Sun & Spoon Read Free Page B

handle as a pretend microphone and sang her delphinium song. Streams of light from the windows cut the stale air, and when Joanie stepped through the shafts, they resembled spotlights. She turned circles like a cat chasing its tail. Dust rose around her.
    â€œYou lighten my heart,” Pa said to Joanie. “If you had a charm alarm, it would be going off every ten seconds and the whole town would hear it.”
    â€œWhat about her jerk alert?” Spoon said under his breath. “It never stops ringing.”
    It was annoying to Spoon that Joanie had such an effect on Pa. Several times, Spoon caught Pa glancing at Joanie with adoring eyes, then chuckling, as if he were unable to do anything but marvel at her and delight in her. During the short span of a couple of hours, Pa referred to her with more than one term of endearment: My Sweet Ragamuffin, Pa’s Little Geyser (because of her unkempt hair), Joan of My Heart.
    Spoon was no competition. He didn’t sing; he didn’t dance; he didn’t drag a suitcase full of sticks around with him, calling attention to himself. Spoon could wiggle his ears, but that was about it. Subtle in comparison. Pa could wiggle his ears, too, and they used to do it together regularly, hamming it up like a vaudeville act. They had only done it once since Gram had died, and then only half-heartedly.
    As Pa swiped at a tangle of cobweb curtains with a rag, Spoon looked right at him and wiggled his ears with fierce determination. Pa didn’t respond. He seemed to squint at a spot on the rafters, his heavy silver eyebrows drawing together, then he continued to work on the cobwebs.
    The morning wore on, and Spoon carried out many tasks. He lugged old broken windows to the curb and stacked them. He peeled moldy, rippled Con-Tact paper off some shelves, shelves that Pa would reline later. He bundled damp magazines with string, then piled them into neat towers.
    While he worked, he thought of all the ways in which Pa had changed since Gram’s death. Pa seemed more bony, and pale. His eyes were still icy blue, but they were often pink rimmed and watery. And most distressing to Spoon was how easily Pa could be distracted now, how sometimes he seemed to be focused on something far, far away, or focused on nothing at all.
    And there were other things. Things Pa didn’t do any longer. He didn’t wiggle his ears. Or tell as many silly jokes as he used to. Or religiously follow the Brewers. And he didn’t play cards.
    Gram, Pa, and Spoon used to play triple solitaire any chance they could get. They played at Gram and Pa’s round dining-room table. A few times a week, Spoon stopped by their house for a hand or two on his way home from school; they played any time of day during the summer. They each had their own deck of cards, rubber banded and stored in the bottom middle drawer of Gram’s breakfront.
    â€œWe could still play cards?” Spoon had said to Pa sometime in June and again at the beginning of July. The last time, the time in July, Spoon had added, “You and me? You know, double solitaire.”
    Pa tapped his chin and stroked his neck. His eyes fastened onto something in the breakfront. “I saw two squirrels this morning in the lilac bushes, doing acrobatics like I’ve never seen.” His voice trailed off. “Very funny . . .”
    Spoon had been particularly stung by Pa’s response, but he knew that it didn’t have anything to do with him. And Pa made a point of ruffling Spoon’s hair about a dozen times that afternoon, as if in apology.
    Spoon’s parents called Pa at least once a day, or visited with vegetables from the garden or a sack of groceries from the store. They invited him for dinner frequently, and he came over to their house every Sunday for brunch. Gram and Pa used to host the weekly brunch, but Pa had asked to change it. Scott and Kay agreed to the change instantly; they were both simply relieved