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Show -53 his own father." My baby brother, handsome as his dad, listened to her obediently, his eyes blank except for two bright spots of reflected lamplight. "I don't believe it," Jacob said. "You have to be wrong about this, Buck." He turned to me; his sleeve dragged across Morgan's cup and he jumped back before the coffee could flood his lap. "I can't imagine Adam falling into the Willamette by accident," I said. "You might have, but Adam was never clumsy. God, he was a graceful man--in the seventeen years I lived here I don't think I ever saw him trip or stumble over anything." I watched Jacob mopping up with a dishtowel and I started to laugh. "Do you remember the night you fell over the wooden Indian at the top of the stairs?" "Do you have to tell that story?" Jacob's face was sad but something inside me was wound up and I couldn't stop. "He got up in the middle of the night to pee," I told Morgan, "and he tripped over the Indian; he grabbed it by the neck to save himself but it was too late and they both went down. When we heard this tremendous commotion and came running we found them lying in the hall in each other's arms with the stairway door fallen on top of them-they'd knocked it off its hinges when they hit it. The fall didn't hurt Jacob but it cracked that poor Indian's head wide open, remember?" |