I always said I got to get out of here, but that was just talk. Now I for sure mean it. Anyway, I’m almost sixteen, so I have to go. Ma and Pa say sixteen is the limit for boys staying in the house.

My two older brothers took off when they hit sixteen, one a year after the other. Mike headed for the gold fields in the Klondike, and Charley went west to look for ranch work. He always liked horses, and there aren’t so many around here, nor people don’t take good care of them, only using them to haul things because nobody can afford a car, mostly. We ain’t heard back from either of my brothers, even though they promised to send money if they could.

Aside from me, my sister Daisy’s the only kid still at home, and she’s just twelve. Or she would be, if she was alive.

My name is Pete, and I live in the attic. My room’s right up under the slant of the roof, only one layer of wood between me and the asphalt shingles, and it gets all the heat in the summer, and not much of it in the winter, despite being upwards, the way heat is supposed to go.

Pa or someone who lived in my room before I did shellacked old ads from the Sears catalog on the wall, things I guess he wanted. One was a shotgun and the other was a guitar. I looked at those things before I went to sleep and thought, that person never got those things, and I probably wouldn’t get what I want, either.

I have radio dreams. Someday I want to sing with a big band like Paul Whiteman’s. He’s the King of Jazz. I’d like to be in his Rhythm Boys, but mostly I’d like to sing like Bing Crosby or Jack Teagarden.

Pa told me, “Get a clue. Nobody’s going to pay you to sing, Pete. There’s a Depression on. Learn to do something you can sell.”

Ma told me later that my voice gave joy to people who listened, like a songbird, but she said there were lots of songbirds out there, and most of them didn’t get paid anything.

Mike and Charley used to live in the rooms on the third floor below me. Ma and Pa slept in the big bedroom on the second floor, and Daisy slept in a closet off the hall across from Ma and Pa’s room. That’s where I still see her sometimes.

All the way downstairs was the kitchen, where Ma cooked and we ate, and the front room, where we did most everything else we did inside awake. The best part of that room was the radio, which we turned on after supper. If I could, I’d live in front of the radio. It wasn’t just the stories, it was the music I loved, live from ballrooms in New York City, where I imagined Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on polished floors to big band jazz, with glass stars hanging from the ceiling, and everything in black and white. I saw myself up on the stage, crooning into a microphone as the conductor led the band through my favorite songs, “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” “Paper Moon.”

When Mike moved out, and Pa got laid off, Pa shifted the broken things from the other attic room down to Mike’s old room. He worked on the junk, replacing a broken footrest on a wooden chair, straightening the spokes of a wheel, planing down a drawer in a dresser that got stuck. He’d sell things after he fixed them, and soon enough he was bringing back other broken things he’d picked up at the junkyard or on trash day to fix and sell.

Ma set up Charley’s room as a sewing room. She put her ma’s machine in there, and piled up fabric she’d bought at sales and thrift stores in palmier days, and whatever odds and ends of buttons and threads she’d squirrelled away over the years. Pretty soon you couldn’t tell Charley had ever lived in there. She did piecework as she could, took in mending when she could find it, and she made baby clothes to sell.

I was at the top of the house separated from everybody else by a whole floor of junk, and sometimes that suited me fine. The parents couldn’t hear me moving around at whatever hours I chose, nor singing,