Raft of Stars

polite. He’d come in to buy a loaf of the cheapest white bread and a jar of peanut butter, and pay with a couple of oily bills and change from his dad’s shop. Then she’d see him the next day, hiking toward the school in his sneakers, carrying only a paper sack. There was no doubt the boy had to make his own sad lunches. Tiffany knew what that was like, how lonesome it felt when the other kids unpacked perfectly cut sandwiches and handwritten notes with drawings of smiley faces on the napkins. Once, Tiffany wrote herself a note with a smiley face on a piece of paper towel, but the other kids could tell it was her writing, and they laughed at her. She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall with her feet up on the toilet, flushed the note, and wept. The first time Tiffany ever saw the Breadwin boy was during the spring she finally lost the house. She was driving up Main Street and it was snowing hard, and there was this boy walking along a guardrail through the slush. He had no hat and his jacket was unzipped. Traffic slowed. A car stopped, and a woman got out and crouched next to the boy. As Tiffany drove past them at a crawl, she saw the woman ask him a question and the boy shake his head. Tiffany couldn’t tell from his red face whether he was crying, or cold, or both. There was shame on his face. Thinking about that made her feel the way she did in that bathroom stall.

Against Miranda’s will, Tiffany walked quickly to the sink. Miranda turned off the coffee pot and stood by her side.

“I’ll wash, you rinse,” Tiffany begged in a whisper. Miranda nodded and smiled.

“I’m glad you’re here, Tiffany,” she said.

Tiffany pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her elbows and swept her hair behind her ears. She was glad to be here too. She liked Miranda. She liked the farmhouse. And the thought of going back to her lonely rental seemed awful.

“So,” said Bobby, “I expect to hear from the sheriff in no time at all.” He leaned back in his chair and didn’t face them as he spoke. He knew they were within earshot, and that was good enough. “In my experience that’s how these things pan out. You just gotta wait for your radio here to light up, and it always does, and then it’s over and everyone gets a little rest. The hard part’s the vigil, is my experience of it. And a vigil is even harder when you’re waiting on children. But they will come. Your boy will be found.”

Miranda thanked him.

“And this is good coffee, thank you. Oh! And here’s a cookie.”

There was a window over the sink, and Tiffany looked out at her reflection as she scrubbed mindlessly at a dish. She couldn’t see it now, but Tiffany knew that beyond the barn lay the field, and beyond that, the forest where Cal and the boys were.

“How far out do you think they are?” she asked quietly.

Miranda waited for the dish with her hands on the edge of the sink. She looked out into the night. Tiffany studied the woman’s gaze in the windowpane. She was a pretty woman, Tiffany recognized that in her right away. She was older and taller than Tiffany, and had a darker complexion, darker hair, but also something more. There was something very dignified in the way Miranda carried herself, folded a rag, wiped up a spill, filled up coffee, held back tears. It wasn’t feigned dignity either, like a person who bandied big words. It was genuine, deeper down, whatever it was. The woman made her own clothes from the looks of it, a flat-fronted denim dress of the sort Tiffany usually saw the wives of church people wearing. Tiffany hated those dresses. She hated watching women try to get into their husband’s pickups with those things on, the way they restricted natural form. But something about Miranda’s manner seemed incredibly noble, or hard-won, or both. The woman seemed to know who she was, which made her seem clothed in more than just denim and piety. Tiffany wished she had that kind of certainty. She wondered what Miranda thought of her purple bangs.

“They’d have made it past the islands by now,” said Miranda. She straightened herself, took her hands off the sink. “It will be easier to find the boys at night anyway. They’ll make a fire.”

“So,” said Bobby, speaking to no one in particular, “them boys is just having a bit of a run around in the forest, but they’ll be fine, if I know anything about boys—”

“Do you think they’ll make one, though,” asked Tiffany, “if they’re trying to hide?” She handed Miranda the dish to rinse. Miranda took it, and then surprised Tiffany with a broad smile.

“Fischer won’t make anything but a bonfire so big we’ll probably see it from here.” She turned the faucet on. Her boy was there in her eyes, like fire itself. “I remember a time Fischer had a friend over and they slept in the yard in tents, had a campfire, told stories, that sort of thing.”

“I did that sort of thing as a girl,” said Tiffany, and she smiled to think of it as she scrubbed the next plate, and then she frowned. She’d slept in the yard in a tent, but never with friends. She never had any to come over. She had huge braces as a kid. And her green eyes were too bright for her skin. But she did love sleeping out in the yard, feeling so far away with her books and her flashlight, the stars and crickets and quiet. It didn’t feel the same later in life. Tiffany didn’t care for tents anymore.

“The last time Fischer had a campout, I woke up at three in the morning to a fire truck parked in my yard, lights