"If you change your mind," my mother said.

"I'll let you know," I finished. I walked down the hall and up the stairs to my room.

Putting my books down on my desk, I looked out the window. Tiffany was already hard at work on her garden, with Astrid sitting nearby, watching attentively. Tiffany had changed out of the SDS uniform and was wearing faded jeans, sneakers, a big, grubby sweat shirt, and some old gloves that looked too large for her. Probably my father's, I thought. He'd been a serious gardener for awhile, back when I'd been just a kid, but he hadn't done anything outside in the yard for a long time except cook at a Fourth of July barbecue my parents had had last summer.

I smiled, remembering that: my father in his barbecue apron with a tall, silly chef's hat on his head, chasing Astrid, who had managed to grab two hot dogs off the end of the fork as he was lifting them from the grill onto a plate. He hadn't been able to catch her but it

had been a lot of fun. He and my mom had laughed and laughed and she'd told us the story of how she and Dad had cooked dinner for our grandparents, Dad's parents, when she and Dad had first gotten married, and Mom had dropped the pot roast in the middle of the kitchen.

"What did you do?" cried Tiffany.

My father had wriggled his eyebrows and said in a high voice like Julia Childs, "You're always alone in the kitchen."

"You ate it?" Maria had asked.

"We washed it first," said my mom and she and Dad had started laughing all over again.

The grill was in the garage now. I wondered if we'd have a cookout this Fourth of July.

As I watched, Tiffany knelt down, picked up a spade, and began to dig in her garden. She worked with slow, intense concentration. She was like my father that way.

Concentration. It was time I concentrated on my homework. I had a math test coming up the next week, and if I didn't study now, I'd have to work on it over the weekend. That was definitely not part of my game plan.