Only the sun streaming through the windows wasn’t an early-morning sun and he was the only one in the bed. The chickens were up and so was Farmer Max. He found his clothes and padded through the living room and dining room into the kitchen for some coffee. The worn wooden floors weren’t so bad, but the linoleum in the kitchen was cold, even through his socks. His entire life the kitchen had been the wrong temperature. In the summer it was too hot. In the winter, too cold. Like the rest of the farmhouse, the kitchen was heated—it just wasn’t heated well, and the fireplace had been a death trap even when he’d been a kid. Surrounded by outside walls or unheated rooms, the kitchen was hopeless. Between the peeling linoleum floors and the cracking laminate counters, it was also ugly. There were no mugs in the cabinet he opened. Max had rearranged the kitchen. He blinked a couple times and looked around. It was the same ugly kitchen—and yet it was different.
