It would have been ridiculous-it was ridiculous-except that he meant business. A minute later the food and the dishes might be on the floor, and the chairs or the table overturned, and he might be chasing Cece around the room yelling how he was going to get him this time, flatten his face on the hot burner, how would he like that? You would be certain he’d gone crazy. But if at this moment a knock came at the door-if a friend of his arrived, say, to pick him up- his face would reassemble itself in no time and he would open the door and call out the friend’s name in a loud bantering voice.

“I’ll be with you in two shakes. I’d ask you in, but the wife’s been pitching the dishes around again.”

He didn’t intend this to be believed. He said such things in order to turn whatever happened in his house into a joke.

Cece’s mother asked him if the weather was warming up and where he had been that morning.

“Yeah,” he said, and, “Out on the flats.”

She said that she’d thought she could smell the wind on him.

“You know what I’m going to do right after we eat?” she said. “I’m going to take a hot-water bottle and go right back to bed and maybe I’ll get my strength back and feel like doing something.”

That was what she nearly always said she was going to do, but she always announced it as if it was an idea that had just occurred to her, a hopeful decision.

Bud Salter had two older sisters who never did anything useful unless his mother made them. And they never confined their hair arranging, nail polishing, shoe cleaning, making up, or even dressing activities to their bedrooms or the bathroom. They spread their combs and curlers and face powder and nail polish and shoe polish all over the house.