It was not, afterward, as simple as a deal. Nothing was. His mother failed the math part of the equivalency test in January and cried at the kitchen table and passed it in March. Mr. Calloway caught a cold in February and was a terrible patient, and Cal read him the entire sports section over the telephone three nights running because Mrs. Petrakis said it was the only thing that would make him take his soup. The Saturday after the space shuttle came apart over Florida, Cal was in the library in the big stone house, and they sat together with the radio on, the reports still coming in, and didn't read anything at all, and when Cal finally said, "I can tell you what it looked like on TV, if you want," Mr. Calloway said quietly, "No. Not that one. Some things I'm glad I don't have to see."
And in February, on a gray Saturday, Mr. Calloway asked Cal to take him upstairs to the room at the end of the hall, the one with the canvases, and open the curtains, and describe every painting in it, one at a time. It took three Saturdays. Some of them were good. Mr. Calloway said they were all terrible, and then asked Cal to hang one in the front hall, a picture of the Monongahela with the steel mills on fire at night, and then, after a week, asked him to hang another.
In Mr. Haddad's class, at the end of March, they had to write an essay on the Word of the Day from October that had stuck with them most. Cal wrote about magnanimous. He wrote about a sixteen-year-old girl on a wooden bench who had three dollars and twenty cents and nothing to give anybody, and gave a stranger his life back anyway, by telling him the truth. He didn't use any names. Mr. Haddad gave it an A and wrote at the bottom, in his tall slanting letters, Not a king. Good.
* * *
On the twenty-first of March, Cal's thirteenth birthday, they all went to the Buhl Planetarium on the North Side: Cal and Rosie and their mother, and Mr. Calloway in his camel coat, and Booker, who claimed he was only there to make sure nobody lost anybody and then bought the biggest bag of popcorn they sold.
The star theater was round and domed and the seats leaned back, and when the lights went down, they went all the way down—a darkness so complete that Rosie grabbed Cal's sleeve and whispered, "I can't see anything," and Mr. Calloway, on Cal's other side, said, "Welcome," and Rosie giggled so loud the people in front turned around.
Then the big machine in the center of the room hummed, and the stars came out.
They came out the way they must have come out over the hills before there was a city, before there were mills or bridges or buses, thousands of them, more than Cal had ever seen from Polish Hill, spilling across the dome, and the man with the microphone made the sun go down in the west and the whole sky began, slowly, to turn.
Mr. Calloway's hand found the strap of the knapsack where it lay across Cal's knees. His fingers settled on the old brown lace, on the knot.
"Tell me what you see," he whispered.
So Cal told him. He told him about the Big Dipper and the bright one the man called Arcturus, and the smudge of the Milky Way across the top of the dome like somebody had spilled flour, and the tiny red one that was Mars. He told him about Rosie with her mouth open and her head tipped all the way back. He told him about his mother, on the far side of Rosie, who wasn't looking at the stars at all, but at the three of them, in the dark, with an expression on her face that he didn't have a word for yet—he'd have to ask Mr. Haddad—something like a person who has carried a thing for a long time and has finally, finally found a place to set it down.
"I know that look," Mr. Calloway whispered back. "I remember it."
And above them, the sky kept turning, slow and enormous, exactly the way it always had, for anyone who looked up.