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I didn't look as much like Mommy as I wanted. Both Noble and I resembled Daddy more. We had his nose and his strong mouth. Although both Mommy and Daddy had brown eyes. both Noble and I had blue-green eyes. which Mommy said had something to do with our spiritual powers because sometimes our eyes were more blue and sometimes more green. Mommy claimed it had to do with cosmic energy. Daddy shook his head, looked at me, and pointed to his ear.

Half an ear. I thought, and smiled to myself, but never out loud in front of Mommy. I always thought of smiles as whispered or spoken or even shouted because Mommy seemed to be able to hear our feelings as well as look at us and see them.

When I was older. I would wonder how it came to pass that two people with such different ideas about the world and what was in it fell so deeply in love with each other. Mommy would tell us that love was something that had no logic, no formula, and was, in her opinion, the hardest thing to predict, even harder than earthquakes.

"Sometimes. I think love just floats in the air like pollen and settles on you so that whomever you're with or see at that time is your love. Sometimes I think that," she whispered, as if it was sinful to think it, to believe that something as powerful and important as love could be so carefree and incidental.

She whispered this to us after one of those beautiful times when she told Noble and me the store_ of her and Daddy. She had told it before, but we both loved hearing it again and again, or at least I did. She told it like she would tell a fairy tale with us sitting at her feet and listening, me more attentively of course.

"One day, a little more than five years after my father had died, we had another serious leak in our roof," she began. "Since my father had died trying to fix a leak, my grandmother thought it was an evil omen, and she was adamant we get the new leak repaired immediately."

"What's adamant?" Noble asked her.

We had just turned six when she told us her story this particular time. We were having a geology lesson when something made her think about it, and she closed her book and sat back. smiling. The year before. Mommy had decided she would home tutor us, at least for the first few years. Daddy was not happy about that. but Mommy told him that her experience as a grade school teacher made her more than qualified to provide us with the best possible early education, and the early years are the most formidable ones, she insisted.

"Besides," she said, "postponing all the extraneous and foolish issues surrounding public education today can only be a good thing. Arthur. Parents. boards of education. and educators are all bickering, and the children are getting lost and forgotten in all this."

In the end Daddy reluctantly agreed. "But, Sarah, only for the first year or so," he added. Mommy said nothing. and Daddy looked at me with a worried expression. It was she who was using only a half an ear now. I thought.

"Adamant." Mommy told Noble. "means determined. Nothing can change your mind. Stubborn, like you get too often." she said and then smiled and kissed him. Mommy never said anything bad about Noble without kissing him right afterward, It was as if she wanted to be sure what she said didn't linger, didn't matter, or maybe wasn't heard by any evil spirits in the house, a weakness it could exploit to get to his very soul.

Yet she didn't do that for me. I realized, Why wasn't she worried about an evil spirit touching me?

"Anyway," she continued. "the first nice day after the rain. Grandma Jordan had me on the telephone searching for a builder to fix our roof. It wasn't easy to get someone fast, and in truth, it wasn't easy to get any

one at all."

"Why?" I asked.

Noble looked up, surprised at my question. He very rarely had any to ask. and I had not asked this question during the previous times she had told us her story.

The job wasn't very big. It was more a handyman's job than a licensed contractor's, but your great-grandma Jordan wanted what she called 'a real carpenter,' so I had to call and plead with people," Mommy said. "Almost all of them said either they had no time for it or they couldn't get to it for weeks and weeks, maybe.

"Finally, I called your father's number, and as hick, or maybe something more, would have it, he picked up the phone himself. He heard me pleading, and he laughed and said. All right. Miss Jordan. I'll be there this afternoon.'

"The way he said 'Miss Jordan' told me he knew of me. knew I was what people called a spinster schoolteacher just because I was in my late twenties and still not married."

She paused and looked thoughtful a moment.

"To tell you the truth." she continued as if something she hadn't thought before had just occurred to her. "it made me a little nervous to hear him speak so casually to me."

"Why?" I asked. Mommy was never nervous about speaking to Daddy now. I thought.

"Why? Well," she said, looking at Noble as if he had been the one to ask. "I never had a boyfriend, not really. Dates occasionally, but no steady beau."

"Beau?" Noble asked looking up quickly. "You mean with arrows and everything?"

"No. silly, Beau-- b...e...a...u. It means lover" she said. smiling. "Some day when you're a teenager, you'll accuse me of being old-fashioned, even in my speech."

Noble grimaced with disappointment. It was obvious to me that none of this was very interesting to him. He looked at his hand and moved his fingers as if he had discovered an amazing thing about himself.

"Your father drove over in his truck. and Grandma Jordan went out to inspect him," Mommy continued, her voice straining with some

disappointment at Noble's small attention span. That was the way your grandmother was with people. She didn't meet them. She inspected them. She looked for flaws, for something dark. I thought to myself. Oh no!" she cried, seizing Noble's attention again. "She'll get a bad feeling about him just like she had about a plumber we called, and we'll lose him.

"But she surprised me," she said, running her hand through Noble's hair. "She smiled and nodded her approval of your father. I brought Daddy into the house, and he looked at where the roof had stained the ceiling. He had this flirtatious smile on his lips every time he talked to me. I'm sure I was blushing. Fm blushing now, just thinking about it," she told us. and I saw that she was. It put a small feather in my stomach, and the tickle went right to my heart.

She sighed before she continued.