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By Root 976 0

feelings about Pete. It had been a long time since I’d realized what fun he was (when I mentioned this to Rose, she said it had been a long time since he’d had fun or been fun, actually), but it was more than that, more a realization that he had certain powers. Those nights he flexed them: he teased me; he charmed his daughters and included them in the game, even allowing them to decide strategy when his play was at a crisis; he topped Jess’s stories, and, in some ways, his style of telling them; he sang verses of songs, both familiar and obscure, that were entertaining, but best of all, appropriate, so that you had private realizations, sharp but silly to express, of how everything that was happening at that moment seemed marvelously to fit—that was Pete’s gift, and it demonstrated to me an intelligence that I wasn’t used to allowing him. In our family life, the inappropriate had always been Pete’s special domain.

One night, Jess told us that Harold had a remodeling project in mind for the July lull in farm work. We were grinning already when Pete said, “I’ve got to hear this.”

“Well, he’s going to rip out the linoleum and the subfloor of the kitchen. You know, the kitchen isn’t over the cellar, it’s over a crawl space. So he’s going to put a new concrete floor in the kitchen, green-tinted concrete that slopes to a drain so he can just hose it down when it gets dirty.”

“You’re kidding,” said Rose.

“Nope. He said if that works out the way he thinks it will, he’s going to try it in the downstairs bathroom, too.”

We laughed.

Ty said, “Is he going to run the hose in from outside?”

Pete said, “He could put in a hose spigot easy enough.”

We laughed again.

I said, “What does Loren think?”

“He doesn’t care. He said, ‘It’s his place, he can do what he wants to it.’ ”

I rolled the dice, landed on St. Charles Place, and paid Rose her rent. She divvied it up between her spend pile and her save pile, and I said, “He’s never going to get married at this rate. Nobody wants to cook in a concrete kitchen that slopes toward a drain.”

“Harold thinks this is an idea he can patent. He can’t figure out why no one’s ever done it before.”

Pete said, “I can’t wait till he tells Larry this one. Larry will go bananas.”

“Or he’ll want a concrete kitchen of his own,” said Rose. “Or he’ll want to go Harold one better and do the whole downstairs, with sheet vinyl on the walls so he could wash those down, too.”

We laughed, but the next day, I saw the delivery truck from the lumberyard in Pike pass our house and turn in at my father’s. I watched while the driver shouted for Daddy, and when he couldn’t roust him, I ran down there to find out what was going on. It was a pantry cabinet, a sink, four base cabinets, and two wall cabinets, as well as eight feet of baby blue laminated countertop, the floor display in the kitchen department of the lumberyard, which my father had bought for a thousand dollars, said the driver ($2500 value, according to the display card taped to the sink). Neither the wood nor the door pattern matched what my father already had—yellow painted cabinets original to the house and linoleum countertops edged in metal—but the display wasn’t large enough to replace what was there. I called for Daddy all over the house and out to the barn, but though his truck was there, he wasn’t. The driver and his helper unloaded the display onto the driveway, and when I said I didn’t have my checkbook, he said the cabinets were already paid for and drove off. I had to laugh, remembering how we’d predicted something the night before, then went home and forgot about it until Ty came in for dinner and told me that he had offered to help Daddy carry the new cabinets into the house and Daddy had said he hadn’t decided where he was going to put them yet, so he was going to leave them sit. Pete got the same response at suppertime.

We were a little perplexed, but the affair of the kitchen cabinets seemed mostly funny until two days later, when we got up and saw that it was going to rain soon, certainly before noon. Ty ate quickly, then walked