I wish school would start up again. But it's July and Mom doesn't believe in summer camp, where I know my best friend Susie's kissing Jake DeMoe on the mouth. Normally that's something I could fix during recess at eleven. But the camp they're at - where the whole world's at except me - is on the Canada side of Lake Erie and Mom says that's too far to walk.

"Drive me then," I say, licking Mom's sewing chalk. She's been using it to draw lines for these overalls she's making me. The pattern's lying on the floor. There's a front part, a back, and two legs with extra paper stapled to the sides because I need my overalls baggier than the pattern says. I need room to move.

"Cut that out," Mom says and takes away the chalk. "I need you here for fittings." She's

bent over the sewing machine, slipping in a bobbin, her glasses low on her nose.

Then she pumps the pedal under the table, a rubber boot on her foot because the machine is old and the pedal sometimes shocks. Her other foot is bare.

I say, "Why do you need me if you've got the pattern?"

"The pattern's just a guide."

"I want to go to Camp."

"To beat up Susie? I don't think so."

I open my mouth - there's other things besides Susie that make me want to go - when the phone rings. Mom tells me to answer. It's Mr. Deere asking for Dad, whose sitting at the dining-room table, glue and feathers and fish hooks scattered across the varnish.

"He's not here," I say and look over at Dad, who gives me a thumbs-up.

"I need to talk to him."

"He's at the doctor's."

"Really? He sounded fine a week ago."

"Not anymore. He's got muscular dysentery."

"Did you have to say that?" Dad asks me after I hang up the phone.

"I thought you needed an excuse."

"I have an excuse."

"So why don't you tell it to Mr. Deere?"

Dad says nothing. He picks up his magnifying glass and holds it so his one eye grows and bulges like a startled giant's. He's been that way for days, sitting at the table and messing with trout flies when he should be at work. It's not that weird. He did the same thing when someone called Frank Sinatra died. Whenever Mom brings home ice-skating passes for the season. What is weird, this time, is that Mom doesn't say anything. She doesn't remind him that sitting around won't put dinner on the table, or heat the hot-tub. She doesn't sneak up to the dining-room table when Dad disappears for his morning toilet, the nozzle of her vacuum cleaner firmly under her arm. She won't scream at Dad, "You don't even fish!" She just gives him slightly scared looks. She fries him steak, gets him cigarettes from the store, then slips back to her sewing.

I ask her why. "Later," she says and leans into the sewing machine so its light bounces off her glasses. So I wait.

I wait until she comes into my room and sits down on my bed like she does when it's dark and there's hard rain outside. And there is. I can hear it hit the ground and I can see it on my TV, these big red cells the pregnant weather lady's pointing at. She works for this channel I watch through jumpy white lines because I can't have cable. Still, I'm not ungrateful like some people. I just keep the sound turned off.