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silence.
    â€œAmos,” he said, “I want you to tell me something. If you could wish for one thing in the world, what would it be?”
    Amos didn’t know what to answer. He had the funny feeling he should give the answer that would have been true a few years ago, an answer that would be as comforting to his father as Tums. The truth was, Amos’s wishes were different now. Now he wished he could walk over to the lunch table where Clara always sat with her friend Gerri and make some excuse to sit down. He wished he had his own car. He wished he didn’t wish his father wasn’t a lowly milkman whose big outings were twice-a-week Moose Lodge meetings and Thursday night bowling, but he did.
    â€œTo play first base for the Blue Jays,” Amos said, and then, refining a little, “and to hit for higher average than Olerud and more homers than Carter.”
    And Amos was right. His father smiled and relaxed again in his seat.

3
    EGYPTIANS
    Clara’s house had an attic. By parting the clothes in the upstairs hall closet and climbing the rungs of a permanent vertical ladder, you came to the trapdoor, which when pushed open allowed entry into the long empty room. “The schizophrenic attic,” Clara’s mother called it, because one side was so unlike the other. All of the junk had been pushed into a disorderly heap in one half of the room. The other half was severely neat. It was here that her mother had set up a desk and tried to complete her master’s degree in something called Egyptology. All Clara knew about it was the strange flat eyes of Egyptian art, which faced toward you even though the faces were in profile.
    But that was before the money troubles. The company that employed Clara’s father sold top-of-the-line office furniture, but not much of it was selling right now. It had something to do with businesses failing and used furniture flooding the market—that’s what Clara got out of it, anyhow. So that was the end of Egyptology. Her mother had failed to find a teaching job and had finally taken a job at Kaufmann’s Department Store, folding towels and ringing up sheets.
    Clara thought Kaufmann’s was a nice place to work, and she thought her mother looked elegant leading customers through the rows of pillows and bright towels, but when her mother came home for dinner, she would complain to Clara’s father long-distance wherever he was and then talk to her sister— Clara’s aunt—in Dalton.
    Clara could always tell who her mother was talking to just by her tone of voice. With her father, her mother’s voice was flat and tired-sounding. “Fine,” she would say when asked about her day, and then they might talk about the latest storm front. “Well, that’s life in Jemison,” Clara’s mother would say in her weary voice, “where the weather changes all the time, but the people never do.” But with Clara’s aunt, her mother’s voice grew bright and alive with hopes and schemes. She talked about new possibilities for making money: catering, sewing, furniture refinishing, anything. Lately, the big new idea was teaching abroad. “There are jobs right now, as we speak, for someone with my credentials in Kyoto and Provence,” Clara heard her mother say one night to her aunt. Clara was good at geography. She knew Kyoto was in Japan and Provence was in France. Clara was amazed and a little afraid. Why would her mother look for a job
there
when her family lived here?
    Clara opened the gray box of Princess-of-Monaco stationery on her mother’s desk and considered her plan. If she was going to put advertising flyers in the newspapers, she needed to get people’s attention. She pulled out one of her mother’s books and after some practice made a drawing of an Egyptian girl pulling a huge square stone across the page. Under that, she wrote:
Girl for rent!
Let me do your errands on snowy days.