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He did, mumbling under his breath until she turned her fiery blue eyes on him, making him swallow the rest of his angry words.

But Daddy agreed with Papa George: the miners were being exploited. This was no life for anyone.

I never understood why Daddy, who was brought up on Cape Cod in a fisherman's family, ended up working in a place where he was shut away from the sun and the sky all day. I knew he missed the ocean, yet we never returned to the Cape and we had nothing to do with Daddy's family. I didn't even know how many cousins I had, or their names, and I had never met or spoken to my grandparents. All I had ever seen was a faded black and white photograph of them with Daddy's father seated and his mother standing beside his father, both looking unhappy about being photographed. His father had a beard and looked as big as Daddy is now. His mother was wispy looking, but with hard, cold eyes.

The family in Provincetown was something Daddy didn't discuss. He would always change the subject, just saying, "We just had differences. It's better we're apart. It's easier this way."

I couldn't imagine why it was easier, but I saw it was painful for him to talk about it. Mommy never wanted to talk about it either. Just bringing up the family caused her to start crying and complaining to me that Daddy's family always thought little of her because she'd been an orphan. She told me she had been adopted by people who she said were too old to raise a child. They were both in their sixties when she was a teenager and they were very strict. She said she couldn't wait to get away from them.

I wanted to know more about them and about Daddy's family, too, but I was afraid it would start an argument between her and Daddy, so after a while, I just stopped asking questions. But that didn't stop their arguments.

One night soon after I had gone to bed, I heard their voices rising against each other. They were in their bedroom, too. The trailer home had a small kitchen to the right of the main entrance, a little dinette and a living room. Down a narrow hallway was the bathroom. My bedroom was the first on the right and Daddy and Mommy's was at the end of the trailer.

"Don't tell me I'm imagining things," Daddy warned, his voice cross. "The people dropping hints ain't liars, Haille," he said. I sat up in bed and listened. It wasn't hard to hear normal conversation through those paper thin trailer walls as it was, but with them yelling at each other, it was as if I were right in the room with them.

"They're not liars. They're busybodies with nothing else to do with their boring, worthless lives than manufacture tales about other people."

"If you don't give them the chance. . ."

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"What am I supposed to do, Chester? The man's the bartender at Frankie's. He talks to everyone, not just me," she whined'.

I knew they were arguing about Archie Marlin. I never mentioned it to Daddy, but twice that I knew of, Archie drove Mommy home. Archie had short orange-red hair and skin the shade of milkweed with freckles on his chin and forehead. Everyone said he looked ten years younger than he really was, although no one knew his exact age. No one knew very much about Archie Marlin. He never gave anyone a straight answer to questions about him-self. He joked or shrugged and said something silly. Supposedly, he had been brought up in Michigan or Ohio, and had spent six months in jail for forging checks. I never understood why Mommy liked him. She said he was full of good stories and had been to lots of exciting places, like Las Vegas.

She said it again now during the argument in the bedroom.

"At least he's been places. I can learn about them from him," she asserted.

"It's just talk. He hasn't been anywhere," Daddy charged.

"How would you know it's just talk, Chester? You're the one who hasn't been anywhere but the Cape and this trap called Sewell. And you brought me to it!"

"You brought yourself, Haille," he retorted, and suddenly she stopped arguing and started crying. Moments later, he was comforting her so softly I couldn't hear what he was saying and then they grew quiet.

I didn't understand what it all meant. How did Mommy bring herself here? Why would she bring herself to a place she didn't like?

I lay awake, thinking. There were always those deep silences between Mommy and Daddy, gaps they were both afraid to fill. Then the arguments would pass, just as this one did, and it would be as if nothing ever happened, nothing was ever said. It was as if they declared a truce over and over because both knew if they didn't, something terrible might happen, something terrible might be said.

Nothing was as mysterious to me as love between a man and a woman. I had crushes on boys at school and was now sort of seeing lobby Lockwood more than any other boy. Since my best friend Alice was the smartest girl in school, I thought she might know something about love, even though she had never had a. boyfriend. She was nice, but unpopular because she was about twenty-five pounds overweight and her mother made her keep her hair in pigtails. She wasn't allowed to wear any makeup, not even lipstick. Alice read more than anyone I knew, so I thought that maybe she had come across some book that explained love.

She thought a moment after I asked her. She replied it was something scientific. "That's the only way to explain it," she claimed in her usual pedantic manner.

"Don't you think it's something magical?" I asked her. On Wednesday afternoons she would come to our trailer after school and study with me for the weekly Thursday geometry test. It was more for my benefit than hers, for she ended up tutoring me.

"I don't believe in magic," she said dryly. She was not very good at pretending. I was actually her only real friend, maybe partly because she was too brutally honest with her opinions when it came to the other girls at school.

"Well then why is it," I demanded, "that a man will look at one woman specially and a woman will do the same, look at one man specially? Something's got to happen between them, doesn't it?" I insisted.

Alice pressed down on her thick lower lip. Her big, brown round eyes moved from side to side as if she were reading words printed in the air. She had a habit of chewing on the inside of her left cheek, too, when she was deep in thought. The girls in school would giggle and say, "Alice is eating herself again."

"Well," she said after a long pause, "we know we're all made of protoplasm."

"Ugh."

"And chemical things happen between cells," she continued, nodding.

"Stop it."