Free Light from a Distant Star by Mary Mcgarry Morris

drive him out of business, mainly the Shelby twins, he told his daughter, which made little sense beyond the fact that their family’s property abutted the far end of Charlie’s. The Shelby twins were Nellie’s age andgenerally regarded as odd. In school they spoke only to each other, so they were pretty much ignored, but she’d been studying them for years and knew they were harmless. Roy and Rodney had dark hair and identical cowlicks. They towered over everyone else and were the clumsiest boys she’d ever seen. Gym classes were agonies of tripping and falling. They always seemed to be getting hit by balls. They weren’t the best students, though their flashes of genius and wit intrigued Nellie. Their science-fair projects might combine the usual elements but in the most unique ways. When their volcano erupted, the spew of colored lava launched a rocket hissing through a tunnel out onto a pad that began to play the “William Tell Overture.” Their mother was at least six feet tall; her white hair was pinned back in a messy bun and she wore yellow tinted aviator glasses. She picked the twins up every day after school and the minute they climbed into her ancient tan Cadillac, Nellie just knew they morphed into different people. She would see them drive off laughing and talking, two of the handsomest and cleverest boys a mother could have, Mrs. Shelby surely thought. It made Nellie feel better knowing that in the safety of their home, Roy and Rodney were gregarious and funny, probably computer geniuses who would someday be programming the universe. For her, it was all part of needing to know people’s secrets, filling in the backstory, as her father called it. Because in the end people were always more than they seemed to be. But then she was often the only one who recognized the “more.” By investing even the most difficult people with some measure of hope and dignity, her own guilty inertia was somehow diminished. And that way she could continue to distance herself from Roy and Rodney. Jessica Cooper was all the burden she could handle.
    Acrid smoke from the smoldering tires enveloped the downtown streets for days until a twelve-hour torrential downpour doused the last of the fires. Investigators discovered countless safety violations, which were bad enough, given Charlie’s many citations through the years, but the worst blow of all was what they dug up about Max. Before drifting into Springvale, he’d been in jail. Her mother told Charlie he had to let Max go. People in town were upset enough about the junkyard, but an ex-con in their midst was just too much.
    “That was three years ago,” Charlie scoffed.
    “And what was that for?” her mother sighed. She was getting wornout. Her father’s gall bladder was acting up again. He’d had two attacks in one week, but refused to go to the hospital.
    “A fight or something,” Charlie said. “But it wasn’t his fault.”
    “Get rid of him,” her mother said.
    “He saved your son’s life.” With his sly look he might have been haggling over the price of a tin pail or a new car. Charlie was master of the upper hand.
    “He’s a criminal!”
    “I judge a man for who he is. Not what he was,” he declared in his loftiest tone. The truth was that he’d found someone with a strong back willing to work for a roof over his head and the privacy of the fenced in junkyard for him and his dog. Kind of like jail, in a way, or so it seemed to Nellie.
    “You enjoy this, don’t you? You’re just asking for trouble and you know you are,” her mother warned in a low voice. Max was by the front gate, helping a man push two large cast iron radiators up a ramp into a plumber’s van.
    “You sound like your mother.” He grinned, savoring, if not his daughter’s misery, then the memory of some familiar rebuke.
    “Please, Dad. People’re just looking for something, a way to get rid of you, you know they are.”
    Charlie chuckled and looked around. “Well,