Be polite. Ruth wanted to correct him out loud but didn't. She didn't know what would be worse, in Allen's estimation, and she needed to make the right impression.

Allen bent down so he was eye level with the boy. “What else you know about?”

“I know twenty different constellations.”

“Twenty?” Allen let out a low whistle. “That's a lot to know. You know Orion's Belt?”

“Of course,” Charley rolled his eyes. “I could find Orion since I was three. Orion's boring.”

Allen laughed. “I guess you aren't interested in the spaceships then. I thought you would be, being Del's boy and all.”

“Spaceships?” Allen had Charley's attention. Ruth held her breath.

“They been here before, and when they came, they came right from Orion.”

Allen stood up, turned his face into the blue sky, where Orion would be if it were dark. They searched the sky together for a minute, and when Charley turned back toward Ruth he was smiling—the same Charley smile, exponentially bright.

Brenda was letting a tarantula crawl on her arm. Ruth had not allowed this at first, but Charley had convinced her they were both unlikely to bite and not actually deadly poisonous. He'd looked it up in an ancient set of World Books in the school library.

“Are there ghosts here?” Nancy asked Allen.

Ruth watched Brenda's tarantula unfold its first set of legs, which stretched delicately forward and planted themselves, levered the crawling mass of the body forward. The creatures did not look at all efficient, Ruth thought, but they sure did cover country.

“There's nothing to be afraid of,” Allen said. “Most days the population of Berlin is entirely tarantulas.”

“Thomas Edison invented a machine that could call the dead,” Charley shouted. Nancy winced, covered her ears. “Or he tried to. It didn't work.”

“Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, not a dead guy phone,” Brenda said.

Ruth sighed. None of her children had made friends at school, but she didn't worry about the girls. She had shared not just a room but a bed with Sister when they were young, Mano joining them straight out of the crib. Ruth knew sister love was like a gas—it could lift the barometric pressure of the entire atmosphere if you needed it to.

“But if there are ghosts,” Allen said, “they're over there in the old hospital. The doctor was nothing but a Chicago stockyard butcher. Could be the ghosts of his lost patients haunt this spot, only they must be scared of tarantulas, since I don't see any here now.”

Brenda giggled, intertwined her fingers so that the tarantula could walk from one arm to the other. Nancy went wide-eyed, scooped a tarantula off the ground, held it between her body and the old hospital. Ruth clutched St. Christopher. Charley went back to tarantula-stalking, tracing their paths on a piece of lined binder paper. Sometimes he stopped and held the map he had created up to the sky, studying both intently.