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with us to dinner and hand out the other four copies to the vegetables who can still read. You would have thought that Frank had won the Nobel Prize. Lina Bauer, who was known for letting boys touch her chest back in middle school, goes on and on about Frank’s “talent” and asks him to write her a poem from the voice of her late husband, which sounds fishy to me. John Hartmann, who has a funny shrunken left hand from a threshing accident, suggests that Frank start a regular column in the school paper.
    “But Frank’s not in high school,” I protest. “It’s a high school paper.” The whole table stares at me, shocked, like I’m some kind of Judas.
    “That’s the point, Joy,” Frank says, quietly, dangerously. “To give the teenagers another perspective on things.”
    The high school journalism teacher says no, of course, just like I thought he would, but that doesn’t stop Frank. He was up two days after his knee surgery last year, and back when our farm was dairy, he milked the cows every day at four in the morning, even when it was pouring, even when he had a raging fever.
    Frank decides to start a weekly paper at Wittenberg Village.
    It lasts for three weeks, until the staff shuts it down for the anonymous editorial criticizing the lasagna and a scandalous column by Lina about the “Ten Most Irritating Habits of Residents” at Wittenberg Village. She comes out of the director’s office crying. “They called me unchristian,” she tells us at dinner that night.
    I am relieved when the whole thing blows over, but Frank takes it hard. He starts watching a lot of TV, and his eyes leak at the littlest thing. I feel bad for not encouraging him more with his journalism. Frank’s always needed something to do. I haven’t minded, whenever I had a spare minute, just sitting on the porch at our old house, watching the corn, or the clouds, or petting our dog, Jenny, now long gone. It always got me in trouble as a girl, my habit of just staring at something, “dreaming,” as my mother said, “idle.” But on weekends, Frank wasn’t happy unless he was fixing something. If anything, he got busier when he retired. A lot of the old farmers were like that, up until a couple years ago: they still had breakfast at five a.m. together at PeeWees, down on Miller Street.
    I mention some of this to Beth when she comes over to check on us and Frank is out playing cards with some of the guys in the fellowship hall.
    “Oh, give it a rest, Mom,” she says.
    “But I’m just worried—”
    “You always have to make them look so good,” she says.
    “What? Who?” I ask.
    “Your men,” she says. “Chris, Dad. Why don’t you just back off? Let Dad fend for himself. And screw Chris.”
    “Beth!”
    “Forget it,” she grumbles, and starts gathering her things. “I’m making a trip to Walmart this afternoon. You guys need anything?”
    “Sit down,” I say. “What do you mean ‘make them look good’?”
    “So Chris made some baskets in high school and makes a lot of money now,” she says. “Who cares?”
    “You know how important it is for your father,” I say.
    “But why do you get caught up in it?” she asks, her voice tight, like I haven’t heard since she was a teenager. “You just encourage it.”
    “Is this about the newspaper article?” I ask.
    “Jesus, that’s what you think? No, Mom,” she says. “Never mind.”
    “Do you want an article too?”
    She stops and stares at me. “Do you really think I’m that pathetic?”
    I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t think she’s pathetic, but sometimes Beth traps you into saying things you don’t mean. I learned a long time ago to be silent with her when it got to thin ice. She sighs and comes over and gives me a cold hug. “I don’t need an article,” she says. “Unlike Dad and Chris, and you, apparently, I’m not obsessed with my high school years.”
    After she leaves, I write one anyways.
    CHARITON ALUM EXCELS IN SHELVING
    Beth