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speaking.’ ”
    “I said that!” Boohoo shouted, as he whipped dirty yarn from the ball that Aunt Verdella probably wound ten times already in a futile attempt to keep her house from turning into an even worse web of chaos.
    “No you didn’t, honey. You said, ‘Peters house, Spideyman speaking.’ ”
    Boohoo clunked down on his knees to wind the yarn around the legs of a kitchen chair.
    “Oh well. Who was it, honey?” Aunt Verdella asked.
    “I don’t know. Some lady.”
    “Well, what did she say?”
    “Just if Rudy Peters was there.”
    “She used our last name?”
    “Yeah,” Boohoo said, then he went on to make
whooshes
and
whams
, as he ducked under the chair.
    “Did it sound like the same lady who called yesterday?” Aunt Verdella asked, her hands propped on her knees as she bent over her belly and peered under the chair. Boohoo didn’t answer.
    Aunt Verdella straightened up. “Ada gave my number to a lady who’s looking to have an afghan made to match her new living room set. I hope that wasn’t her … though why she’d ask for Rudy instead is beyond me. Oh well, hopefully she’ll call back.”
    I gave her a kiss, then headed toward the door. “I’m making meat loaf for us tonight,” I said. “So don’t start any supper.”
    “Oh, how nice,” she said. I was on the porch when she called, “You invited your dad, didn’t you?”
    I hesitated. “He wouldn’t come,” I called back.
    “Oh, I think he would. He doesn’t work tomorrow. I’ll give him a call.”
    It was fun cooking in my very own kitchen, even if the pots and pans were scuffed and dented. I cranked the radio up high, since I didn’t need to worry about waking anybody, and while I chopped onions I waited for slow love songs to play.
    Jesse was cute. Real cute. Six feet tall, so I didn’t feel like an Amazon when I stood next to him. He had straight dark hair that he used to let grow past his ears every spring after basketball season, since the coaches were the only ones who enforced the dress code.
    When I was a freshman, Jesse’s family moved to Dauber and built a house on a forty they bought from Mike Thompson—Freeda’s old boyfriend—after he married awoman from South Dakota who missed her family too much to stay in Dauber. Jesse was a junior. He rode my bus for a few months as he worked to buy another car, after the engine blew up in the one he had. I still remember looking up from my book when the bus slowed down to pick him up that first day, and how my head filled with whooshy noises when he boarded. He was cuter than any boy in Dauber High—and he actually smiled at me.
    I thought Jesse liked me, the way he sought me out on the bus, and even in the halls. But it turned out his attention was only meant in friendship, because two weeks after he came, he was suddenly going with Christine Conner, his first in a long string of girlfriends before he graduated.
    One day, just weeks after Jesse moved to Dauber, he rode his bike over to get the book report I’d written for him, since he didn’t even have a book picked out, and the reports were due on Monday. Dad called Jesse a “long-haired hippie” after he left, but Jesse wasn’t a hippie. He didn’t run around high, shouting antiwar slogans and making peace signs. He listened to Bob Dylan, but that was about it. “Not exactly the kind of boy I want to see you date,” Dad grumbled, a year later, when Jesse dropped me off after school one night. I smiled inside because Dad thought Jesse
could
be my boyfriend.
    The day I learned that Jesse had enlisted in the Army, I told Dad—even though it felt awkward since about the only exchange we ever had was about my car, or which one of us would pick up something at the store. Dad’s dark brows dipped when I told him. “Jesse who?”
    “Dayne. The ones who built a house on Mike Thompson’s property. The one you called a hippie when you met him?”
    “Well I’m glad to hear that he felt enough responsibility