And Terry wiped his face with the back of his hand and walked back into the house, and left me alone with our father’s tools.

Chapter 7 — Our Father’s Chair

I need to tell you about our father, because you cannot understand the nine years without him, and because he is the reason the house on Sycamore Street had a hole in the middle of it long before our mother died.

Duane Hendricks was a quiet man who built things — the treehouse, the back deck, half the furniture in that house — and who loved his children in the wordless way of men of his time, which is to say by fixing our bicycles and showing up to our games and never once telling us so out loud.

I was his shadow growing up; I followed him around the garage handing him wrenches, and Terry was more our mother’s, and none of us thought anything of it because that is just how families sort themselves.