IT wasn't good, what L.D.'s dad said to his mom.

           "Seventy-five dollars is a lot of money," Dad said.

           He might as well have gone on and said, no.

           L.D. had just come down to the bottom of the stairs, right at the start of the one-story part of the house, and the living room. He was on his way to turn on the living room TV. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, behind the dining room, which was the other side of the living room. Dad's words made him stop.

           It was the new youth arts center, starting on weekends next fall, just after fifth grade started, that's what they were talking about.

           "Oh, Art Cooper," Mom said, "it's not as if we can't afford it. Stretch it out over the nine months and it's pretty cheap."

           "Sandy, I don't know. His grades are already poorer than they ought to be. This'll be a big distraction. Why isn't this a summer program?"

           "Well, the facility is holding summer seminars for adult artists. The youth arts center gets it September through the start of June."

           Dad humphed.

           Then Mom said, "And I'm thinking this will help him channel that creative energy into something focused so he may be able to better attend to schoolwork. It's not going to be taking up his study time. And if he has projects for the center through the week, I'll be sure they occupy what would have been playtime not homework time. And honestly, Dear, you know that."

           "I know that, huh?"

           "Sweetheart, I just don't know that I understand your resistance. He'll be ten soon. It's time for him to start exercising that part of his brain."

           "Like he doesn't already," Dad said.

           "I mean, in a structured environment."

           After a couple seconds of cupboards opening and closing and the sink water running for a little, Dad said, in a quiet voice, "We'll see," and didn't sound like he really meant it.

           Slowly, L.D. crept back up to his room, while his parents got ready to leave for the grocery store with his little sister. He felt like falling on his bed and not moving for a hundred years. Instead, he got out his two Beatle albums.


It was a big concert hall in New York or L.A. or London or some place and L.D. was the superstar. He wasn't nine going on ten anymore. Now he was going on twenty, even older than a teenager. He'd turned into an exciting, important man from a regular guy. He wasn't just a kid in Dayton, Ohio in 1968. He was the rock star Sgt. Pepper and it was 1978.

           He wasn't standing in his upstairs bedroom. He wasn't in front of the little picnic table his mom bought for his room, where his small, black, stereo record player sat. There weren't posters on light-blue bedroom walls, Batman and Robin from the comic book, and the black-and-white one of the Beatles before they had moustaches.

           L.D. was on stage and looked down to its end, where thousands, maybe hundreds-and-hundreds of thousands of girls screamed and cried, all of them there to hear him sing and play his guitar. Maybe even a million girls!

           The automatic arm of his stereo came down at the start of the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The sounds from the start of the record, of the audience and the violins getting tuned, came from the little black speakers, one on each end of the picnic table. Sgt. Pepper's concert was about to begin. Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles' next album, were the songs for the show. They were the only Beatles records L.D. had, for now, and he knew every word and every sound from every song.

           L.D. put his imaginary guitar pick over the center of the body of his yellow, plastic guitar. It was his Christmas present from Aunt Linda. It came with plastic strings but he took them off right away because they didn't sound right and they got in his way.

           On the first chord of the song "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," L.D. moved his wrist exactly with the record. The lead guitar lines cried from the little speakers. His other hand moved with drama up and down the red neck of the yellow guitar. He fingered each note of the lead guitar. He bopped his body left and right with the drumbeat and the dark, rich, guitar chords. His voice thick, put up in the back of his throat, L.D. imitated Paul McCartney's voice. He was good at getting all the Beatles' singing voices right, but he liked doing Paul the most. He sang the story of Sgt. Pepper's band.

After the first verse, while the horn guys play their horns before the chorus, the superstar Sgt. Pepper walks to the edge of the stage. Girls strain forward to touch his ankles. He smiles and winks at the girls. Then he turns and smiles at the other guy on guitar (just like John Lennon did to Paul on the TV show of The Beatles in concert). Sgt. Pepper smiles at the other guy because the girls love Sgt. Pepper. Maybe he'll pick one of them to make out with him in his hotel room.

           He and the other guy stand at the same microphone (like Paul and George Harrison) and sing the chorus. Then Sgt. Pepper notices Lillian Fuller, from way back when he was a little kid in the fourth grade back in Ohio, in the audience. He ignores her. Sgt. Pepper looks over to the side of the stage and sees Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark.

           This is in New York.

           Besides playing his yellow electric guitar, Sgt. Pepper also sits at his famous piano, shaped like a picnic table, for some songs. Finally, after the crowd cheers, roars and stomps the concert hall into a shaking earthquake, the band comes back out and performs the encore song, "All You Need Is Love," and Sgt. Pepper is at his piano. The song is his biggest hit single and has sold over five-hundred- million copies!

Then, the audience makes even more noise and the band has to come back on and do another encore! Sgt. Pepper puts his guitar back on and walks to his microphone. The band does "Getting Better" again. Then Sgt. Pepper waves goodbye to the audience for the last time.

L.D. pulled his guitar strap over his curly, light-brown hair that went to his shoulders, then sat on his bed. Aunt Linda gave him the strap just before she left in December to be an exchange student at a college in Italy for a semester. She'd laced together thick kite string to make it. It was her going away present to him.

           Outside in the side yard, Frisky, L.D.'s dog, had yapped and whined the last few seconds. Car doors shut. In a few more seconds the front door opened. His mom called up the stairs, "L.D., come down and help your dad and sister with the groceries." He jumped up from his bed and headed downstairs because Mom had probably talked more to Dad about the arts center. In the kitchen he looked at Mom, asking her with his face.

           Mom hugged L.D. like it was an answer. She said, "You father hasn't said yes, yet. But he hasn't said no." She nodded toward the door in the kitchen that went to the garage. "Go help."


No question in L.D.'s mind, Mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. When the sun hit her a certain way there was some dark-red in her brown hair. People always said he had Dad's blonde color in his light- brown hair, but he knew he had Mom's green eyes. She said he had some hazel-blue from the sky mixed in. And though she always said she was fat, L.D. didn't think she was. He had friends with moms that were fat. His mom wasn't fat. She wasn't as skinny as Aunt Linda, her little sister, but she wasn't fat at all.

           She'd be thirty-six in June, a little after L.D. was ten. She was the art teacher at Van Cleve Elementary School. She was also a sculptor. She said she'd had some success in a spattering of exhibitions. It started a few years ago. She could sing, too, and L.D. loved to listen to her. All the people at church liked to hear her sing a song called "Nearer My God to Thee." L.D. didn't really like that kind of song, but it seemed to mean so much to her it made it really special to hear. And the preacher, Brother J.G., always insisted she sing "Oh, Holy Night" at the Christmas service. It always made L.D. feel like crying when she sang it.

           She loved paintings and bought them all the time. They were on almost all the walls in the house. Some were the real paintings by artists who weren't famous. Mom even knew a few of them personally. She also bought prints. Prints were photographs of famous paintings by artists Mom said were The Masters. On the living room wall, above the sofa, was one by a guy, whose name was pronounced Rue-SOH but was spelled like it should have been Roh-EW-see-uh. It was Mom's favorite.

           L.D. looked at that painting a lot. It looked like a real place. It was a picture of a few trees clumped together in the countryside. The branches of the biggest one stretched out and in its shade cows ate grass. One cow, just outside the shade and a little closer to the person looking at the painting, drank from a small pond. Or maybe it was a large puddle left from when it had rained. The sky behind it all was white with clouds. The blue of the sky got through in a couple spots. Behind the grass and the trees, the ground had taller brown grass or maybe bushes. And there was a road that wound up and away from the cows and led to the far back of the picture. It must have been early spring in the painting. The little silver tag on the bottom of the wooden frame had the painting's name. Again there were words that weren't pronounced like they were spelled. Mom would say the name like it should be and it sounded like beautiful music.

Group of Oaks at Apremont in the Forest of Fontainebleau Théodore Rousseau

           It was a cool Saturday afternoon. Spring was pretty new and you still had to wear a jacket sometimes. Big islands of puffy clouds, gray and blue on their bellies, most connected by puffy, white bridges, covered the sky and let the sun show only sometimes. A piece of sun floated by on the ground while L.D. walked to Dad's dark-green Oldsmobile.

           In the driveway, Lisa, who'd just turned four, skipped and bounced by with a sack of groceries. Her blonde ponytail sort of flapped with her bounce. Her red windbreaker was open and you could see the front of her yellow jumper. She hummed "Henry VIII" by Herman's Hermits

           "Lisa!" Dad said, "Walk right with those groceries."

           Lisa walked into the garage. She stopped skipping but still bounced. She sang, "I got married to the widow in store \ She's been married seven towns before."

           What an idiot, L.D. thought, can't even get the words right.

           L.D. walked up to Dad at the car. In the side yard, Frisky yapped with excitement. She looked like a shorthaired terrier but really was a mutt. Her jumps pushed her white, brown-spotted body almost high enough to get over the chain-link fence.

           "Frisky! Shutuuuup!" L.D. said to the side yard.

           Dad handed L.D. a bag full of fruits and vegetables and said, "She got water?"

           "Um, I think so." L.D. started back toward the house.

           "Son, explain to me why you don't know if your dog has water."

           He turned back to Dad, "I forget."

           "What you mean is that you forgot all about your dog," Dad said, "You've been in your room listening to records all afternoon, haven't you?"

           "Yes, Sir."

           "And you let your dog slip your mind. Didn't you?"

           "Yes, Sir."

           Dad was forty-nine years old, tall, thin and had nice muscles. Mom liked to brag he had only the vaguest hint of middle-aged spread. His crew cut showed some gray and was only thick on the sides of his head. Though he did have some really thin hair on top, it was cut so short you couldn't tell it was there, except up close. And there was a little bald circle up there, right on the very top, no matter how long Dad's hair got.

           While he pulled another sack from the trunk of the Oldsmobile, Dad said, "Son, it's okay for you to enjoy your music and such, but your responsibilities come first. Your responsibilities to those who depend on you come before everything else."

           "Yes, Sir."

           "Today you placed your fun over the responsibility you have to your pet. She depends on you. You have to be there for her."

           "Yes, Sir."

           "You help finish with this, then you check Frisky's waterbowl. In fact, it's about time to feed her, isn't it?"

           "Yes, Sir."


The Coopers lived on Murray Drive in a house Mom called a nice middle-class family home with a nice back yard. It was at the top of Kittyhawk Drive, a short street that came up a steep hill to right in front of the house. The neighborhood was on top of the East-End Hill, higher than the rest of Dayton. They could see a lot of the Miami Valley. They could have moved to a bigger house in a richer neighborhood, but they stayed because of Mom. She grew up in a rich neighborhood, in a place by Dayton called Oakwood, but liked the East Dayton neighborhood. Mom also loved that view. So did L.D. At night, the lights from the houses in the valley and the couple skyscrapers downtown looked really cool. The only place the view was better was the next block over on the jungle jim. It was at the playground on the hill behind L.D.'s school, Orville Wright Elementary. When he sat on the top bars, the view was wider and farther since from there he didn't have houses and trees in his way.

           Their house was a brownstone and had a two-story part and a one- story part. The taller part had the three bedrooms and the big bathroom upstairs. Downstairs, Dad's den was on the back side, and he even had his own door to the little downstairs bathroom that didn't have a tub or shower in it. Mom's art studio was in front with a big picture window that looked at the valley. The guest bedroom, where Grandpa and Grandma Cooper, from Illinois, stayed when they visited, was next to Mom's studio. That's also where his girl cousins slept when they spent the weekend, and Aunt Linda, too.

           L.D. went out the back door to Frisky's doghouse, in the middle of the yard. The yard was a quarter acre with a chain-link fence from the front edges of the house back to Mr. and Mrs. Grossman's yard. Dad sometimes thought about a pool but wasn't sure he wanted to mess with the upkeep. After L.D. had replaced dirty water in the bowl, Frisky leaped and jumped around him while he held the bowl steady on his trip back to the dog house. He almost spilled the water twice. Frisky ignored the water when L.D. sat it down. She whined and jumped at him, begging to play.

           L.D. jerked forward and placed his hands on his knees. Frisky crouched. Her dog smile beamed. She zipped away, ran the whole yard in a wide circle and scurried back to L.D. He picked up her rubber tube steak, which lost its squeaker a long time ago. When she got back to him, he tossed her toy to the back of the yard and with a little bark she went after it. After a few minutes, L.D. and Frisky wrestled on the ground. She was on top with a happy growl in her chest.

           Mom opened the back door. "Sweetheart, have you fed her yet?"

           "No." He sat up.

           "Think it's time to?"

           "Okay," he almost whined. He wasn't doing anything wrong.

           In the kitchen, L.D. poured dried dog food into the bowl, then poured warm water from the tap over the food to make gravy. Just before he opened the back door, L.D. decided there wasn't enough water in the dog food, so he went back to the sink.

           "He spent the whole time we were gone listening to his records and let that dog slip his mind," he heard Dad say from over in the hallway by his den and Mom's studio.

           L.D.'s hand froze on the faucet knob just before he'd turned the hot water on.

           "Goodness, Honey, he's nine," Mom said, "and he was off in one of his worlds, not just 'listening to his records.' He loses himself in his make-believe. He's creating worlds in his head. It's why---"

           "---Yes, yes," Dad said, "the youth arts center. Sandra that thing is a half-year away. You couldn't even enroll him until, what, September?"

           With a sort of sigh in her voice, Mom said, "Middle of August, I think."

           "So, I'm nowhere close to a yes on this, yet."

           "I know."

           One thing L.D. knew about Dad was that his "yet" didn't have to really mean "yet," at all.