Richard’s father Charles comes home to find his wife and son working in the garden. Richard rushes up to embrace him, but is pushed away hastily so that his father can kiss his mother. He knows that when his father comes home, everything has to be just so – otherwise his temper hangs in the air and makes the whole house ‘sick.’ Gordon, his elder brother, has gone away at camp, and his absence upsets the family dynamic because Gordon and Charles were similar enough to get along well. As the day passes, Richard finds himself slipping up. He makes too much noise, or daydreams between conversations, and all of these mistakes provoke the anger of his father. This distemper is then targeted indiscriminately between his mother and him, which makes him wish that his father would like him more. When they go to church, Richard forces himself to behave, and observes that his mother is doing the same thing. He is surprised, however, when his father says that he wants to repair the ladder with Richard’s help. In Gordon’s absence, Richard realises he has a chance to bond with his father. They fix the ladder; his mother had attempted to do so before and failed, for which his father ridicules her, saying that women aren’t expected to have sense. He laughs, as he is expected to, and daydreams about an afternoon he spent swimming with his mother when she told him that the fishes biting him weren’t trying to be cruel – that’s just how they were. She warned him that only people could choose to be unkind. That evening, dinner is delayed because his mother was making a cherry pie for his father. Charles finds fault with this, too, observing that the filling is too sweet. In an attempt to please his father, Richard repeats what was said earlier; ‘she’s a woman – she’s not expected to have sense.’ His father laughs, but his mother looks betrayed. Feeling instantly ashamed, Richard runs away to the river and languishes in his embarrassment. To his relief, however, his mother eventually comes and joins him. She does not look angry; but neither does she look happy.