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And Daddy never looked his age. Of course to me, thirty- two sounded very old back then, but he was athletic and strong with raven black hair he kept swept back and eves the color of rich wet soil. He always had a tan, a light almond complexion, even in the winter because he worked outdoors as a building contractor. He wasn't very tall, maybe just a few inches taller than Mommy, but he had wide shoulders and never slouched. He told us that his mother always made posture important.

"When I was your age, children," he said. "my mother made me walk around the house with a book on my head, and if it fell off. I had to stand in the corner with it on my head for twenty minutes. I hated doing that, so the book never fell off, and you can see how that helped."

"Should we walk around with books on our heads. Daddy?" I asked him.

He smiled and said no, because our posture was fine. We never met our grandmother, his mother. She had died a year before we were born. He made his mother sound like an army general sometimes, describing how she shouted orders and marched him about his home to do chores. but Mommy told us he liked to exaggerate.

"The truth was, your father was a spoiled brat," she said, and she said it in front of him. He would pretend to be any at her, but they would always laugh about it.

So many things were heard with only a half an ear in our home those days.

But not Mommy's spirits. At least, not to her. And soon not to me!

I had vet to hear them. but I knew Mommy was right in saving I would. I could feel it in the air. Their voices were almost in my tars. There was a faint whisper here, a faint whisper there, maybe waiting in a closet, a cabinet, or behind a closed door. I'd stop and listen hard. but I didn't hear anything really. or at least nothing that made any sense. I wasn't quite ready yet. I guess.

None of the spirits came from Daddy's family, only Mommy's. Mommy said that was because her family was special. They were people born with mystical talents and spiritual gifts. Some could read fortunes: some could see the future in sins in Nature. Some had healing powers and could stop disease with just a touch of their hands, and one, it was said, even rose from the dead and returned to his family. Daddy said he must have been a sight to see and a smell to smell.

Mommy didn't get angry at him when he made fun of her stories. Instead she made those light brown eyes of hers small and tightened her lips as she gazed at him. Then she put her hands on our shoulders and leaned down between us.

"He'll see someday," she whispered in both our tars, but kissing Noble's. "Someday, he'll know."

Like Mommy. Daddy had no brothers or sisters. He had cousins and uncles, of course, and a father who was still alive, but was in a home now for very sick elderly people. All we knew was he couldn't remember anything or anyone, not even Daddy, so there was no point in our visiting him. Daddy did visit whenever he could. but Mommy said our grandfather was already gone. He had just left his body behind for a while like some statuary. "a living tombstone," she called him.

If he was kind, he would take his body with him," she muttered.

Her own mother had passed away when Noble and I were only two. I had no real memory of her or of my maternal grandfather, because he had died ten years before we were born. He had fallen off the ladder when he was repairing a leak in the roof of this house, and he had died almost instantly when the fall broke his neck.

Daddy told me he remembered Mommy's grandmother well. If he talked about her, he usually spoke with a twist in his lips, since as we knew he blamed Mommy's interest in spiritual matters on her and Mommy's mother. Daddy said her Grandmother had come from Hungary to marry her grandfather, and besides her two suitcases, she was laden down with a bag of superstitions, many of which Mommy still believed. To this day Mommy wouldn't let Daddy put his hat on a table because that would bring death or tragedy. He couldn't whistle in the house because that was calling the devil, and if a knife fell, she would predict we were getting a visitor.

Sometimes Daddy teased Mommy by calling her his gypsy lover because of all these superstitions and the stories he said Mommy's mother told him about the gypsies, who she said stole children and wandered about the Hungarian countryside, putting on carnivals and magic shows and reading fortunes. Daddy stopped just short of calling Mommy's mother a witch, herself. He told us she had ways with herbs and natural cures that, he had to admit, seemed magical. Mommy knew a great deal about those things, too, and relied on them more than she relied on modern medicine.

In fact, she and Daddy had some serious arguments about our getting our -inoculations. He finally convinced her by assuring her he would just sneak us off and do it anyway if she didn't cooperate. She relented, but she wasn't happy about it.

Daddy was a healthy man who was hardly ever sick. Both Noble and I thought he was invulnerable, an extension of the wood and metal, the steel and cement, he used to build houses. He could work in bitter cold weather and in hot, humid weather and never get discouraged. When he came home to us, he was always happy and energetic. He didn't fall asleep on the sofa, or drag himself about the house. He loved to talk, to tell us about his day, mentioning people or places as if we had been there with him. Both of us wished we had. but Mommy would never let us go to a work site even though Daddy wanted to take us.

"Get distracted." she told him, and they'll get hurt. And don't tell me you don't get distracted. Arthur Madison Atwell, You and your political speeches. When you make them, you're oblivious to everything else and don't even know you're standing in the cold rain."

Mommy was right, of course. Whenever Daddy had an opponent he deemed worthy, he would argue politics, but that wasn't often at home because we had so few visitors and Mommy wasn't very interested in politics. Daddy criticized her for that and said she cared more about the politics of the afterlife than of this life.

Most of the time. Noble and I would sit at his feet and smile and laugh at the way he shouted back at the television set when he watched the news. He did it with such vehemence, the veins in his temples popping, that we actually expected he would be heard and whoever it was on the screen would pause. look out, and address him directly. Mommy was always chiding him about it, but her words floated around him like so many butterflies who were too terrified to land, fearing they would flame up instantly if they dared touch his red-hot angry earlobes.

No matter how she yelled at him, or how sharply either of them spoke to each other, we could see and feel how strong was the love between them. Sometimes. unexpectedly. Daddy would take Mommy's hand and just hold it while they sat and talked or when they were walking about our house and land. Noble and I would follow behind. Noble more interested in a dead worm, but my eyes were always on them.

And then there were times when Mommy would get a chill, even on hot summer days. and Daddy would throw his arms around her and hold her. She would lay her head against his shoulder and he would kiss her temples, her forehead, and her cheeks, raining his kisses down upon her like so many warm, soothing drops. She would hold on to him and then feel better and walk on or do whatever it was she was doing before the evil spirit hiding in a breeze had grazed her forehead or touched her heart.

Noble rarely saw any of this. He was always more distracted than I was. Everything competed for his attention. and Mommy always complained that he wasn't listening properly or thinking hard enough about what she had just said.

"Your thoughts are like nervous birds. Noble, flitting from one branch to another. Settle down, listen to me," she would plead. "If you don't learn to listen to Inc, you'll never learn to listen to them," she would say and glance out the window or into the darkness.

Noble would raise his eyebrows and look at her and then steal a look at me. Mommy didn't know it. but I knew he didn't want to listen to them: he didn't want to hear any voices. Lately, in fact, the very idea of it had suddenly begun to terrify him. I could see that he dreaded the day he would hear someone speak and see no one there. whereas I longed for it. I wanted so much to be like Mommy,

"You should be happy they will speak to you. Noble. You'll know things other people don't," I told him.

"What things?" he asked me.

"Things." I said, and made my eyes small like Mommy often did. "Secret things," I whispered. "Things only we can know because of who we are," I recited. I had heard Mommy say it so often.

He grimaced with skepticism and lack of interest, and I couldn't make him listen like Mommy could.