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true, but it might be a trick. He stood clamped onto the sink and swaying.
    “What if you die?” His face was soaked in red as if all the blood in him was trying to get out and couldn’t. Any moment he’d get even worse. But there was one good thing—he couldn’t get to her. He couldn’t scare her with his gross hands.
    “Lord, girl, I’m not going to pass.” He chuckled. “All it is is a cough.” And the coughing eased up some. He breathed good and full.
    Jennifer lifted the torpedo, an Indy 500 race car shaped like a skinny arrowhead, and flung it. Usually, she aimed for the stomach because it didn’t hurt awful to be hit there, yet enough of a hit that he felt it, that he knew what she’d done. But this time, she flung it right for his head and hit him under the ear. He had coughed for five minutes.
    “Damn it, girl. That one hurt.” He rubbed the place. There was even a speck of blood.
    “You can’t cough that long.”
    “I can’t help my coughing.”
    “Not that long,” she told him.
    He reached down, grabbed the torpedo, and flung it back. The car cracked into the wall.
    “You put a dent in it,” she said. “You’re going to wake her.”
    “Delia needs to be.”
    “I thought she needed to readjust.”
    “Not now. She needs to see what kind of mess her daughter’s up to.” The red in his face had changed, was pinker and cool, like he was controlling the blood, how it flowed, how it moved through the skin and under his short, short brown hair. “She won’t be happy.”
    Jennifer spotted the car. She looked at Terry, then back at the torpedo.
    “Don’t—”
    But she did and flung it and Terry ducked and this time the car sailed through the thin glass of the kitchen window.
    “Shit,” he said. “Now we’re both in trouble, Jenny. Why—” But he stopped himself a second time. A shuffling noise was coming from her mama’s bedroom. “You woke her.” He raised a finger.
    “You did it coughing. And yelling.”
    “Just get me something to fix this,” he said.
    “Like what?”
    “A shirt, cardboard, something. I got to cover this hole unless she finds it.” He leaned in on the broken frame, then swiveled around. “Come on, come on.”
    So she went to her room and rattled open the drawer, scooped up her shirts, and carried the whole bundle to the kitchen.
    “I just need one.” Terry wrapped it around his hand and punched out the remaining glass; the wind swirled, blowing in debris and light.
    “Why don’t you use your own shirt?” she suggested.
    He grabbed up another one of hers, a pink one that she wore a lot, and another, stuffing them in the window like bricks until they fit tight in the square and the wind couldn’t whistle through. It looked as if the window had grown a colorful fungus, her clothes bulging and ugly.
    “You think Delia will notice?”
    “That’s stupid. Of course she’ll notice.” There was a flushing noise—her mother still behind a door. “When do Iget my shirts back?” She only had three clean ones left and needed them.
    “As soon as I get this fixed. You’re all right today.” He glanced down. “We’ve got to measure it,” and he quickly traced his finger along the frame. “I’ll talk with Neil about cutting glass, or maybe plywood. But that’s it. One square, you think?”
    They looked at the fungus blob, and Jennifer nodded. “One square,” she said.
    Then, “I can’t help the coughing, Jenny. Don’t be so hard on me.”
    “I don’t like it.”
    “I don’t either.” He sighed. “Don’t be so hard on me, okay?”
    She wasn’t about to utter
okay
or even give him a nod. Then he started to rub her head, and she jerked back.
    “I washed my hands,” he promised, and put his hand back on her head and she let him. But she didn’t feel calm, couldn’t bring herself down from all his noise, such a thin body, he wouldn’t hold up. He’d pass like Everett, and she’d lose another father. So she rolled the dust around with