Mr. Walters comes out the screen door and opens the metal refrigerator he keeps there. He takes out a tall silver can of beer and snaps the top and takes a drink.
"One day I'll come out here and you'll be taller than I am," he says.
"If I keep growing," I say. "I don't think I've stopped yet."
"I doubt it," he says. "How's your garden coming?"
"Good."
"Doing some laundry?" he says. "Different than doing it at your special place in the stream, I bet."
"We used the Laundromat sometimes," I say. "These are all school clothes. I'm just getting ready."
"That'll be interesting," he says, "once you spend some more time with kids your age instead of working around with your father all the time. I wonder how much that will change you, how you act."
"I act like a girl," I say. I stab the pins into the cardboard bodies so they will not get lost.
"I'm not saying anything like that," Mr. Walters says.
I put in the detergent and the clothes and I turn and walk back outside into the sun which blinds me for a moment. I sneeze. Once in a hard rain we soaped up our clothes in the forest park and hung them up to rinse from the branches. From a ways away it looked like ten headless people flying through the trees.
In the Methodist church there is a choir wearing purple robes up at the front and the minister wears a white robe. He is not just someone's father taking a turn like in the church when I was a little girl. In that church people stood up in the crowd and said why they knew the church was true but here we just repeat words in our programs and the hymns in the hymnbook are not the ones I know. We stand to sing. We keep standing up and sitting down.
Father can carry a tune. I can hear his voice past mine and separate from all the others. Deeper. He holds the heavy red hymnal open with one hand and his other on my shoulder. When we sit down a couple girls look back at us and I wonder if they'll be at my school but I cannot tell if the people around us know who we are. I do not see Ben or Michael or their mother or anyone we know. The gold plate comes down our row and Father hands me a five-dollar bill to put inside.
Afterwards on the way out he is all smiling and shaking hands. People say I look pretty in my yellow dress. Really I only want to get outside into the sun and air, away from the crowd and candles and the dusty curtains. I don't want to sing for another week.
The best part of church is the big hill. On the way we have to ride up it and halfway to the top I get off and push. Father's bicycle wags back and forth with him standing on the pedals and at the top he shouts and waits for me. It's on the way home that the big hill is the best. Then I pedal hard and bend low. I scream and coast and the wind blows the braids out of my hair and my yellow dress around my waist I'm going so fast. Father roars behind me and he's never beaten me to the bottom.
Later we have changed out of our church clothes and I make sandwiches. Father's bracelets slide along his forearm as he writes in his small notebook. He has cut a piece of cardboard to cover the window next to where he likes to sit so no one can see him.
"Are you growing a beard?" I say. "It looks like you stopped shaving your face."
"What do you really think about that church?" he says. "Do you believe any of that?"
"It's different than the one I remember," I say, "when I was little."
"Is that what I asked you?" he says.
"No," I say. "I like the bicycle riding part."
"Good, Caroline," he says.
"Why?" I say. "Do you believe that?"
"I believe that's a good looking sandwich," he says. "Well, church. No matter how ridiculous it is sometimes some worthwhile things get said."
"So that's why we go?" I say.
"Appearances count," Father says. "When they see us riding our bikes to church, when they hear us sing and we dress up on Sunday that makes them believe certain things about us."
"Like what?" I say.
"That we're like them," he says. "That we believe the same things. That makes them happy, to see us doing what they're doing."
The horses in the moonlight bite and kick at each other with their sharp metal hooves.
When Father cuts the hay field he pulls the swather behind the tractor and it takes down the tall grass leaving a line like he's erasing the field a stripe at a time or like a haircut. It's pretty and it's sad to watch, the color green goes darker where it's cut and I watch from the branches of an aspen I climb. Every time he turns the corner he waves to me. If he hits a rock or there's some snag or tangle or jam he stops and climbs down to fix it.