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wandered nearby snapping the heads off the weeds.
    “Simon,” she called to him, “what kind of sandwich you want?”
    “I ain’t hungry.”
    “I’ll just make you a little one. And go call your mama and daddy; they have to eat too.”
    “I wish
you
would.”
    “Come on, Simon.”
    He shrugged and started toward the house, still walking aimlessly and kicking at things. “All right,” he said. “But I’ll tell them it’s your fault I came.”
    “They won’t mind you coming.”
    “You think not?”
    He banged the screen door behind him. After he was gone Joan stood in the yard awhile, clutching Janie’s things against her stomach, feeling the dampness soak into her stocking feet. She wished she could just walk off. If it weren’t for Simon, she would; she would go find some place to sit alone and think things out. But her feet were growing cold, and there were sandwiches to make; she shook her hair off her forehead and startedback toward the house. The closer to the house she came the quieter the wind sounded, and when she stepped back into the kitchen there was a sudden silence in her ears that felt odd.
    She put the things from the clothesline into the closet, and then she returned to the kitchen and leaned against the refrigerator while she planned a meal. The room was so cluttered it made thinking difficult. Small objects lay here and there, gathering dust because no one had ever found a place for them. The kitchen windows were curtainless, and littered with lost buttons and ripening tomatoes. And the wall behind the stove was covered with twenty or thirty drawings, Scotch-taped so closely together they might have been wallpaper. Most of them were Simon’s—soldiers and knights and masked men with guns. His mother thought he might be an artist someday. Scattered among them were Janie Rose’s drawings, all of the same lollipop-shaped tree with hundreds of tiny round apples on it. She said it was the tree out back, but that was only a tiny scrubby tree with no leaves; it had never borne fruit and wouldn’t have borne apples even if it had, since it was some other kind of tree. Once her mother said, “Janie, honey, why don’t you draw something
else?
” and Janie had run out crying and wouldn’t come down from the attic. But the next day she had said she would draw something different. She came into the kitchen where they were all sitting, carrying a box of broken crayons and a huge sheet of that yellow pulpy paper she always used. “What else
is
there to draw?” she asked, and her mother said, “Well, a house, for instance. Other children draw houses.” Then they all hung over her, and she drew a straight up-and-down line and a window, and then a green circle above it with lots of red appleson it. Everybody sat back and looked at her; she had drawn an apple tree with a window in it. “
Oh
, my,” she said apologetically, and then she smiled and began filling in the circle with green crayon. After that she never tried houses again. She labored away at apple trees, and signed them, “Miss J.R. Pike” in the corner, in large purple letters. Simon never signed his, but that was because his mother said she would recognize his style anywhere in the world.
    When Simon came downstairs again he had changed into his boots; he was trying to make the floor shake when he walked. “Daddy’s coming and Mama ain’t,” he said. “She ain’t hungry.”
    “Did you ask if she wants coffee?”
    “She didn’t give me a chance. She said go on and let her rest.”
    “Well, run up again and ask her.”
    “
No
, sir,” Simon said. He sat down firmly in one of the chairs.
    “Just run up, Simon—”
    “I won’t do it,” he said.
    Joan thought a minute, and then she said, “Well, all right.” She reached out to smooth his hair down and for a minute he let her, but just barely, and then shrugged her hand away.
    “Daddy wants just a Co-Cola,” he told her.
    “He’s got to have more than