Read Online Your Eyes in Stars by M. E. Kerr - Free Book Online Page B

in and out of there with his coffee mug. He spikes his coffee.”
    I knew my mother was in seventh heaven! Later that night she would be on the phone to one of her girl friends. Often her conversations began, “Wait till you hear this!”
    “Hard times make everyone blue,” said our mother.
    “I’m not talking about feeling blue,” said Seth. “I’m not talking about Dad’s fretting over his precious prison,unaware there’s a world going on outside The Hill! What’s happening to the Joys is a monumental disaster! J. J. even worries Mr. Joy might kill himself!”
    I couldn’t help myself. I put down my fork and made gestures as though I were giving someone’s phone number to the operator. I said, “Wait till you hear this. Horace Joy is getting pie-eyed nights because he’s lost his shoe company. He goes into the dining room—”
    “Jessica Osborne Myrer!” my mother exclaimed. “Just what are you doing?”
    “Imitating a certain someone gossiping,” I said, knowing it was one of those bad moves, the kind I had sometimes been compelled to make right before I met Elisa. I would get home and immediately be sent to my room for misbehaving in school: dropping Alka-Seltzer tablets in the inkwells, making the ink rise and spill across desks; letting the air out of teachers’ tires; spreading gossip my mother told on the telephone.
    “Mom would never tell something I told her in confidence,” Seth said. “And Mom would never spread rumors about Mr. Joy!”
    “We think the world of Horace Joy,” Mother answered. She gave me the evil eye and said, “Go to your room. You’re not having dessert.”
    Seth now viewed J. J.’s father the way he might a king who had lost his throne. Seth would remain his loyalsubject even after the basket under the guillotine contained Horace Joy’s head.
    “Just when I thought you were beginning to grow up,” said my mother as I was leaving the table. “You’re the same old tomboy show-off. Someday tell me where on earth Elisa Stadler got the idea the name Jessica suits you.”
    “You were the one who named me that.”
    “I didn’t know how you were going to turn out,” said my mother, “or I never would have.”

19
    E ARLIER , E LISA HAD come by on Gertie Sontag’s bike and said she was going to Hollywood Hangout for ice cream for her father. Richard was with her. Lately he was with her every chance he got. Last week he had left a fake gardenia on the Sontag porch. Mother had seen him do it, and she had told me that no young man was going to buy a flower for me as long as I rode down streets on my bicycle no hands. “Boys do that sort of thing on bicycles, not girls. Not girls boys give flowers to.”
    Heinz and Sophie Stadler were sitting on the front porch swing across the street, holding hands. After I was sent to my room, I watched them from my bedroom window and wondered again about my own embarrassing family. Something was radically wrong with my parents. My mother was caring enough on the surface, but she seemed to pull back at any demonstration of affection—not that there was any coming from me. Iknew she favored Seth, knew he was honey and darling and I was Jess—or Jessica Osborne Myrer when she was furious.
    But my mother seemed not to want Daddy’s touch either, despite their walking rituals and their grasshoppers. How could Daddy stand not being hugged or kissed? I couldn’t remember a time they’d acted like lovers, except in old photographs around the house. They looked a lot younger in them, too.
    At the other extreme were Elisa’s parents. No wonder Elisa got out of the house when he was around. I’d seen that sort of thing only in the movies: long clinches, fingertip kissing, and staring into each other’s eyes. Then he’d always light the two cigarettes and pass her one.
     
    As I stared at them from my window, there was a knock on my door.
    “Sweetie?” My father’s whisper. “Ready for some dessert?”
    I let him in, and Mugshot,