When she hugged me I could smell her perfume and feel the press of her firm little breasts. I kissed her cheek; she kissed me high up on the jaw, making a smack in my ear that I felt all the way down my back. “Say things are going to be better now,” she whispered, still holding me.

“Lots better now,” I said, and she hugged me again, tight. Then she stepped away “You better have brought plenty food, big boy, because we plenty hungry womens. Right, Kyra?”

“I taggled my own quartermack,” Ki said, then leaned back on her elbows, giggling deliciously at the bright and hazy sky. “Come on,” I said, and grabbed her by the middle I toted her that way to a nearby picnic table, Ki kicking her legs and waving her arms and laughing I set her down on the bench; she slid off it and beneath the table, boneless as an eel and still laughing ’?dl right, Kyra Elizabeth,” Mattie said. “Sit up and show the other side”

“Good girl, good girl,” she said, clambering up beside me. “That’s the other side to me, Mike”

“I’m sure,” I said. Inside the bag there were Big Macs and fries for Mattie and me. For Ki there was a colorful box upon which Ronald Mcdonald and his unindicted co-conspirators capered “Mattie, I got a Happy Meal! Mike got me a Happy Meal! They have toys!”

“Well see what yours is.” Kyra opened the box, poked around, then smiled It lit up her whole face She brought out something that I at first thought was a big dust-ball For one horrible second I was back in my dream, the one of Jo under the bed with the book over her face Give me that, she had snarled It’s my dust-catcher. And something else, too—some other association, perhaps from some other dream I couldn’t get hold of it. “Mike?” Mattie asked Curiosity in her voice, and maybe borderline concern. “It’s a doggy!” Ki said “I won a doggy in my Happy Meal!” Yes; of course A dog. A little stuffed dog. And it was gray, not black… although why I’d care about the color either way I didn’t know.

“That’s a pretty good prize,” I said, taking it. It was soft, which was good, and it was gray, which was better Being gray made it all right, somehow Crazy but true I handed it back to her and smiled. “What’s his name?” Ki asked, jumping the little dog back and forth across her Happy Meal box. “What doggy’s name, Mike?” And, without thinking, I said, “Strickland.”

I thought she’d look puzzled, but she didn’t. She looked delighted.

“Stricken!” she said, bouncing the dog back and forth in ever-higher leaps over the box. “Stricken! Stricken! My dog Stricken!”

“Who’s this guy Strickland?” Mattie asked, smiling a little. She had begun to unwrap her hamburger.

’5 character in a book I read once,” I said, watching Ki play with the little puffball dog. “No one real.”

“My grampa died,” she said five minutes later.

We were still at the picnic table but the food was mostly gone.

Strick-land the stuffed puffball had been set to guard the remaining french fries. I had been scanning the ebb and flow of people, wondering who was here from the TR observing our tryst and simply burning to carry the news back home. I saw no one I knew, but that didn’t mean a whole tot, considering how long I’d been away from this part of the world.

Mattie put down her burger and looked at Ki with some anxiety, but I thought the kid was okay—she had been giving news, not expressing grief.

“I know he did,” I said.

“Grampa was awful old.” Ki pinched a couple of french fries between her pudgy little fingers. They rose to her mouth, then gloop, all gone.

“He’s with Lord Jesus now. We had all about Lord Jesus in V.B.S.”

I3s, Ki, I thought, right now Grampy’s probably teaching Lord Jesus how to use Pixel Easel and asking if there might be a whore handy.

“Lord Jesus walked on water and also changed the wine into macaroni.”

“Yes, something like that,” I said. “It’s sad when people die, isn’t it?”

“It would be sad if Mattie died, and it would be sad if you died, but Grampy was old.” She said it as though I hadn’t quite grasped this con cept the first time. “In heaven he’ll get all fixed up.”

“That’s a good way to look at it, hon,” I said.

Mattie did maintenance on Ki’s drooping barrettes, working carefully and with a kind of absent love. I thought she glowed in the summer light, her skin in smooth, tanned contrast to the white dress she had probably bought at one of the discount stores, and I understood that I loved her.

Maybe that was all right. “I miss the white nana, though,” Ki said, and this time she did look sad. She picked up the stuffed dog, tried to feed him a french fry, then put him down again. Her small, pretty face looked pensive now, and I could see a whisper of her grandfather in it. It was far back but it was there, perceptible, another ghost. “Mom says white nana went back to California with Grampy’s early remains.”

“Earthly remains, Ki-bird,” Mattie said. “That means his body.”

“Will white nana come back and see me, Mike?”

“I don’t know.”

“We had a game. It was all rhymes.” She looked more pensive than ever.

“Your mom told me about that game,” I said.

“She won’t be back,” Ki said, answering her own question. One very large tear rolled down her right cheek. She picked up “Stricken,” stood him on his back legs for a second, then put him back on guard-duty. Mattie slipped an arm around her, but Ki didn’t seem to notice. “White nana didn’t really like me. She was just pretending to like me. That was her job.”

Mattie and I exchanged a glance.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Ki said. Over by where the kid was playing the guitar, a juggler in whiteface had started up, working with half a dozen colored balls. Kyra brightened a little. “Mommy-bommy, may I go watch that funny white man?”

“Are you done eating?”

“Yeah, I’m full.”

“Thank Mike.”

“Don’t taggle yer own quartermack,” she said, then laughed kindly to show she was just pulling my leg. “Thanks, Mike.”

“Not a problem,” I said, and then, because that sounded a little old-fashioned: “Kickin.”

“You can go as far as that tree, but no farther,” Mattie said. “And you know why.”

“So you can see me. I will.”

She grabbed Strickland and started to run off, then stopped and looked over her shoulder at me. “I guess it was the fridgeafator people,” she said, then corrected herself very carefully and seriously.

“The ree fridge-a-rator people.” My heart took a hard double beat in my chest. “It was the refrigerator people what, Ki?” I asked.

“That said white nana didn’t really like me.” Then she ran off toward the juggler, oblivious to the heat.

Mattie watched her go, then turned back to me. “I haven’t talked to anybody about Ki’s fridgeafator people. Neither has she, until now. Not that there are any real people, but the letters seem to move around by themselves. It’s like a Ouija board.”

“Do they spell things?”

For a long time she said nothing. Then she nodded. “Not always, but sometimes.” Another pause. “Most times, actually. Ki calls it mail from the people in the refrigerator.” She smiled, but her eyes were a little scared. “Are they special magnetic letters, do you think? Or have we got a poltergeist working the lakefront?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry I brought them, if they’re a problem.”

“Don’t be silly. You gave them to her, and you’re a tremendously big deal to her right now. She talks about you all the time. She was much more interested in picking out something pretty to wear for you tonight than she was in her grandfather’s death. I was supposed to wear something pretty, too, Kyra insisted. She’s not that way about people, usually—she takes them when they’re there and leaves them when they’re gone. That’s not such a bad way for a little girl to grow up, I sometimes think.”

“You both dressed pretty,” I said. “That much I’m sure of.”