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just a few small double-hungs in each room that we covered with plastic in winter. My dad had built the house when he was twenty: a pine-sided cabin with two bedrooms and a porch and a barn where he had hoped, someday, tokeep goats or horses. Now that barn was just a place with no walls where we kept snow tires and broken lawn mowers and old chairs in need of caning.
    The weeds were thick and everywhere: pigweed and witchgrass and dandelion. It had rained all of June, and standing water pooled in between the rows and mosquito eggs floated around in the pools. But that day was all sun. My hair fell into my face and stuck to my cheeks, and the thin brown hairs on my legs shone. Wet dirt wedged under my fingernails and made them throb. The skin on my arms and legs burned. My mom’s arms were a nice freckled brown, and she didn’t sweat. Mine were my dad’s: pink and burnable.
    â€œSwing low, sweet chariot,” my mom sang, quietly and out of key. She had grown up in a big house in the suburbs, just like the girl in my book, and could have done anything with her life. Back in college she had wanted to be a poet. There were floppy books of poetry stored on a shelf in the corner of her bedroom, collecting dust. Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. There were old lace bras in her underwear drawer that she never wore. I got up and moved to the grassy shade at the edge of the garden. I lay down and closed my eyes and thought about how a Coke or a blue Slush Puppie or a sip of my mom’s ice-cold wine would feel on my tongue. I could hear her inching along through the rows. I picked a blade of grass and stuck it between my teeth and nibbled on it, let thebitter taste seep all over, and then I spit it out and just lay there, feeling the cool.
    I had the story of how they met like a movie in my mind. My dad had a job at the local college building storage sheds. It was hot and he worked with his shirt off and all the girls hung around, my mom told me, pretending to read near where he cut and hammered boards. But she was the only one to offer him a glass of ice water. He said he’d love one but that swimming was an even better way to cool down. Then he grinned. “You like to swim?”
    He took her to a place in the Silver Creek called Indian Love Call and told her it was named that because Indians would bring their girlfriends there. On one side of the river a ledge outcrop rose twenty feet above the water, and they carried their towels up to that rock and looked down. The water bristled with snowmelt, and the boulders flashed silver in the sun. He beat his fists against his chest and made a hooting call meant to imitate an Indian; his voice echoed back. Then he took off all his clothes and leapt into the water. My mom stood there in her jeans and blouse looking down at him. He crowed and hollered and splashed and looked up at her. She laughed. “What you waiting for?” he called out.
    â€œIt looks cold!” she shouted above the sound of water hitting stone.
    â€œFresh!” he yelled, so my mom took off all her clothes and jumped in too. She’d never been naked in front of aman or leapt off a cliff into ice water; she said she knew right then, in midair, that her life would be something entirely different from what she had imagined.
    â€œYou all done?” My mom stood up, brushed her dark hair out of her face with the back of her hand, and looked down at me on the grass.
    â€œYeah. Pooped,” I said, so we walked back up to the house together. The sun had settled below the trees, and the sky bloomed tangerine behind the leaves. She was quiet. In one of her not-talking moods. “Speak, woman,” my dad would say if he were here, poking her ribs, trying to get her to crack a smile. “We’re missing you down here.”
    She put some rice on the stove and started chopping spinach and peas. Every once in a while she’d glance up at the old-fashioned clock that hung on our