“John’s at the prison today, working with the dogs.”

            “Oh,” I said, looking up from the table at the motionless ceiling fan. “Okay.”

            “Only two weeks til he’s done.”

            “That’s great,” I said. “Wow, that’s great.”

            Mom looked at me over the lip of her glass as she drained it. “It’s a promotion, Adam,” she said when she’d finished. The glass thudded dully on the coaster and she returned to her sewing. “It’s a promotion.”

            “What?”

            “Don’t do that,” she said. “It actually is great. It’s going to be great for him.”

            “Isn’t that what I said?”

            She didn’t answer and I watched her pale fingers work a needle through some fabric she’d stretched over a small hoop.

            The phone rang from the living room and I pushed back in my chair, but she shook her head. I stopped, half-standing with my palms on the table, and she sighed and drew the needle. The ringing phone cracked the clock-ticking kitchen silence and I waited. Finally, she lay her sewing on the place-mat and went to the living room. I took her glass and walked to the sink by the kitchen window.

            “Hello?” she said, from behind me. “Yes, this is she.”

            The tap sputtered over the glass and I looked over my shoulder, across the ill-lit kitchen. Curtains darkened the living room window and Mom stood in the shadows by the end table, nodding with the phone on her shoulder and the cord wrapped around her fingers. I’d dreamed about Dad the night before, like I had most every night since moving out: a silhouette at the open fridge, magnifiers flipped up onto his brow and the white light glaring off his rubber apron, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, and drinking milk from the carton. I glanced up and pushed aside the frilly half-curtain that hung across the window. The afternoon was blue and beautiful and I wondered for a moment if it might keep going until we were all of us gone.

            A sparrow fluttered from the locust and, through the yellow boughs, Mr. Rosencrans puttered around his brick cape cod with a weed-eater and a lit cigarette. A postal truck lurched off the curb in front of my shabby car. A dog barked. A whippoorwill called. Water overflowed onto my hand and I jerked the glass from under the running tap and turned it off. I could hear Mom breathing from the kitchen doorway.

            “It was just Tonya,” she said.

            I tipped some water into the drain and walked to the table, glass in hand. She stood squint-eyed in the pale sunlight, thin and tired like she might turn and pass through the wall. Behind her, in the living room, the black shapes of the sofa and armchair hulked like sleeping animals. “Hmm?”

            “She’s always calling about money. Setting up fundraisers for the roof or some mission or another, but I put my tithe in the plate. Nothing worth fixing in Mexico anyway, or wherever it is they’re always going. Guatemala or somewhere.”

            “Who?”

            “On the phone. Tonya Galloway from the church.” She walked slowly toward the kitchen table and I held out the glass.

            “Oh right,” I said, as she took it. “Tonya from church.”

            “Don’t act like you remember,” she said. “I’ve learned not to expect it. And honestly, Adam, I can fill a glass. You mind your own thirst.”

            I crossed my arms and waited and she stood there, swirling the water. I watched for a moment, then sat. She turned abruptly, crossed the kitchen, opened the freezer, and cracked three ice cubes from the tray. They clinked into the glass and she returned to the table.

            “Your brother won’t be home til late, but you ought to take him to lunch tomorrow. As a congratulations.”

            “Yeah, maybe. I need to be on the road pretty early, though.”

            Her glass banged on the coaster and the water sloshed out. “For Christ’s sake, Adam, I don’t know why you even take your coat off anymore.”

            “I told you I could only stay for the day.” I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I told you I just came to fix ––”

            “And I told you not to come at all if you’re only here ––”

            “Well, I came anyway.” I shoved the chair back and stood. “Speaking of which, I’d better get to work. Seeing as how I’m only conditionally welcome.”

            She glared at me. The phone rang again and she started, but hid it well, recovered quickly. Neither of us moved until the ringing stopped. She dropped her gaze and picked up her thimble from the table. The phone started ringing again and I made for the living room.

            “Don’t you answer that phone, Adam.”

            I lifted it and clapped it hard, back onto the cradle, then passed into the hall and through the basement door.

#

Gray light spilled down the stair from the open door. Dust glowed on the plywood and I stood, hands on hips, staring into the spindly shadows and tiny rooms before me.

            “This isn’t how I left it,” I called.

            “What’s that now?” Mom’s voice was hollow and her shadow cut briefly the light on the stair, then disappeared.

            “This isn’t how it was.”

            “I know. That’s the whole reason I asked you here.”

            “No, I mean besides that. You changed something. You didn’t tell me that you changed it.”

            “What are you talking about, Adam?” The floorboards creaked and her shadow drifted over again and disappeared again. I didn’t answer. “I don’t know how you expect me to tell, either way,” she said.

            “There’s nothing to tell. You’re the only one here. You and John. Either someone came down and changed it or they didn’t and I’m telling you that someone came down here and changed it.”

            “Don’t yell at me, Adam.”

            “I’m not yelling,” I called. “You’re just –– come down the stairs so I can talk to you like a normal person.” I rubbed my eyes again and ran my hands through my hair. The floorboards creaked and I heard the chair scritch over the kitchen floor, the click of the embroidery hoop against the table. “I wasn’t yelling,” I mumbled to myself.

            I shook my head and peered down into the mammoth dollhouse, into the small rooms with their birch walls, sanded smooth and delicately painted, intricately painted, wainscoted, and trimmed; their persian rugs and afghan rugs and armchairs and mantles; their windows and french doors and sliding doors and bedsteads.

            Dad built it one Christmas. Like the one I had when I was a girl, she told him, but he kept building and building until it became something other. Weeks into months into years, and I sat on the last stair and watched him, bent over the fragile labyrinth for hours on end with magnifiers over his glasses and his tools unwrapped on the floor beside. He’d work without the slightest thought for my presence until I coughed or squirmed, then he’d glance up. The single bulb, dangling from the ceiling, would flash over the magnifiers and he looked like Vulcan before the furnace. He’d smile without straightening his back and say Come over here I have a game for you and it was always the same game. Can you find Adam? Somewhere in the maze of hallways and quarters and closets and drawing rooms hid a boy, delicately carved from walnut, barely the size of my pinkie nail. Good now can you find him a way out? I’d climb his step-ladder and he’d pace around, reaching into the gargantuan dollhouse, moving the small boy from room to room at my direction.

            Mom turned on the tap upstairs.

            The basement smelled like the inside of a moldering armoire and I coughed. A chain dangled from the ceiling and I pulled and lit the bulb so that I could better see. Under the swaying light, the dollhouse sprawled across a ten-foot plywood square that rested atop nine waist-high cinderblock columns. Plastic trees and shrubs dotted a lawn of cheap green turf, glued to the plywood and peeling up where it met the house. With one story and no roof, it lay bare to the dark basement its hundred tiny rooms and hundred tiny closets; its dozens of narrow hallways and numerous dead ends; its buffed floors and carved end tables; its still curtains and cold hearths filled with paper flames.

            One corner of the dollhouse lay ruined; walls buckled, miniature furniture strewn about and broken. Sawdust and splinters littered what remained of the cramped hallways, blown outward from a tiny book-lined study a foot from the outside wall, as though a heavy object had been tossed casually into its painted shelves. Mom wouldn’t tell me how it happened, but I’d learned not to expect candor from her. And either way, something else had already seized my attention.

            To an eye unfamiliar with its intricate detail, the house would’ve appeared unchanged, but to mine it was profoundly altered. In the largest drawing room, the fireplace had been painted black; in the main dining room, each tiny chair faced away from the table; and in several bedrooms, the curtains had been pinned down over the windows.

            I steadied the bulb with my hand, but it resumed its gentle back and forth the moment I let go and bent over the musty smell of birch.

            The inconsistencies were small but many, so I knelt at the open toolbox and fastened the magnifiers about my head. Atop the screwdriver set and hammer and matchbox and loose wrenches lay a canvas bundle. I set it on the floor and loosed the leather tie so that it fell open and revealed its orderly rows of scalpels, tweezers, brushes, dental mirrors, picks, and tiny bottles of glue and bestine. I chose a pair of tweezers, adjusted the lenses over my eyes, and began the work of setting things right. Night fell slowly in the dim basement, beyond the bulb’s swaying circle, and I was alone.

            Only when the last chair faced its table, did I kneel again before the tools.

            I removed a mirror and small blade from the case and set them aside, then reached into my pocket and spread its contents over the floor. The concrete was cold and I returned the cash to my pocket, brushed the pennies into the dark under the plywood, and set the tiny, carved walnut boy upright where he’d fallen. With the blade and mirror, I went to work again.

#

           I emerged from the basement into the nascent dawn, climbed the dark stairs to my old room, and sat on the corner of the bed with the door closed. The walls were blank and I couldn’t see my face in the mirror that hung over the empty dresser. The street woke slowly through a thin layer of frost on the window and my shadow crept across the floorboards. I sat for a time, drumming fingers on my old bedspread and watching the quiet street outside.

            A door opened and closed down the hall and the sticky padding of bare, heavy feet on the hardwood drew closer, then further away, then cricked and groaned down the stair. I opened the door and followed the sound down into the dark kitchen where John stood, shirtless and slender, in the blue light of the open fridge.

            “Morning,” I said, and leaned with my shoulder against the doorframe.

            He glanced back, then resumed staring into the clutter of jars and cartons. “Morning.”

            “Hey,” I said. “Congratulations.”

            His eye ceased its roving but he didn’t turn. “For what?”

            “The dogs. Mom says it’s a promotion.”

            He shrugged. “I guess you can call it that.”

            “It’s not?”

            He shrugged again. “It’s fine.”

            “Well is it a good job? I mean, do you like what you’re doing?”

            “It’s a place to be.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “In the order of things.”

            I watched him, half-buried in the cold shelves. He wasn’t looking for anything anymore. “I guess that’s nice,” I said.

            “Isn’t all that much to it.”

            “Still, more than I can say.”

            “Mmm.” He shrugged and reached among the foggy tupperwares and the light fell brightly onto his face, the stubbled cheek and haggard eye. He emerged with a buttermilk carton and smelled it, screwed up his nose, and took a sip. “You look like hell,” he said, wiping a drip with the back of his hand and smearing the word hell across his lips. “You didn’t sleep.”

            “It’s that bad? You can tell?”

            He laughed, returned the carton, and brought out the jug of whole milk. “Nah,” he said as he dropped it onto the counter. “I get in pretty late. You had that light on down there.”

            “Oh.” I laughed. Morning crept slowly under the curtain-frills as he rummaged about the cabinet for a bowl, then went to the pantry for cereal. He seemed healthier in the fragile sunlight; cheeks less hollow, eyes softer. He leaned against the counter with the bowl and spoon. I cleared my throat. “So, Mom’s still ––”

            He nodded and spoke through a mouth full of cereal. “Mom.”

            “Yeah.”

            “She says things she doesn’t mean.”

            “I don’t know. Seems like she means pretty much ––”

            “Come on, Adam.” He looked up and shook his head. “Honestly, I don’t know why you still come down here, then.”

            I straightened, put my hands in my pockets, then leaned against the molding. “I just wanted to help her out.”

            “Ah.” He coughed instead of laughing. “Right.”

            “Right,” I said. The floorboards creaked above us and the upstairs bathroom door closed. “Actually, I should probably get going.”

            “Take your time,” he said. “She doesn’t get up this early.”

            “That’s not what I meant.”

            “Okay. That’s not what you meant.”

            He put the bowl to his lip, tipped it up, and drank down the dregs. The bathroom door opened again and the feet crossed the ceiling again and the bedroom door closed. Out the window, the rising sun glowed yellow behind the dark clouds and a crow landed on the locust. John’s dark form crossed the pane and I started.

            “Coffee?” He was filling the carafe at the tap.

            “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be right back. I mean –– if it’s okay –– while you’re doing that, I’ll be right back. I’ll be back in just a second.”

            He nodded and stared at the swirling water in the carafe and I made my way across the living room, back toward the basement. The old doorknob squeaked and the stairs groaned and I descended.

            Staring into the dollhouse, I knew I’d left it better than I’d found it, perfect again. Home to someone. Light winked in and out of the steel wrenches in the toolbox, alongside the screwdriver and canvas bundle. I rummaged about for the matches, placed them atop the wrenches, then closed and latched the lid.

            Light off, I climbed the stairs.

            The bowl sat orphaned on the counter and John leaned back in his chair, ankle crossed over his knee and cup steaming on the table. By then, the morning was full in the half-curtained window.

            “It’s ready.”

            I nodded, crossed the kitchen, and poured a cup. “Thanks.”

            “Can you sit?”

            “Yeah.” I set his bowl in the empty sink, leaned against the counter, and sipped the coffee. The crow called and I watched the steam ravel off his cup. “Don’t let her sell it,” I said, before I could push the words back down.

            “What?”

            “I said don’t let her sell it.”

            He picked up his cup, but didn’t drink. “Well it isn’t really mine to keep, is it?”

            “I didn’t say you had to keep it.”

            He looked at me for a moment. “I just mean that it isn’t mine.”

            “It isn’t really hers either.”

            “Well that’s not true.”

            “Oh come on now, John. She never wanted it.”

            “She sure did. You don’t remember?”

            “She wanted what she asked for; she didn’t want what he made.”

            “Well I guess that’s probably true.”

            “It is true,” I said. An anger burned in my voice, which I tried to check. “It is.”

            He nodded. “Still,” he said. “I know her better than you do.”

            “Maybe.”

            “Maybe.”

            “Not by choice, anyway.”

            He squinted at me and ran his tongue over his front teeth, behind the closed lips. He said nothing, but John was always more than just words. Steam unspooled from his cup and disappeared and he took a sip and set it on the table. “Okay, well I still can’t keep her from selling it; whether it’s hers or not, I can’t stop her.”

            “I think you could.”

            “I don’t even know why anyone would buy it.”

            “That’s not the point.”

            “Seems important though.”

            “Just don’t let her sell it.”

            John ran his finger back and forth along the rim of his cup, and I glanced up at the clock. When I looked back, he was staring at me. “Got an appointment, huh. About time you got back to wherever it is you go to?”

            The second-hand ticked across the quiet. “Yeah,” I said. “I think it is.”

#

           The rattling was back but the check-engine light wasn’t and I smacked the dash to see if I could get the heat working. The backwoods state-route seemed like it might never end, but I finally found the battered highway sign and merged onto the interstate thinking I should’ve just told him. I came all this way and I should’ve just said the words.

            Light it up, John. Just burn the damn thing to cinders.

– Peter Amos