Free Star Time by Joseph Amiel Page A

Matt sent some money to help pay for the funeral, but none was left to travel there for it.
    Greg was inconsolable. A silent father wrapped in his own grief was little comfort. Greg had trusted God, as he had been taught to do. Either God was a nonexistent hoax or a brutal monster to be despised. Greg was determined never again to place futile hopes in God. Or his mother. She had taught him that family was indispensable to her and must be to him. And then she had betrayed him.
     
    The day after receiving the phone message, Greg and Chris drove out of the city to the cemetery. Greg had asked his grandmother, now a widow living in Florida, to find out its name and address. She and his mother had reconciled after Greg's grandfather died. The two women obviously hoped that the phone call would reconcile Greg with his mother, too.
    To Greg's surprise the cemetery was Jewish. Having rejected God after Meggy's death, he had ceased to relate religion to his life and considered himself, if anything, Protestant because his father was. He parked the car, top up, on a knoll overlooking the meadow planted with rows of headstones where Meggy was buried. A small red Ford was parked on the road meandering among them. A straight-backed woman in a blue dress stood before one of the gravestones. Her hair was short and dark.
    "That's her, isn't it?" Chris asked quietly.
    "Yes," he replied.
    He had not seen her since the bleak December after Meggy died, when she had appeared without warning in the living room, but he had no doubt the woman was she.
    Greg's anger was too quick for her. He ran off, stopping only long enough at the kitchen door to yell back, "You took Meggy away and killed her before I could get there. You knew I would try to save her if I came."
    Next day, when he returned late from school after stopping to play basketball in the schoolyard, his mother was waiting on the porch steps for him. Head down, black hair cascading over the shoulders of a heavy black coat, white breath floating upward, she looked like a volcano in the dimming light. Beside her was a gift-wrapped box.
    Hearing the front gate open and close, she looked up.
    " Meggy would have died regardless," she said before he could run away again.
    He did not want to believe that. "I would have kept her safe. I always protected her."
    "I tried to, too," his mother said sadly. She then spoke so carefully he knew she had planned the words while waiting for him. "I truly had hoped that by now you and I and Meggy would have been together. Being separated was only to be for a little while."
    He could perceive in her voice a plea for forgiveness for leaving him and taking Meggy , that she would take him with her now if he gave her half a chance — she had come back for that, he realized. But he would never forgive her. If you truly love your child, you do not leave him, no matter what. She had made her choice. Now he would make his.
    Through the glass window in the storm door, he could see his father sitting on the sofa in the lighted living room, watching them. Greg marched up the porch steps past her and into the house to take the seat beside him. For the first time he could remember, his father placed his hand on Greg's shoulder.
    A few minutes later, his mother stood up and walked down the short path to the sidewalk and then, turning onto it through the gate, headed back to the bus station. Greg saw her for one final moment through the living-room window. Her head pivoted, and he realized that she could see him in the lighted room, so he looked away.
    Someday he, too, would leave, he decided. Someday he would set out on his quest for the success that would keep him safe. But the choice of where and when would be his. Relying for happiness on someone he loved could bring him grief, he had learned. To become important, to become a person who mattered in the world and of whom others had to take notice, a person who was rich and invulnerable and admired, that must be his