Leo finished sweeping the floor, then swept the hallway down to the bathroom. He ran back to the kitchen for the sponge and Comet and glass cleaner, then he scrubbed down the bathroom sink, the tub, and the outside of the toilet. He sprayed the mirror and wiped it clear. He swept the floor across the hall into his room, then did that floor too. Buddy Guy’s electric guitar was really whining the blues now, holding on with a long single note right behind Junior’s singing about the man mistreating him. Leo took a T-shirt from his bureau drawer to use as a dust cloth. He wiped down his bureau top, his bedside table, the window sills, even Big Bill Broonzy’s face. He pulled up his window screen, then swept all the dust and floor grit onto his new Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee albumn cover and dropped the dirt out onto the pine needles. He was sweating now and he thought after he cleaned the whole damn house he might do some push-ups and sit-ups, maybe even go run down the road.

He was on the roof sweeping pine needles and twigs out of the gutters when Jim drove up. He was early by about an hour and Leo figured he’d skipped going down to the club altogether. Leo waved and said hi, but Jim didn’t say anything back. He barely looked up as he carried a grocery bag into the house. Leo hurried up and finished. He dropped the broom off the roof and climbed down the pine closest to the house. Inside, his father’s coffee was brewing and Leo heard the shower water running in the bathroom. He wondered if Jim had noticed how clean everything was. He went into the parlor and did forty-six push-ups. Then he started doing sit-ups. He remembered GP telling Allie on the raft on Empire Lake how he could do 350 of these, but at thirty-five Leo’s stomach muscles burned and his lower back hurt, so he stopped at forty-three. He changed into sneakers, then ran up Saunders Hill to Paper Boulevard. He jogged away from town and stayed on the shoulder, running against any traffic. During wrestling season they had to run three times a week but only for a couple of miles. Leo thought he could do that. He’d run a mile down and a mile back. There was a break in the trees at the first bend to Springfield, and he could see the river. The water was green again, blue near the banks, and he thought of Allie crying in Beatrice’s yesterday, the way she put her hand to her mouth after she pushed the flowers off the counter, the way she turned her back on him.