He tried tempting her out of the room with smells. He tried roast rabbit and partridge on a bed of wild rice. He cooked onions. He went to the bridge one afternoon and caught walleye pike and fried it. He made spaghetti. Bacon.

She refused to crawl out from under the armor of quilts. “Whatever you’re burnin in there sure gives me a headache.”

He called her bluff by baking cornbread. She upped it by taking the last blanket off the back of the couch while he and Boo slept. Boo was getting fatter by the day, but One-Two didn’t have the heart to eat while Betty was starving, so he began to shed weight.

When he saw the food tactic wasn’t going to work, he began fixing anything he could think of that needed mending, and some things that didn’t.

He shored up the front steps and screwed them to the house so they no longer wobbled. He took all the screens off the windows and the door except for the ones in Betty’s bedroom windows, and sat in the living room and patched them while listening to “Wheel of Fortune” at top volume.

On the fourth day he got sick of television and made a trip to the hardware store for some solder and spliced the broken cord to the eight-track tape player he found underneath the winter boots in the hall closet.

The only two tapes that still worked were Boo’s old Kiss tape that One-Two didn’t dare play, and “Marvin Gaye’s Greatest Hits.” The rest of them, by ABBA, Kenny Rogers, and Jim Croce, had all been soaked by the boot slush that gathered on the floor of the closet.

One-Two played Marvin Gaye so much that Boo began to sleep in his car. By the sixth day the tape player broke for good, but by then One-Two could sing all of the songs from memory in a raspy monotone. He was crooning “How Sweet It Is” outside Betty’s window while he raked up the dead leaves, cigarette butts, and dog shit that had been collecting in the lee of the house since it was built. Betty yells at him out the window.

“Either fix the damn tape player or hoof it to the church for choir practice. You got the most god-awful voice I ever heard.”

He leans the rake against the house and switches to a hum as he dusts his boots on the new doormat and walks straight into Betty’s room.

“There ain’t no fixin it.”

Betty sighs deeply and sinks back down under the lead weight of the blankets.

“There ain’t no fixin it,” she muses.

“I can get a new one.”

“There ain’t no fixin it,” she says with greater conviction.

“I can get a new one. It ain’t no big deal.”