Milk Glass Moon Read Online Free PDF

It is one thing to parent a helpless infant and then a child, but when that child develops a will, the future becomes clear—I won’t be in charge anymore, and I won’t be able to protect her. My husband will have to guide us through these rough patches, since parenting seems to come so naturally to him. I have to learn how to calm down and lead my family. And then I have to find a way to love my job as a mother as the requirements change, and I’m going to need Jack to help me do it.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    It’s been three weeks since Etta almost fell off the roof. She survived two weeks of being grounded, which was pretty terrible for her because she missed all the end-of-summer barbecues and the picnic trip with her friends to the Natural Bridge. She moped around for days, and then at the one-week mark, things began to get a little better between us. She made French toast for us on Sunday morning and did her laundry without my asking. Since things are back to normal, Jack has taken her over to Kingsport for their annual father-daughter shopping trip for the first day of school. Etta wants a backpack she saw at Miller and Rhodes.
    I go through the house with a laundry basket, loading it up with things that need to be put away. Etta’s shoes, comic books, notebooks, pencils, and gear fill the basket. As I go up to her room, Shoo the Cat bounds up the stairs next to me. He charges into Etta’s room, and I follow him.
    Last summer we let Etta paint her room. She chose periwinkle with white trim. Her iron bed, painted antique beige, is covered with one of her grandma MacChesney’s quilts, a pattern called “Drunkard’s Path.” She has a poster of Black Beauty over her bed (does every preteen girl in America love purple and horses?).
    Etta has a map of the world on her far wall. In red she’s circled where she’s been, and in pencil the places she wants to go someday. (I’m surprised to see locations in India and New Zealand circled in pencil.) I trace my finger from the United States to Italy and find my father’s hometown of Schilpario, north of my mother’s: the city of Bergamo, high in the Italian Alps. Etta has written the names of her relatives next to the dots that mark the mountain villages. South on the Mediterranean coast she has circled Sestri Levante and written her cousin Chiara’s name enclosed in a heart. Since I took Etta to Italy, she and Chiara have been faithful pen pals, and in many ways, Chiara, who is fifteen, is like a big sister to Etta. Chiara wants to come to the States one day. Judging by the length of her letters, she will have a lot to say when she gets here.
    Etta’s toy chest, only a year ago filled with dolls and stuffed animals, is now filled with equipment. There’s a fishing basket, Rollerblades, a basketball, and several small branches (what she uses them for, I have no idea). She should have been a boy, I think as I prick my finger on a fishhook. I gather up some loose pencils from the bottom of the trunk and return them to the cup on her desk.
    The top of the desk is covered in butcher paper, on which she has drawn a map of the heavens and written STARS OVER CRACKER’S NECK HOLLER in calligraphy along the top. She has made diagrams of the constellations and labeled each one. This pencil drawing was done with a ruler; it is so precise, I’m surprised it’s hers. Granted, there are many places where the paper is worn thin from erasures, but for the most part, her work is sure-handed. Etta loves astronomy—she points out the Milky Way on clear nights, or a planet when she recognizes it sparkling in the sky—but I didn’t know she was so passionate about the subject that she would take time to study the night sky in such detail. Evidently, Etta has an inner life that I know very little about.
    When I was a girl, I spent a lot of time thinking about why I’d been born in Big Stone Gap, of all the places in the world. I would look up at the sky and wonder where it ended. I had