Keeping The Moon(55)

“Seventeen days,” I repeated. She went back to her paper, searching for the horoscope, happily eating her cereal. To her, change

could only be a good thing.

I was thinking of this a few nights later at Norman’s. We had the radio on, just enough to hear the music but not the words,

and the door open. Out above the water, a half moon was hanging there, big and bright.

“Fourteen days,” I said out loud.

“What?” Norman said, poking his head around the canvas.

“The eclipse. It’s in fourteen days.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”

I sat back in the chair, lifting my chin before he asked me to. I was used to it now, the same way I was used to my days revolving

around this one thing. I still went to work, and ran on the beach, and made my way through the maze of Mira’s notes. But

everything seemed like a means to get to this end, the portrait. We’d spent almost a month on it, Norman slowly constructing me on

canvas as I memorized each part of him: the arch of his eyebrow, the way his shoulder blade jutted out when he stretched, the smell

of turpentine on his skin whenever he crossed the room to adjust my position. I had started to dread the moments when he stopped

painting, pausing with the brush in midair, as if at any second he would pronounce it finished and everything would be over.

“I remember the first time I saw a lunar eclipse,” he said suddenly, jerking me back to attention. “I was, like, six, and me and

my brothers camped out in the backyard to stay up for it. It was the biggest deal.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.” A breeze blew through, spinning the mobiles over my head. “They fell asleep before it even happened, just like my dad

predicted, but I remember lying there in my sleeping bag, looking up as the moon just disappeared. And even though I knew what it

was, and I was so excited all day waiting for it to happen, I got really scared. Because it doesn’t just come right back, you

know? There’s like this long, long time when it’s just gone.”

I didn’t know. I’d never seen one.

“So I ran inside and up to my parents’ room and woke up my dad,” he went on, dipping the brush into the can of paint thinner and

swishing it around. “I was freaking. Crying and everything. And my mom kept saying how she’d known I was too young to camp out

and how he should have listened to her-- this was before the divorce--and my dad kept telling her to be quiet so he could hear what

I was saying, because he couldn’t understand me.”

He stopped then, and I thought of the voice on the answering machine, clearing his throat. Waiting.

“What were you saying?” I asked him.

“I was saying,” Norman said, looking outside, “that they took the moon. They were keeping the moon.”

“What did your dad do?”

“He walked me back downstairs and out to the yard, and told me to stop being ridiculous and go to sleep. It wasn’t really a big

bonding moment.” He looked back at the painting in front of him, then at me. “But I will never forget how it felt to He there and

wait for it to come back. Because I wasn’t really sure it would. I wanted to believe it as much as I’d always believed the moon

could never go away. But I didn’t.”

“But it did come back,” I said. “Eventually.”

“It did,” he agreed, nodding, looking right at me.

And I never wanted this to end, could have stayed forever in this tiny universe with the radio playing, Norman watching me, and the

breeze just blowing through, warm and sweet.

“But it’s strange,” he went on, “when you’ve always been told something is true, like the moon will come back. You need proof.

And while you wait, you feel the entire balance of your world just tipping. It’s crazy. But when it’s over, and it does come

back, that’s the best, because it’s all you want, everything narrows to just that. It’s this great rush, like for that one

second everything’s okay with the world again. It’s amazing.” He looked up at me and smiled and I thought again how I could be

happy spending a lot of time, maybe even forever, earning those.

“You’ll see what I mean,” he said, moving behind the canvas again, out of sight. “You’ll see.”





Chapter Thirteen


It was the second week of August, two days before Mira’s eclipse, when Morgan came to work with a plan.

“I’m going to Durham to surprise Mark,” she announced. She had her hair curled and makeup on, as well as a cute skirt and blouse

I didn’t recognize. “Will you work for me?”

“That’s my skirt,” Isabel said.

Morgan glanced down. “You never paid me back the twenty bucks I lent you to buy it. Plus, I’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

Isabel harrumphed, grabbed a water pitcher, and went back out to her tables.

“Can you cover my shifts?” Morgan said to me hopefully. “At least tonight and the morning? I’ll call if I’m going to be

longer.”