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multiplication tables or the meaning of the word “onomatopoeia,” he memorized the steps to achieve a perfect hole in one. Most people believed holes in one were perfect by their very nature.
    Their father believed differently.
    On the days he wasn’t giving lessons to the wealthy members of the golf course, members who came from Chicago and Minneapolis, who’d done well in the stock market or the steel industry and needed to learn how to play golf to make their money seem older than it was, Twiss’s father would bring her along while he played the back nine. Though she wasn’t strong enough to be his official caddy, he’d let her carry his old putter and whack at whatever mushrooms had popped up on the green. Rollie, the groundskeeper, would give her a nickel for slowing their proliferation (except for the morels, which Twiss was supposed to save for Rollie’s wife so she could make soup out of them). After she and her father had finished playing the course, Twiss would use the nickel to buy a cream soda from the clubhouse.
    Milly would stay at home because someone had to stay with their mother, who didn’t like to hear about golf, think about it, or dream about it. She said golf gave her heartburn.
    While Twiss and her father drove to the course on Sunday afternoons her mother would listen to A Day in the Life of  …, a radio program that was supposed to illuminate what it would be like to drive a train across Colorado or to sing on Broadway in New York City. She’d sit down at the kitchen table a whole hour before the program started. Every fifteen minutes, when the wooden bird sprang forth from the cuckoo clock, she’d jump a little.
    “How would you like to climb Kilimanjaro?” she might say to Milly, if Milly happened to pass through the kitchen while the program was on. “I don’t think I’d like to wade through all that snow, but it might be worth it to see the view from the top.”
    “I’d rather look up than down,” Milly might say back, which would commit her to listening to the rest of the program.
    Milly never said whether she liked A Day in the Life of  …, but the way Twiss figured, she still had to sit down and not play golf for an entire hour, an eternal afternoon.
    Countless ticks. Endless tocks.
    Twiss didn’t remember most of those Sundays with any real individual clarity, but she remembered one of them—when she was nine years old—photographically well.
     
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    hat Sunday, Twiss was too sick to play golf, and her mother compelled her to listen to the program with her while Milly accompanied her father to the course. Once or twice a year Twiss caught a cold. To account for her sneezing, she’d pretend she had allergies. Ragweed, she might say. Hay fever, when she couldn’t think of anything better.
    On this particular Sunday afternoon, she said just a little sick? when she meant … she couldn’t think of what she meant. Her head felt like a ball of dough.
    “Oh, no you don’t,” her mother said, when Twiss dressed in her golf clothes and went to the front door to wait for her father. “I wouldn’t hear the end of it at our next Society meeting. They already think I didn’t donate enough fabric at Christmas.”
    “But I meant the yellow stuff,” Twiss said.
    “Pollen,” her mother said. “If you’d said mold, I might have let you go.”
    Twiss appealed to her father when he came down the stairs in his golf shoes, which her mother was always trying to get him to put on outside since the metal spikes on their soles left polka-dot imprints on the wood floors.
    “Looks like your mother may be right about this one,” her father said.
    “Milly thinks I look fine,” Twiss said.
    “What do I think?” Milly said.
    “It’s only one day,” her mother said. “That’s what I think.”
    Her father took the putter from her hand and replaced it with a cherry cough drop. “You can be a champion next week. Give your sister a turn.”
    After he and Milly drove