Wish

“But the knot in my stomach told me that was a lie. The worry clutching at my heart told me my mama might never get her feet on the ground.”

Though she maintains a tough exterior, Charlie’s first-person narration reveals her internal anxiety over her family situation. Barbara O’Connor uses an idiom to describe the process of a person getting their life under control, but Charlie takes the turn of phrase literally. Carla needs to figuratively get her feet on the ground by literally getting out of bed, but Charlie further simplifies the image and sees it as the entire solution to healing their family.

“I studied the inky little stars and hearts I had drawn on my arm that morning.”

Stars become an important motif in the narrative as Charlie’s fixation on wishing permeates the story. Stars also become part of a collective ritual to conclude each day as she sits on the porch every night with Gus and Bertha, and they all look up at the stars. Children often draw on themselves out of boredom in class or as a way of self-expression, but Charlie’s impromptu body art also serves as a reminder of wishing on stars, an especially comforting concept to her, given her fondness for wishing in general.