it to a pawn shop on Chapman Highway called Second Chances.
The owner was an older man named Walt Harmon. He had kind eyes and a gray beard, and he looked at the locket for a long time.
“This is a nice piece,” he said. “Old. Real gold. You sure about this?”
Ezoic“No,” I said. “But I need to.”
He gave me a hundred and eighty dollars. Then he wrote my name on a little tag and tied it to the chain.
“I’ll hold it for you as long
as I can,” he said. “In case you want to come back for it.”
With that money, I bought a small chocolate birthday cake from Kessler’s downstairs. Mrs. Kessler gave me a discount and added blue frosting stars without being asked.
EzoicI bought a children’s book about constellations, the kind with glow-in-the-dark pages. Nolan had been obsessed with the night sky ever since his school took a field trip to the planetarium.
And on a clearance rack at a department store, I found a soft navy shirt with a tiny
silver moon embroidered above the pocket.
It was the first new shirt I’d been able to buy Nolan in over a year. Everything else came from the church donation closet or the thrift store.
EzoicI imagined his face when he opened it. A brand-new shirt. With a moon. Picked out just for him.
When he opened it on his birthday morning, he gasped.
“A moon!” he said. “Mom! It’s a real moon!”
He put it on over his pajamas and wouldn’t take it off. He wore it to school the
