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Noble was beg-inning to lose interest again. He had a dead caterpillar in his pocket and brought it out to straighten on the carpet.

"Where did you get that?" Mommy snapped at him. It made me jump because turning her sharp voice on Noble was not something she did very often. Most of the time, she turned it on me.

"I found it on the porch step," he said.

"You didn't kill it, did you?" she demanded with a note of fear in her voice. He shook his head,

"Never kill anything as beautiful as that. Noble. Every bad thing you do is kept in an evil bank account, and when there is enough in it. Nature will punish you severely." she warned, her eyes now not full of anger as much as they were full of real worry.

He widened his eyes, but he didn't look afraid. Somehow. nothing Mommy said or did frightened Noble. It was as if he had been inoculated against threats, especially ones that emanated from the world of mystery. If he couldn't see it for himself or hear it, he didn't believe in it. Nature was just too abstract an idea.

I was so different. I looked for Mommy's spirits in every shadow and corner. I listened to every breeze that threaded through the trees or through our open windows. I even sniffed after odors that were different or strange. In my heart of hearts. I felt it was all coming to me faster and stronger now. Soon. soon. I would be as Mommy was, and maybe then she would kiss me when she whispered in my ear or be worried more that an evil spirit would touch me. Maybe then.

After all,, hadn't she told me often that the reason she insisted I be named Celeste was that something divine would be passed on to me?

"Anyway," Mommy continued, refusing to be distracted from her wonderful, romantic story. "your father went out and set up his ladder. Just the sight of it against the house drove my mother and my Grandma back inside. The memory of my father falling was still too vivid for my mother. She found him lying there unconscious while I was at school, you see. I'll never forget that phone call when they summoned me to the office, and she was screaming and crying, He wasn't moving. He wasn't breathing."

She wiped away an errant tear and sucked in her breath.

Noble was attentive again. Any reference to death captured his imagination. but I sensed it also frightened him a little. He moved a little closer to me so that we could touch.

"Be careful. I told your father when he went up that ladder. He looked down at me, smiled in that way of his that can put you at such ease, and then he went up to the roof so gracefully and confidently, I had no anxiety about it.

"What a beautiful view from here." he called down to me. "Your home is in a perfect place in the valley. I can see clear to the lake that feeds the creek and a beautiful pond. You ever go swimming there? I would," he said, sitting on the edge of the roof as if he was sitting in a rocking chair on someone's porch and had all the time in the world,

" Please hurry,' I shouted up at him." Mommy told us, and then paused to give us the same explanation why. "There were nasty spirits twirling about the house. and I did all I could to keep them from climbing the walls to get at him."

"What did you do. Mommy?" I asked in a whisper. This I had asked before, but it was like it was my part in a play. She looked to me for the question, anticipated it.

"I chanted at them. and I recited the Lord's Prayer.

Finally. Daddy was finished and started down the ladder. I held my breath and watched him nervously. He jumped down the last five steps or so and smiled at me.

" 'Fixed,' he said.

" 'Thank you,' I told him.

"Then he asked me about my school-teaching job and about the house itself. He was truly intrigued with the construction. We didn't go back inside right away. and Grandma Jordan didn't come out and interrupt us. My mother was always so anxious for me to meet a man and get married, you see. Anyway, I showed him around the property and we talked.

"There were few long, pauses between us. I wanted to hear his voice, and he wanted to hear mine. Finally," she said, smiling that soft smile that made her even more beautiful. "he asked me out on a date. I was so surprised I didn't say yes and I didn't say no. I just stared stupidly at him until he said. 'I have to know before I go or before I go on social security.'

"Of course you know I said yes, and the rest is history," she concluded, folding her hands over each other as if she were folding the covers of a book.

"What's history?" Noble asked. His interest in the word surprised both of us.

"All the events, the time that passed, our marriage, your birth, up until today," she explained patiently.

Noble thought a moment.

"Is tomorrow history, too?" he asked.

"It will be." she said, and that seemed to please him.

Why did it matter at all to him? Of all the parts of the wonderful love story, why did that matter?

Noble was always a puzzle to me, even though we were as close as identical twins. Daddy said we were so close in our looks and mannerisms, we could have been born Siamese. It was true that we looked so much like each other, but there was something different in his eyes from what was in mine. I guess it all had to do with his being a boy and my being a girt It was something I would learn about very soon, but never quite understand,

Although Noble wasn't