The contents of the pan crackled, then ignited. Celia jumped back with a shriek. Rusty was on his feet and across the kitchen in one quick motion. He grabbed the handle of the pan, threw it in the sink, and spun the faucet on, sending a hiss of steam up like a rocket. I sat glued to my chair in the little swirl of chaos, absorbed by question after question and the unsettling feeling that everyone here knew more than me about something.
Just then, Bru stepped into the kitchen all showered up and smelling like patchouli oil. Enough to compete with the pungent burning smell that now blanketed the room. He took the situation in like it was nothing out of the ordinary, grabbed a set of keys hanging on the hook by the door, and said simply, “I’ll go get the pizza, then. Combo okay for everybody?”
I nodded, eyeing Rusty across the kitchen. He smiled at Bru. “That’ll be fine.”
Celia blew a loose curl off her forehead, smoothed her dress, then smiled a thank-you at him. “You’re the best, baby. I don’t know what went wrong that time, but one of these days I’ll get this whole cooking thing, I will,” she said, wiping her hands with a dish towel.
Bru walked over and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hopefully I’ll live to see it.” He put his hat on and looked from me to Rusty. “Anybody need anything else while I’m out?”
We were all quiet.
“Okay, then. I’ll be back in time for the star show.”
17
The “star show,” as Bru called it, was enough to make me forget everything else the moment I looked at the sky. When he got home with the pizza, he herded us all out onto the deck. It jutted out over the side of the mountain and left the impression we were floating between the valley and the stars. We settled around a circular wooden table lit by a single candle so we’d have enough light to see, but not so much that it drowned out the light of the falling stars that streaked fast across the sky every few seconds.
“They’re called the Perseids,” Bru said through a mouthful of pizza. “Because they all look like they come from Perseus up there.” I remembered Perseus from English. He was the one who killed Medusa and saved Andromeda and tamed Pegasus—all these impossible things that made him the kind of legend that got his own constellation. Another faint tail of light skimmed over the mountaintops, and I tried to trace its path back to the bigger-than-life hero in the sky.
“All these shooting stars come from the same place?” I asked, searching for the next one.
“Yes and no,” Bru answered. He set his slice of pizza down. “They’re not really stars, but they do come from the same place. It’s a big ol’ cloud of comet dust. Little bits of rock and ice no bigger’n the grains of sand on the beach.”
I considered this as two more, fainter than the ones before, etched barely visible lines across the black of the sky. It didn’t seem possible that something so tiny could make light that we could see all the way down here.
“Just beautiful,” Celia whispered.
Rusty leaned forward, elbows on the table, and said exactly what I was thinking. “I don’t understand.”
Bru thought about it for a second, then turned to face us. “Without gettin’ too tricky, it’s like this. Every August, the earth’s orbit crosses this cloud of debris left behind by a comet that swung by years ago. When those little bits hit our atmosphere and burn up, they put on quite a light show.”
I glanced at Rusty and wondered if that’s what we were—the little bits left behind to burn up and fall after the bright streak of a comet had come and gone. We’d definitely put on a show the last two days.
We sat eating in silence for a little while, watching the pieces of comet dust flare up and rain down delicate white light. When the box was empty but for one last slice, Bru leaned back in his chair, patting his round little belly. “Somebody’s got to finish that off, and it shouldn’t be me. Honor . . . Cece?”
“No, thank you,” I said. Celia shook her head.
“Rusty?”
“Nah, I’m full.” He stretched his arms above his head and yawned. “And I gotta go to bed soon. I wanna be up early to work on the car.” He glanced over at me. “We’re on a deadline here.”
Bru leaned forward and grabbed the piece of pizza. “I can help you out with it after I get back from my a.m. tour. I’ll be back early. Some crazy tourist lady booked a sunrise Vortex tour. Which means I gotta get up at four to get the jeep ready.”
“Bru does jeep tours around the mountains here,” Celia explained. She reached around the table for our empty paper plates and unused packets of parmesan cheese and pepper flakes. “The Vortex tours are his most popular ones.”
“Vortex?” I asked.
Rusty leaned his head back on the chair and put his face to the sky. “Oh, damn, here we go. Thought we already had our cosmic lesson for the night.”
Bru turned his attention to me, ignoring him. “A vortex,” he began in his teacherly kind of tone, “is basically a spot where you can feel the energy the earth gives off,” he said, crunching his last bite of pizza crust. “But amplified. For reasons we don’t really know about. The Indian tribes around here found ’em and used ’em for all their spiritual ceremonies. And now people visit them for all different reasons—meditation, peace, clarity . . . what have you.”
He wiped his mouth with a napkin but missed a few crumbs that fell to his beard, and I tried not to watch them move up and down as he talked. “The spots affect everyone different, just depends on what you’re there for and how open you are to it.” Rusty snorted, but Bru went on unfazed. “They’re all over around here, around the whole world, actually, but you gotta know how to find ’em, and that’s where I come in.”