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think.
She kisses him back because it’s easier than talking.
    She doesn’t want to think about those magazines and what they say to do. She doesn’t want to think about what other girls think. Mostly, she doesn’t want to think about Rhodesy up ahead there. Something haunts Rhodesy, Abi can feel it. She doesn’t want to know what, though, she really doesn’t. She doesn’t want to think that maybe she’s added some bit of black to the blues in Mary Rhodes.
    She kisses Jude again. No, no thinking.

Da Capo
    S ummer settles in. You might forget for a minute and think it’s never going to rain again. Abi fixes the screen door with a few small nails to hold it in place, then leaves the front door open, the back door, the windows. She’s glad for the noise of rushing water and engines, the roar of trucks to the mill. Time passes slowly, unmarked by bells and lunch announcements. She misses the school library and is glad she took out a few books before the end of the year.
    Open the dictionary. Past B and C. Now it’s D.
    Da capo
. A musical word.
Repeat from the beginning.
The dictionary shows the little sign that composers use for da capo. You look through the music for that sign – a swirly little thing, and you start from there. Where would Abi put a dacapo in her life? Late last summer, just before Mum left? What would she do differently? Or would she put the da capo earlier?
    She looks across the table to Dad. Where would she put the da capo for him?
    Life Before the Chair.
    â€œLook!” She remembers Mum saying. “Look what I found!” Mum had brought the chair home on the old wagon, from a garage sale over a mile away.
    Dad took hold of it and together they brought it into the living room. Dad had laughed aloud. “I’ve been needing one of these.” He’d flopped into the dark green plush and patted the wide armrests.
    â€œI thought you’d like it!” She’d grinned, pleased with herself.
    How could it have been like that? Mum doing and giving, and Dad laughing? And now, Dad not laughing and Mum gone. Even with all this trying to put pieces together, it doesn’t make sense.
    There’d been other good times, too. But there’d also been the times – maybe twice a year – when Mum would get a letter from “home” as she called it. During the cold months, she’d go into her bedroom to read these, and in the warm months, she’d sit on the car seat out front, with the thin piece of airmail paper in her hand, staring at it, and then staring outat the road. She never sat in the greenhouse to read those, and she never shared them. So just how did the pieces fit?
    Always so back to back, Mum and Dad were: he looking to the river, and she to the road.
    Home
. It had always bothered Abi that Mum called another place home. Why wasn’t this home? When would it be? How long did you need to stay in a place for it to become home?
What
exactly made a place home?
    In the place Mum called home – Kent, Abi thought it was – there was no one there for her. Mum’s parents had been dead since before Abi was born. So
home
? How could it be? When Abi asked who the letters came from, her mother would only say that they were from one of her cousins. There were a few, apparently, still living somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. No one with enough money to travel to the far coast of Canada, it seemed. “Not a travelling people,” Mum had said once.
    Back to da capo. How about putting it before Dad lost his job? Or before they moved from the old house? Abi can hardly remember it. Might even have been an apartment. When was that? After old Uncle Bernard died, he left the place to them. Abi could barely swim then. Spent the first year in this house wearing a lifejacket “just in case.”
    All right – put the da capo before she was born…
No
. Abi’s never thought