her grandmother needed something.

    Her mother’s shoulders slumped. “Mim, would you finish folding this laundry while I tend to Mammi Vera?” She tossed a crunchy sun-dried towel to Mim and hurried down the stairs.

    Delia Stoltz didn’t know which was worse: the discomfort and soreness from yesterday’s lumpectomy, waiting to hear from the doctor if the margins were clear, or waking up fresh to the knowledge that her husband was gone and he would never come back. Her life would never be all right again.
    Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of Charles almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy and joyful times; mostly, terrible dreams of abandonment, loss, and sorrow.
    The phone rang and rang. All Delia Stoltz wanted was to be alone. She was sore from the lumpectomy. The only call she wanted was from Dr. Zimmerman’s with the pathology report about the sentinel node biopsy—and don’t expect that for a week or ten days, they had said. Why did it have to take so long? She tried to focus on the good news, that the cancer seemed to have been caught in early stages, and that the initial tests in the hospital looked like the lymph node was clear of cancer cells. But she knew enough to wait for results from the extensive