On the day his daughter Marie arrived home from school crying, Louis knew only one thing to do. He scooped her up onto the piano bench, slid next to her hunched, sobbing little figure, and began to play. His fingers pressed against the cool ivory and the rollicking melody soon made him forget his troubles, until he glanced over at Marie. She had quieted down but now stared at his hands dancing over the keys, and he followed her stare to the reddish-pink spidery patches that covered the skin in between his long fingers, across the tops of his hands. Soon he would have to go back to work at the silk mill, and the allergy from the silk would once again cause his skin to flare up almost to his elbows. Mani rosse, his kids called them.

With Marie’s stare like a weight on top of his hands, he stopped playing. But Marie begged him to continue. She was six, nearly seven. Next to his hands on the keys, she spread wide her own fingers; he had taught her a few notes and simple songs on his own, but her fingers were long enough to play a chord now. He fumbled through the song books for a beginner one, but only found organ music and hymns. He jumped up from the piano bench, piled the kids in the hand wagon, and pulled his family into town behind him.

At Ronco’s Music Store, he bought a song book and arranged for Marie’s piano lessons on trade-out; in exchange, he would wallpaper the Roncos’ upstairs rooms. On the trip home, he ducked into the library. He checked out two books for himself, one on wallpapering and the other, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. For Marie, he borrowed Black Beauty.

That evening before dinner, he told his wife Antonette about the piano lessons for Marie. Before Antonette had left for the blouse mill that morning, she had told him that she was pregnant once again. The child would be their fourth.

“What about you going back to work?” Antonette asked. “Did you find out about a job in the quarry?”

“Not yet,” he said. “You should have seen Marie’s face when I told her about the lessons.”

Antonette said nothing. She scraped the last potato hard and fast, quartered it with a knife and dropped the chunks into the bubbling pot.

“How sure are you about things?” Louie asked.

“Pretty sure,” she said. “It should come around December.”

Louie wandered into the other room where Marie was sitting quietly on the piano bench, studying the primer song book. Four-year-old Phil ran a pretend truck over the carpet; the baby, red-headed Jeanne, kicked and squealed with laughter on her blanket. When Louie peered over Marie’s shoulder, he saw she was studying the notes, rests and measures, as well as the round, smiling faces of the children in the sketches accompanying the songs.

The next morning, Louie started on the wallpapering job for the Ronco’s. He finished up around quarter to five, so he stopped in at the silk mill. He showed the supervisor his hands and explained that the mani rosse had nearly cleared up enough for him to go back to work. He asked about getting a position where he wouldn’t have to handle the silk. “High school graduates get those jobs first,” the supervisor said, leaning in close and lowering his voice. “But I could use workers. How about you take your old job back for a raise?”

Louie said he would consider the offer and trudged home. He stopped by the library again and took out some high school subject books. He started dinner; tomato gravy popped and sausages floated in pots on the stove. While he cooked, he started reading the American history textbook about the first settlers to come to America—the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, the Dutch in New Amsterdam, or what today was New York, where he and his father had passed through in 1913, just before the Great War had broken out. Most interesting was what he learned about the indentured servants who traded seven years of labor for their passage to the American colonies and a chance at a better life. Some of them died before the seven years ended, but others persevered: built their own houses, lived as they liked. This so fascinated him that he burned the bottom of the gravy pot because he forgot to stir the contents. Marie worked on her addition and subtraction problems at the kitchen table, and from time to time he bent over and checked her work. The heat from the cooking made his skin flare up to the elbows. He rubbed a cream prescribed by the mill company’s doctor over his hands and arms, but the rash just grew more inflamed, the color of June strawberries and painful as wasp stings.

He was still at the kitchen sink, coating his hands with the slippery cream, when Antonette bustled in the back door with her arms full of sewing patterns and fabric. She dropped her purchases onto the table. Beside his daughter’s schoolbooks, he had stacked the textbooks from the library. Antonette traced a finger down their thick spines. “What are these?” his wife asked.

“At night, I’m going to study for my high school diploma,” he said. “So I can make a real income.”

She approached him and picked up his forearm gingerly. “What are you going to do about this? Are you going to get laid off again?”

“What can I do?” he asked. “The better jobs go to high school graduates.”

She dropped his arm. “That’s just an excuse,” she said.

“Look, you can’t even figure the bills out right,” he told her. “You always get them all wrong. Without my help you wouldn’t pay right on the accounts at all.”

Marie called for help with her homework, and Antonette pressed the spatula into his hand and marched over to the table. Head bent, she rewrote the simple numbers and letters over and over again. Marie looked up at her mother. “But that can’t be right, Mom,” she said in a small voice. Antonette’s chin crinkled and she rubbed the eraser so hard over the paper that the corner tore off. Marie howled for Louie, and Antonette scratched out her writing, shoved the chair away and left.

 

The following day, Louie stopped by the silk mill and accepted his supervisor’s offer. He would start back at the job the next morning, studying at night and wallpapering the Ronco’s upstairs on Saturdays to pay for Marie’s piano lessons.

Afterwards, Louie drifted outside. The April morning was rainy and damp. When he neared the library, he felt drawn inside as if tugged by invisible thread. This didn’t make sense; he had already checked out all the necessary books for the high school exam, but he climbed up the steps anyway. He wandered over to the U.S. History section and just stood there, his arms loose at his sides.

A librarian approached and startled him. “May I help you find something?” she asked. She was a Bangor lady, light-skinned, her English perfectly knit together. She brushed her hand over the bookshelf in front of them and her nails were long with smooth, rounded tips. None of the Italian women he knew ever had such nails; Antonette’s were worn down to the skin.

He fumbled with his words but managed to say, “American history.” Then he added, somewhat stupidly, “I like to read.”

“Perhaps a biography, then,” the librarian replied. A biography, what was that? But he watched in silence as she pulled two books: one on Thomas Jefferson, and another, the journals of Lewis and Clark. When she passed them to him, her smile momentarily vanished and her forehead crinkled; he glanced down at his broken out hands and tucked the books underneath his arm.

The librarian stamped the cards in the back of the books and he hurried away. Outside, he didn’t know what else to do, so he walked home. Marie was in school, and during the day Antonette’s parents watched Phil, and eighteen-month-old Jeanne. He stopped by their house to collect his children.

His mother-in-law answered the door. “Oi, what are you doing here?” she said. The house reeked of herbs and the homemade wine fermenting in the basement vat. From the background, her husband called, “Is that my son-in-law, out of work again?”

“It’s temporary,” Louie said. “I’m working on my high school degree.”

His father-in-law limped to the door; he worked in the slate quarry and a recent foot injury had kept him home. “How, with your English sounding like an accordion?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Louie said. “It’s a written test.”

Phil toddled to the door, and his mother-in-law handed over the baby.

His father-in-law turned to his wife. “Two months ago, I told him to come down to the quarry and get a job,” he said. “But he refused. Quarry work is too low for him. He would rather touch the silk and get the mani rosse. Bah!” And Antonette’s father tossed up his hands in disgust.

Louie bent down, grabbed Philip’s tiny hand and left.

 

At home he gardened for the rest of the afternoon, until the rake handle chafed his irritated skin and brought tears to his eyes. So he dropped the rake and slipped inside the house. While he slathered more cream on his hands, he boiled water in the kettle. Then he made a cup of chamomile tea and opened the Jefferson book.

On each page, he needed to stop several times and use his English dictionary to look up a word, but his eyes couldn’t put the sentences together fast enough. This man, this Jefferson, had been so much more than just a writer of a famous Declaration of Independence that Louie had already read about in the high school history book. Jefferson seemed much like himself always coming up with new ways to fix things around the house, tending to great gardens in the home he called Monticello; Louie loved that Jefferson had chosen an Italian name. Only when Louie reached for his cup to find the tea cold did he look up and realize the sun was almost gone from the sky. But still he read on, until the end of the introductory chapter. Thomas Jefferson, he discovered, kept reading and learning and never stopped. Even though he died a much poorer farmer than when he started out, and lost his wife at a young age—this struck a particular chord in Louie as Antonette had almost died during the birth of Jeanne, their youngest—Jefferson had lived a full life with many friends and done many good things.

When Louie finally closed the book, he wiped tears from his eyes but also smiled to himself. Great things would open up for him from this learning, and despite his hands, he felt certain the next supervisor job that turned up at the mill would be his once he earned a high school diploma. He had done right by refusing a job in the quarry.

 

That weekend, Louie installed a large motor sewing machine in the house on loan from the blouse mill, so that Antonette could begin sewing blouses orders at home and reduce all possible strain on her pregnancy. By the following Friday, Louie’s hands were already bright as poison ivy from handling the silk for the entire week. Cracked, bleeding blisters covered the skin in between his long fingers and across the tops of his hands. But that afternoon was the day of Marie’s first piano lesson, and he stopped at Ronco’s music store and picked up a song sheet for his daughter as a surprise. He had finished the Jefferson book and at the library, returned it in exchange for some more high school subject books: U.S. History Through the Great War, Writing a Composition, arithmetic and algebra books, in addition to ones on gardening and architecture.

When he stepped inside his house, the sound nearly deafened him: the delicate up and down scales of the piano battling with the mechanical hum of the sewing machine like a constant irritating fly in the next room. Tommy, the teacher, instructed Marie at the piano; Jeanne and Phil toddled and twirled to the music. Louie interrupted the lesson and propped the song sheet on the piano.

“Oi, you are a fellow man of the arts,” Tommy said. “And your daughter has passion. She should keep up with the lessons for sure.”

“As long as we can afford them,” Louie said. He picked up the song sheet and presented it to Marie. “For you,” he said.

But his daughter shrank away, shaking her head so that her curly black hair trembled against her face. “You have the mani rosse, again, Daddy,” she said. “Why can’t you stay home and teach me to play?”

Louie and Tommy exchanged glances, but said nothing.

 

Later that night, Antonette again asked if he’d stopped by the quarry on his way home from work. He lied and told her that he stopped to do some plumbing repairs for a neighbor rather than admit he’d lolled around the music store and library. “A broken toilet?” Antonette fumed, throwing butter onto a hot pan so that it made a great crackling splatter. Then she refused to speak to him for the rest of dinner.

Afterwards he and Antonette sipped their coffee; the kids laughed and tumbled. Finally his wife spoke. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I stopped by Pop’s this afternoon, and he tells me that two months ago you could have had a job in the quarry. But instead you stay at a job that makes you sick, gets you fired? Are you crazy?” She reached across the table and grasped one of his hands with her rough fingers. Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t stand seeing you suffer like this, for a dream.”

He placed his hand overtop of hers; despite the cream he rubbed onto the skin every couple of hours, the rash just grew more inflamed. “I don’t expect you to understand,” he said at last, slowly. He felt as if they were clasping hands over a wide, rumbling creek, and Antonette would never get a glimpse of the world from the side on which he stood.

“Do you love me, Louie?” she asked. “Do you want to have to move back in with my father if we can’t pay the bills? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you don’t have work.”

He stared at his lap. “I love you,” he said. But it didn’t feel like the same kind of love as when she’d agreed to marry him. They hadn’t known each other well; the marriage was somewhat arranged, but at the time that didn’t seem to matter. Now he wondered how good of a fit they were for each other. How much could any one person know about anyone else at all, even their spouse?

Finally Antonette went upstairs to put Jeanne to bed. Marie practiced her lesson on the piano; Louie flipped through the Sears catalog on his lap, listening.

 

On Monday, the supervisor took one look at Louie’s hands, shook his head and scribbled the name of a doctor in East Stroudsburg on a piece of paper. “Don’t come back until it’s cleared up,” he told Louie. But the supervisor allowed him to use the mill’s telephone to make the appointment.

The doctor couldn’t take him for three days. Louie drifted outside. He stopped by a few of the other mills, but as soon as the supervisors saw his red hands, they shook their heads. He asked about management positions where he wouldn’t have to handle cloth, and they asked about a high school diploma. When he shrugged, they told him to try the slate quarry. So he left.

He went home and pulled the kids’ wagon up the sidewalk and right through the doors of the library. For the next two hours, he selected titles until the wagon was piled up to the sides with library books. This time he made sure to include several medical texts so that he might learn about how to treat the mani rosse himself.

He rolled the wagon up to the reservation desk. “My goodness,” the librarian chuckled. She opened a cover and picked up her rubber stamp. “This one is just wonderful,” she said. “Have you read Chekhov before?”

He nodded, a smile breaking out before he could stop himself. “Wonderful,” he said.

The librarian smiled back, and the stamp thumped over the books, one after another, the sound reminding him of a piano pedal.

 

The next two weekends brindled with summer-time heat. As he laid the wallpaper in the stuffy upstairs rooms at the Ronco house, his mani rosse flared up with itchy blisters. Often he started reading after dinner only to look up and see that the time was past midnight. He even brought books out into the garden on nice days, and he leaned over his hoe to turn pages as he tilled the soil. The English language came together for him in a flood, the passages clear as spring water; he knew this meant he was almost ready to take the high school exam in June when the school district offered it for adults.

Even though he wasn’t earning real wages, he dreamed about building a small library of his own for his studies, like Thomas Jefferson’s. He had managed to acquire a few books here and there, but he wanted copies of his favorite classics to keep and reread, instead of going to the public library. The Sears catalog had a Classics Collection for mail order. He had opened the book so many times it fell open to the worn, dog-eared page immediately, and the hard bound, gold-lettered titles Sears described as “The finest of World Literature for the bookshelf in any American home: Moby Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations.” A more reasonably-priced alternative, the set of “twenty-four great novels” also came in paperback editions.

One night he was pouring over the page again when Marie finished playing her lesson and scampered over to his chair. Leaning over, she stared at the catalog pages then at his hands, which bloomed over with rough redness. “You go ahead and order the books,” she said.

“Order what books?” he said.

“The books you want from Sears. These books.” And she jabbed her finger to the page.

When he crawled between the sheets that night, Antonette said that if he didn’t have a stable job by the time the baby was born, she was going to move back with the kids into her father’s house.

He wore gloves while he slept to prevent himself from scratching his hands and forearms raw. But sometimes in the middle of the night, he woke up in an unbearable frenzy, the gloves thrown on the floor beside him, and his fingers cracked open with blood.

 

The next day, Louie put up the last of the wallpaper in the Roncos’ upstairs rooms. On his way home, he stopped at the high school to register for the June exam. When he arrived home, eager to share the long-awaited date with his family, he stumbled upon an unhappy scene: Antonette was stomping around the house, flicking a dust rag over the rungs of chairs, Marie was sulking, arms crossed, on the couch with a pile of workshirts nearby, a needle and a spool of thread in her lap. The black cover was closed over the piano keys. Someone had stacked the piano books in a neat pile on top of the instrument. He asked what had happened.

“Tell your father what you did,” Antonette said. “Go on.”

Marie wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I played the piano instead of doing my chores,” she said.

“That’s not all,” Antonette said. “She lied. I heard her come in from school and go right to the piano and start playing. I stopped my sewing and asked her, and she said that the dusting was done. But I checked,” here his wife paused and held up her rag, “and it wasn’t.”

Louie leaned over in front of his daughter. “Why did you lie to your mother?”

“Piano is more important than chores,” she said, and looked up at him. “Isn’t it?”

He crossed his arms over his chest but said nothing. Finally he gestured for her to come with him up to the bedroom, where he removed his belt and spanked her with it just a few times, but hard enough that she cried. He felt bad for spanking her, but if there was one thing he and Antonette agreed on was that their daughter must not learn to get away with a lie.

When he came downstairs, Antonette was wiping her eyes on a handkerchief. Louie slid his arm around her waist and kissed her on the soft hair above her ear, and she laughed a little bit. “I hate having to discipline her like that,” she said, and sighed.

“Guess what?” he said. “I’m taking the high school test on the twelfth of June.”

“That’s good news,” she said. She threw her arms around him and gave him a long squeeze, and when she pulled away she wore a big smile. “You must have studied enough, by now. Can we get some of these books out of here?” She nodded to the stacks strewn around the kitchen countertops, the dining room table and the floor by the stairs.

“Sure,” he said. “I can take some right now.”

Antonette wanted to go with him. The two youngest were still at her parents’; they could stop first at the library and then pick up the kids with the wagon on the way home. She hurried Marie to fetch a sweater while Louie gathered books in his arms and filled the wagon. The process wasn’t easy—he found himself picking up one book and thinking of reasons he hadn’t finished reading it, only to do the same with another—but eventually he cleared the house of almost all he’d read.

 

He slipped into the library but Antonette lingered on the sidewalk. Evening had started to fall as they walked, and inside the library was warmer than the damp outdoors. He returned all the books and meant to just browse quickly for one or two bedtime stories for the kids, but he spotted a book on great inventors and then another one called out to him on Benjamin Franklin, and then another, by Tolstoy. The librarian joked, asking where his wagon was today and he replied, “Outside, with my wife,” and they both burst into laughter. So when at last he descended the library steps two at a time with another stack curled underneath his arm, Antonette’s eyes glowed back at him as fiercely as the burning street lamps overhead.

 

A few days after the incident of Marie’s lying, Louie was home alone, writing a practice composition in preparation for the test. He expected Antonette to return any minute; she was taking longer than usual to purchase the items for dinner. He had no idea how much time had passed; the writing consumed him entirely, especially since he forbid himself to use the English dictionary. As he started the final paragraph of his essay, one of Marie’s latest, favorite piano songs drifted over the garden. He finished and tucked the composition paper in his pocket to read after dinner.

Inside, the backdoor banged behind him and the piano-playing stopped. He peeked in the sitting room to find Marie in his reading chair with one leg tucked underneath her, pushing a needle through a buttonhole and her lips pressed in a firm line. He smiled to himself and started the supper.

A moment later, Antonette pushed open the door with her shopping bags, started to remove the dry goods, but stopped as if she heard a strange noise. Chin lifted, she marched into the living room. From the room came the shuffling sound of books, and Antonette scolding Marie. Louie sprang to the doorway.

Antonette stood over the pile of mending next to her daughter. “All this should have been mended by now,” his wife said. “Did you do your chores before playing the piano?” she asked Marie. “Tell me the truth.”

“I did,” Marie said. She glanced up at her mother and continued sewing.

“But you didn’t,” Antonette cried. She stormed over to the piano with one hand on her hip and thudded her fist on the top of the instrument. “The cover is up, the seat cushion is crooked, and do you know what else?” A proud but angry beam lit up Antonette’s face. “I arranged the lesson books in a certain order so I would know if they’d been moved. And they have. So I know you’re lying.” She looked at Louie. “Did you hear her playing the piano?”

Marie’s tiny face darted in his direction; he could sense her holding her breath as he held his own.

He said, “I was outside until just now, writing my composition. I was very focused on that, so I really don’t know.” He clenched the dish towel in his hands, twisting it around.

No one moved or spoke; only Antonette sighed. She said, “You know, I was just thinking about that piano the other day, how it was a wedding present from my father but how we might sell it to pay off some of our debts.”

Marie whimpered no under her breath.

“But all the kids learn to play,” Louie said. His heart beat fast but he felt as if he were grasping for papers upset by a wind and flying around the room. “We learned.”

“Everyone learned, but not everyone likes to play,” Antonette said, running her palm along the top of the piano.

“You did,” he said. “You played when we first got married, all the time.”

“I liked it very much,” she said. She closed the cover over the keys, not making a sound, and glided past her daughter and husband to the kitchen.

Louie consoled Marie for a moment and promised he wouldn’t let the piano be sold. They weren’t that poor, not yet. Then he took his place at the stove next to Antonette, who was chopping eggplant.

He dug through the bags only to come up empty handed. “What, no meat? I thought we were having sausages tonight.” He said it loudly, trying to lighten the mood, but Antonette set her knife down next to the eggplant and shushed him.

“Don’t you think I would have sausages if there was any money for them?” she said, her whisper spitting at him with the truth.

 

Two weeks before the high school exam, he walked with Marie to the post office and mailed the order form and the check for the books from the Sears’ catalogue. “Potete mantenere un segreto?” he asked her. She nodded, her eyes the black gloss of piano keys.

 

On Sundays he gardened, and sunlight from the many hours spent outdoors would turn the flesh up and down his arms a deep brown. The broken out patches were less visible but ever present.

But he obsessed over the books almost more than the exam. When would the books come, and where would he put them? Would he hide them from his wife? No, he would display them proudly on the shelf in the sitting room, where only the family Bible and a book of hymns took up space. He could picture the whole set all in a row, making the shabby room look a little smart. Would she say anything or pretend not to care? She shouldn’t say anything, he thought. She bought her sewing stuff whenever she wanted, and he worked hard, too; he had as much right to buy something he’d like as anybody else. The books were a gift to himself for earning his diploma.

He started back at the silk mill again, his old job. Every day he asked the boss if a supervisor’s position had opened up yet, to which the boss always apologized and promised to let him know, shook free a ream of silk for inspection and praised Louie for his work. Every day Louie hurried home after his shift to see if a brown package sat waiting by the front door.

 

On the day before the exam, the summer afternoon turned brisk—a chill had crept up and the warm air left with the first gusts of a rain shower. Louie was returning from the library where he had spent the last three hours brushing up for the test the next day. He lumbered through the back door and into the kitchen, the heat stunning his damp cheeks. From the sitting room, Marie practiced scales on the piano; upstairs, the baby cried. Antonette, now swollen throughout her middle and humming, had bent over as best she could manage to stir something really well in the kitchen furnace. Between the movements of her arms as she stuffed pieces of a broken down cardboard box in the door with one hand and thrusted the poker with the other, he recognized the white leaves of bound paper, curling up as the flames nibbled at the delicate edges. He wailed and sprang toward the inferno, knocking into the table where they ate breakfast, and pushing her aside as he reached in for the little pile of books. The bright flames illuminated his mani rosse, badly scarred and red as roses from going back to the mill. The furnace, by now, had gotten well into its feed and engulfed the pile. Too late to save the flock, he knelt on his knees, head down, weeping. His wife reached for the handle and shut the furnace door.

He knelt there like that for awhile, tearing at his hair and wailing. “How could you?” he cried. “You had no right.”

But Antonette just stepped around him and shoved a pan of raised bread dough into the stove. She said, “All you do is dream, Louie.” Then she turned her back on him and continued punching and kneading the dough on the counter, pressing her hardened knuckles into the flesh.

The blazing heat from the fire drove him to his feet. But he left the kitchen without a word.

 

That night, he tossed and turned and couldn’t sleep. What if the test had more difficult English words than he had thought? Maybe he had underestimated how much he relied on the dictionary for help when he was studying. Worse, what if he took the test and there were no management positions open at the mill for months—or any of the other mills in town, for that matter? He finally caught some sleep as the neighborhood roosters began to crow, but his heart thudded the whole time. He saw Antonette once again in front of the furnace, rocking their new baby, and Marie picking up her piano books one at a time and dropping them into the fire.

He woke up as the light crept underneath the shutters, scratching his forearms and his chest like a madman. Overnight, the mani rosse had spread to his chest and neck. He got up and splashed water on his face to shave, but the rash had inflamed the skin so badly so that the single scrape of the razor against his skin made his eyes water. Trembling, he looked down at his hands and cursed them. He patted dry, crept to the side of the bedroom where Antonette kept a chipped statue of the Virgin Mary, knelt and prayed for the exam to go well.

 

The exam took place in a classroom of the high school. The test-takers were almost all younger men, but Louie was partly relieved to see that about half were Italians like himself, the rest white. Many of them yawned and looked half-awake; others sat forward at their desks and tapped their sharpened pencils in their palms. Louie did neither. He had worn long sleeves even though the morning temperatures were already blazing hot. Now the room was growing stuffier by the minute, and he fought to keep his forearms hidden underneath the desk so that no one would see his scabbed and bloodied skin. A custodian brought more desks into the room, and the line of test-takers extended out into the hallway. He recognized the one Italian lady among them from the church and smiled at her, but she didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps like him, she was too engulfed by last minute fears.

When the proctor finally passed the test booklets back, Louie wrote his name at the top and stared at the first question. Math—not his strong suit at all. Where were the questions about the Founding Fathers? But he proceeded to work out the problem and moved down the page, unsure of his answers. By the time he reached the bottom, the rash on his neck and chest screamed for him to scratch, and he sweated underneath his shirt. He gripped the pencil and decided to skip ahead, forget the math. He could come back to that section later. He flipped ahead and finally found the history questions, but he could stand his skin no longer. Why hadn’t he thought to bring the cream with him, or put any on his chest that morning? He stared down at the question: Louis and Clark’s Expedition took place under which president? John Adams, he wrote before he had too much time to think.

The proctor announced that ten minutes remained to finished section one. Louie panicked. He must have not been listening or understood when the proctor explained the test instructions. He flipped back through the test booklet and in his hurry, knocked it to the floor so that he had to reach down and pick it up. When he glanced up, he saw that the proctor, a middle- aged woman who looked like her girdle might be too tight, regarded him with a strange expression on her face. Her mouth opened as if she was going to say something, but then she shut it quickly and stared down at her desk. Did she think he was cheating? He gathered up the test booklet and realized she hadn’t been staring at him at all, but his raw and reddened hands.

He placed the test booklet in front of him again, but he felt like he couldn’t breathe and no air circulated in the room at all. His chin and hands shook. Finally he pushed back his chair and carried the test booklet up to the front. He didn’t look at the proctor, and he didn’t look back at the classroom or the high school, or anything on the whole walk home but his hands.

Only when he rounded the corner to his block did he remember that it was Jefferson who had sent Louis and Clark on their journey west, not John Adams.

 

The roses he’d planted a long time ago bloomed in the bed next to the kitchen door, and their pungent perfume followed him up the steps. Inside, he heard piano playing and laughter. He shut the door quietly behind him and crossed the kitchen to the living room. Antonette and Marie sat on the piano bench; his wife’s fingers hopped over the keys as she explained the parts to a duet. He sank into his chair near the door, hoping they wouldn’t hear him, but Antonette stopped talking and glanced over her shoulder. Her gaze darted for the clock and back to Louie, and she lowered her hands to her lap. Marie turned around, too, and a wide, questioning smile lit up her face. But at the sights of his mani rosse worse than ever, her smile dropped. She spun around and started playing a simple melody, but his favorite of the old folk songs.