Rita stood, looking up at my father, and I watched a thousand clouds dance through her eyes. My sister’s moods matched the tumult in her eyes: quicksilver, straddling the line between sunny and fierce. My stubborn, skin-pinching, door-slamming older sister, but oh, those eyes! Steel and pewter, collecting shine and silver in the right kind of light. You could trick yourself into believing the future swirled around in Rita’s eyes.

But not then. There was nothing but frustrated present. She looked like Isis, feet planted and hands on her hips, like she should have a magical, golden armlet clamped down upon the flesh of her upper arm. At five-foot-four, Rita was as tall as she was going to get, but my sister stood her ground like an Amazon.

“Why?” She said finally. “Give me one good reason why I can’t go.” Despite the warrior posture, her voice was low and feline.

“No more histrionics, Rita. I’ve got a hell of a headache.”

The air between them crackled. I half-expected to feel the skin-tingle of static, the zing of electricity I got when I sat outside to watch a heat storm unfold in they sky.

Rita used to sit with me and watch the skies crack in two. But that was before she started to curve and flow into her teens, before she started spending all her time hanging out at the bridge in between the steeple of Stevie Sutton’s knees.

“I’m warning you, Rita. Earl’s been busting my chops down at the shop all day. The last thing I need is my teenage daughter back-talking me when I already said no.” A vein in his temple was raised in relief against the rest of his skin, blue-gray and pulsing.

Rita threw her head back and growled, deep in the back of her throat. When she spoke again her voice crash-landed into a whine and the Amazon posture sagged. “Everyone else is going to be there!” The brave, crazy Isis shell fractured, and for a moment, I caught a glimpse of the confused fifteen year-old underneath.

“Rita,” my mother warned.

She growled again and stomped upstairs. The bedroom door slammed and within seconds a heavy metal heartbeat throbbed through the floor boards above.

“A goddamned Greek tragedy,” my father said again, softer this time.

He glanced at Sissy, who sat, a half-eaten slice of birthday cake in front of her. Sissy looked up at him, vanilla crumbs stuck in the corner of her mouth.

“Happy birthday, Sissy.” He reached to pat the top of her head but stopped short before he did. “I hope you wished your sister would stop being so damn difficult.”

“She’s right you know, Frank,” my mother said. “There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be allowed to go to that party. She’s not six anymore.”

“You think I don’t know that, Beverly?” There was an edge of something, raw and brittle, in his voice. “You think I don’t know she’s fifteen going on thirty, know she spends all her time with that Sutton clown from down the street? I’m not blind.” He pulled open the fridge and grabbed another beer.

“There are too many women in this house, Beverly. I can’t get any peace and quiet.” He slammed the fridge and stalked across the kitchen toward the basement.

He’d sulk downstairs to look for some peace in a shop full of tools sharp enough to slice a soul in two. He’d search for some quiet on a bookshelf spilling over with stories older than time.

I started a slow count in my head. When the basement door smashed closed behind him, loud as a thunderclap, I stopped.

Five Mississippi.

---

“You want to know a trick, Twig?”

When he leaned close to whisper in the dark, I smelled a hint of aftershave, an echo of the pungent cologne he splashed on in the mornings.

“Sure, Dad,” I said. Outside, the backyard trees were whipping in a winter storm. The sky through the bedroom window was ink-black dark, the color that haunts your dreams.

“When you see a flash of lightening, count.” He kept his eyes on the sky.

“Then, when you hear a thunderclap, stop,” he said. “That will tell you how far away the storm is. Each second is about a mile, so if you count to ten, it means the storm is about ten miles away. The fewer seconds between them, the closer the storm is, you see? And if they’re really close, if it sounds like the thunder is going to come through the roof and bounce you on your bed, then you know the storm is right overhead. It may be scary for a moment, but it’ll move on soon enough.” He rested his hands on his knees and looked at me. “You see?”

I nodded, though I didn’t understand how knowing the north or west of a storm would make it less terrifying for someone like my mother, who took refuge in the middle of the house storms. Rita and I giggled and ignored her pleas to stay away from the windows—until the day the wind loosed a dead limb from a birch and sent it hurtling like a javelin through a neighbor’s window.

She would be in the dining room now, I thought, the only windowless room in the house.

A crack and a bolt of lightening lit up the dark. My father’s face looked ghostly in the light and he whispered, low and rumbled under his breath.

“One, two, three,” slow counting, with a silent Mississippi between “Four, five, six, seven.” A roll of thunder grumbled and he stopped.

“You see, Twig? It’s about seven miles away now. Next time we’ll count again and we’ll know if it’s getting closer or moving further away, ok?”

Outside in the hallway Rita went into the bathroom we all shared. A moment later I heard the toilet flush. I watched the window, waiting for the next flash. Across the room Sissy slept soundly. Storms never bothered Sissy.

“There!” I shouted when I spotted another flash in the sky. “One, two.”

My father counted with me. “Three, four., five, six, seven, eight, nine!” he smiled triumphantly at me as the thunder clapped. “You see, Twig? The storm is moving away. Soon you won’t hear anything at all, so be a good girl and get to sleep. Your mom’ll be in here soon and she’ll get mad at me if you’re still awake.” He stood up to leave.

“You know,” he stopped and looked back at me, “the Greeks used to believe it was Zeus sitting on Mount Olympus making all that noise. Your grandmother says it’s the sound of the angels bowling,” he paused. “Stories and myths,” he said. “Sometimes it’s better just to know when it’s going to pass, don’t you think?”

---

I expected my father to hunker down with Argonauts or sing along to the whine of the table saw until the kitchen was clear and Sissy been sent upstairs to sleep, until nothing was left in the kitchen but a stencil of moonlight drawn on the tabletop. But he stood poised on the threshold of the kitchen, sheepish and hunched.

My mother was rinsing dishes, steam curling around her face, loosening strands of her hair. My father circled her waist with the loose loop of his arm, his fingers resting lightly on her hipbone.

“I’m sorry, LuLu,” he said. He leaned down and pressed his mouth in a light kiss on the back her neck. “I’m sorry I shouted. Sorry if I ruined Sissy’s birthday. Just plain sorry, I guess.”

My mother kept rinsing, her back to him.
“Dance with me?” She didn’t turn.
“Aw hell, LuLu. I didn’t need to marry a Greek. I got an Italian instead. Dago, wop, it’s all Greek to me.”
My mother turned and lightly punched him with a damp dishtowel which had been balled up next to her. She threw it onto the counter where it unfurled like butterfly wings. Then, like she always did, she melted into him and let him twirl her around the kitchen.

A tango across the linoleum.