A Nearer Moon by Melanie Crowder

Author:Melanie Crowder
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

14

Luna

A week slid by, a week given to sadness and regret Maybe because Mama couldn’t face the guilt and grief brimming in Luna’s eyes, or maybe because she couldn’t find space around her own guilt and grief, she and Luna may as well have been strangers—not speaking, not even meeting each other’s eyes.

Things had been different once. Granny Tu said so. Before Daddy died, Mama had been the first out on the water every day, quick to share a grin and a kiss, to snatch up one of her daughters and spin her around and around, high in the air, until the laughter of little girls pealed like bells across the swamp.

But sorrow can spread inside a person, blocking out any light that might find its way in to heal the hidden hurts. And so Mama went more and more often to the chapel at the end of the walkways, and spent more and more of her time at home wreathed in her pious quiet, in her grieving silence.

There were small things that could be done to make the sick person’s time a little easier. So when Willow closed her eyes for her morning nap, Luna tiptoed outside. She passed Benny’s hut and tramped along the walkways past the school, past the chapel where Mama had been since early that morning, and over the long bridge that led from the huts to the garden.

The trail zigzagged up the hill, and Luna put her hands out to either side to brush the tops of the ferns that lined the path and tickled her shins with every step. A solitary butterfly wafted out of the trees to settle on a cluster of orchids, while honeybees dipped in and out of the cascading blooms.

At the top of the hill, Luna opened the garden gate and fastened it behind her before stepping carefully between tidy rows of crops. Uncle Tin was in the far corner, kneeling beside a flowering cucumber plant and delicately nudging the spiraling tendrils onto the lattice behind it.

“Morning, Uncle Tin,” Luna said, and she knelt down beside him, digging her fingers into the warm, dark soil.

“Well, good morning to you, Luna,” Uncle Tin said in his leisurely way. “What’ll it be today?”

“Willow’s still sweating like she has a fever. She doesn’t say it, but her eyes are all squinty, so I think her head hurts a lot.”

Uncle Tin nodded as he listened, sifting through the soil with his weathered hands.

“And she still grimaces when she turns over, like it hurts to move at all.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Uncle Tin said. “Fever, headache, body aches. That sounds about right.” He tilted his head to give Luna a sad smile.

Of course it sounded about right. Everybody, since the swamp first settled over the land, had shown the same symptoms. The same three weeks. The same helpless slow slide. Luna fixed her eyes on the ground in front of her, where a beetle struggled across the uneven soil. The dirt crumbled beneath him, and he fell

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