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We would grab the rope and walk backward until we stood on tiptoe with our arms stretched above our heads. Then we would race forward and leap, white-knuckled when the rope took our weight, watching the ground drop away below our windmilling legs as we swung, laughing, far into the air.

    We couldn’t spend all our time outside, of course, and although we had officially moved into the house soon after the tornado, Dad neverproperly finished it. The list of what was broken, unfinished, or ramshackle was nearly endless. Maybe he’d been building things more carefully at first, but after the tornado, he cut corners with a will. He even had a go-to response when an issue came up. It didn’t matter whether the trouble was a missing chunk of drywall, an electric outlet that didn’t work, or a door that wouldn’t shut all the way   —when a concern was brought to Dad’s attention, he would fire back, “You know good and well I’m no finish carpenter!”
    One night after Mom complained about something and Dad fed her his line, Jerry asked Dad exactly what he meant by the finish carpenter part. I was on my stomach in the living room, drawing with Sheri, and I looked up in time to see Dad slap Jerry across the face.
    “I mean what I said, you imbecile!”
    Jerry ran to his room and Mom raced after him while Dad went outside, slamming the door behind him. When Mom came back to the living room, I went to check on Jerry. He was on his bunk in the bedroom we shared, staring at the wall.
    “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”
    “Yeah. Forget it.”
    “All right.”
    With nothing else to do, I lay in my bunk and looked around the room. The ceiling was bare Sheetrock, with the brand name and dimensions still stenciled on its peeling, yellow surface. When I was bored enough, I counted the hammer marks on it. Our closet was a single length of steel pipe held parallel to the wall with two brackets, and our dresser drawers fell onto the floor if we pulled them out past halfway. The window, like all the others I’d seen Dad install before the tornado, was a single pane of glass set against the cinder block wall with a flimsy frame and no insulation. When a really strong wind howled up, flakes of snow would eddy through the gaps around the window and float down to our floor, where they would slowly melt on the flower-patterned linoleum. In other words, our new room was a million times better than the trailer.
    With Dad already outside, I hoped it would be a night we wouldn’t be called upon to fix the pump in the well. Dad had cut a rectangular hole into the dirt around the well and installed an old pump and a reservoir tank. It was insulated so poorly, however, that the pump often seized, and Dad liked to say that Jerry and I were “just the right size” to climb down into the well and bash an old hammer against the side of the pump until it began running again.
    When the well was first drilled, we were all grateful to have running water. However, the water contained so much iron and other metals and minerals that we could almost feel the grit between our teeth. Mom spit out the first sip she took, declaring it unfit for humans.
    Dad must have tasted it too, because he didn’t seem surprised when a salesman came a few days later to tell us about the latest in water-softening technology. We watched with interest as he collected water from our well in a small vial, then added drips and drops of various chemicals, periodically checking tables of colors and numbers in a three-ring binder. Then he announced that we had some of the hardest water he’d ever tested and that we’d need two complete filtration and injection systems, along with double the normal amount of salt.
    We bought a single system. Jerry and I were supposed to add salt to the machine each week, but that lasted only until the initial supply of salt ran out, because when we told Dad it was time to buy more, he shrugged. From then on our softening system simply served as