Sunday, July 9, "4:30 PM". "Garrett".

My baby sister Beth is really cute, I have to admit. She’s laughing a lot these days. She grabs her toes and rocks a little and smiles and dares you to tickle her. When you do she laughs and laughs, it’s the greatest thing ever. She said “Daa-daa” yesterday, which freaked Mom out, but I think she’s just making noises.

Something kind of funny happened today.

Dad’s copy of A Family Farmer’s Country Almanac had been sitting untouched on the end table by his easy chair since the last time he left it there. Nobody wanted to move it. We saw him with it so often, thumbing through it on a Sunday afternoon, that it almost seemed like a part of him. It’s dogeared and coffee-stained and wrinkled and bent, but bright and sturdy and bold. It’s like a relic of who he was.

Well, Mom was tidying up this afternoon, dusting the furniture. She saw it, hesitated, hovered over it a minute. I was there and I watched her. She picked it up. She opened it, flipped through some of the pages. Then she stopped on one page and looked it over a while. Suddenly her eyes closed, her head dropped, and she sat down hard in his chair. She cast her body forward and started to cry, holding her elbows clenched between her knees and the Almanac open in her hands.

I was alarmed, and I put down what I was reading (it’s Catcher in the Rye) and went over to her. I put my hand on her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t say or do anything except lift the book slowly and hold it out for me to take. I took it, and looked at the page.

It showed the long-range weather forecast. It tells you eighteen months ahead of time what the weather is supposed to be. I remember them arguing about it a long time ago.

I saw now that Dad had marked up the page during the fall of last year, grading the weekly predictions. Next to each forecast was either a small red “X” or a green checkmark, that seemed to say, “They got it wrong this week,” or “They got it right.”

All of the September predictions had an “X” beside them. There was one checkmark in October, but the rest were “X”es. There were no more marks after October. I guess Dad had made up his mind by then.

Below that, scrawled over the charts for November and December, was his handwriting in big green letters.

You’re right, of course, Amy. It’s pure lunacy.

I couldn’t help smiling.

Suddenly she wailed. “What was he doing, Garrett?” She was crying but also kind of smiling, like she knew she’d been the butt of a joke. “He carried that Almanac around everywhere. He kept saying how it knew the future, how it knew when the fish were biting and the rain was coming. It was ridiculous! We argued about it a dozen times.”

I didn’t know myself whether to laugh or cry. “He was just fooling, Mom. You had to know that.”

“I didn’t!” She was nearly shouting. “He always believed in everything: in God, in the future, in being healed, in finding other people, in everything turning out fine. I thought the Almanac was just one more example of how he believed in…in the ridiculous.”

I took a step away from her. The way she was talking made me feel kind of serious. She sounded more exasperated than angry, but I could tell the page had struck a nerve.

“He didn’t believe in the Almanac, Mom,” I said. “He just liked it. It had interesting articles. He knew he had to become a farmer, and it made him feel like a farmer. It made him feel like he wasn’t the only farmer in the world, he was part of a tradition, a community.”

She kept staring at the floor, slowly shaking her head. “I don’t… I don’t…”

“Listen,” I continued, “he told me once that when he was a kid he used to see it on his grandpa’s end table. His good grandpa, not the bad one.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I remember.”

“He didn’t think The Almanac was gospel truth, Mom. It just gave him a comfortable feeling. He liked it. It’s how he coped.”

She had grown still. Even the crying stopped. Her head and shoulders hung limp. She looked defeated. “Then why did he say he believed in it?”

I lifted my hands, still holding the book, then let them drop. “Maybe just to get under your skin? You thought he believed in everything, so he played up the stereotype?”

“But he did believe in everything.” Her voice was choked and quiet.

I went across and laid the Almanac back in its place. Then I knelt down in front of her, shaking my head. “No. He didn’t,” I said. “You know he didn’t. Dad was a biology teacher. He wasn’t as smart as you but he was smart. He never had faith just for faith’s sake. He put his faith in the things he thought deserved it.”

Then she sobbed, and I held my mother.