“You got any extra? I’m not really in the mood for peanut butter and jelly,” my grandfather said.

I glanced over to find that he had picked up my spilled cards and dealt.

“Cheater. I didn’t see you deal those,” I said, reaching up to pull down a second bowl.

He spread his palms over his chest, making a show of innocence. “Cheater? I’m an innocent old man,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said, carrying the bowls to the table and setting one in front of him. “Redeal, old man.”

He swept the cards together and shuffled, chuckling, as I blew into my bowl to cool it off, keeping one eye on the kitten the whole time. I’d treated these people horribly. I’d refused to speak to them, refused to be pleasant. I’d said awful things to my grandmother, and her only response had been to tell me she loved me. My grandfather had invited me to play with him. They understood, even when I was being unfair and selfish and ugly.

They’d acted like… family. Like they were offering a place to belong. I just had to take it.

My grandfather started laying cards out on the table again. “As if I need to cheat,” he blustered, “against a girl with purple hair.”

As dire as the sky had looked the day before, it looked that much brighter the next morning, as if the sun were trying to make up for lost opportunity. For the first time since arriving at my grandparents’ house, I awoke without one of them waking me, a shaft of sunlight warm across my face, like a caress.

The night before, after Grandpa Barry and I had played Spit and then three hands of rummy, I’d made brownies from a box I found in the back of the pantry. I’d placed the plate of brownies on the table between us and poured two glasses of milk. I taught him how to play Seven Bridge, and he won the first game, which included a lot of crowing and laughter on his part. I blamed the loss on distraction. How was I supposed to concentrate on the cards with the kitten in the center of the table?

Grandpa Barry was good at keeping me from brooding. We chatted about places that had the best ice cream, whether or not soccer was a boring sport, books we’d read, and the Waverly theater company, which he thought had a summer program that I could get involved with if I wanted.

Not one word about storms or tornadoes or my freakout or the way I’d been acting or the lifelong grudge my mother had held against them. Just brownies and milk and cards.

And for a few minutes, none of that reminded me of Mom or Marin.

When I realized that I had spent time not thinking about them, I instantly felt guilty. I tried to call up their faces in my mind. They were fuzzy, but they were still there. I imagined their voices as they spoke to me. I was pretty sure I could remember those. I told myself that eating brownies and playing cards wasn’t going to make them deader. It wasn’t like a bowl of macaroni and cheese with my grandfather meant I was forgetting they ever existed.

I pulled myself out of bed, showered and dressed, then padded into the kitchen, where my grandmother sat over a newspaper, a pen in her hand. She looked surprised to see me but didn’t say a word as I passed by. I tried to act as if everything was totally normal between us, going to the fridge to grab a cup of yogurt I’d seen in there the night before.

I sat across from her and ripped off the top of my yogurt. “Where’s Grandpa Barry?”

“He went into town to pick up a few yard supplies. Got some fertilizing to do this weekend,” she said. She leaned over and wrote something into a crossword.

“He going to be gone long?” I spooned yogurt into my mouth, my heart beating, knowing what I was about to ask.

“Oh, a little while,” she said. “You never know with him. He runs into people and gets talking. How come?”

I swallowed. “I thought maybe we could go to Elizabeth today. I’ve never seen my mom’s grave.” I let the words fall between us, my stomach sinking further the longer she took to respond.

She lifted her chin, tapped her pen to it a few times, looked out the window. “Well, I don’t know if he’ll be back in time to go.”

“Just the two of us,” I said. “Me and you.”

Almost instantly, the end of my grandmother’s nose bloomed red. I only noticed it because that was something that always happened to my mom, too. The moment she even thought about crying, her nose would redden, starting with the tip.

“I need to put on some decent clothes,” she said. “I can do that right now.” I could tell she was making an effort to not look as hopeful and eager as she felt.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Okay.”

She pushed away from the table, leaving the crossword right where it was, then hurried out of the kitchen. From the living room, she called, “We can have lunch at Orrie’s. It was one of Chrissy’s favorites.”

“Sure,” I said after a pause, and even though I still felt all kinds of uncertain, something about the day ahead felt right, too.

She left a note on the kitchen table for Grandpa Barry, and we got in the car. I watched out the window as we pulled through town.

“Is that the high school?” I asked, pointing to a brick building about half the size of my school.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said, “but your grandfather and I have been talking. If you’d like to stay at your school for senior year, we’d certainly understand. We’ve got a little money put aside and are willing to use it to rent a place in Elizabeth for the school year. It won’t be home, and we probably will need to come back to Waverly on the weekends to tend to the house, but we want you to be happy.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Chrissy wouldn’t have wanted you to be uprooted your senior year. They’re saying your school will be rebuilt by August, can you believe it?”

I shook my head. I almost couldn’t believe anything at this point. The thought of getting to spend senior year with my friends, at our favorite places to hang out, in the lighting booth and on the stage, made me feel somehow whole again.

“Thank you,” I breathed. “Thank you so much. We can come back every weekend, I won’t mind.”

“Well, some weekends you might want to stay, if you have things to do with your friends in Elizabeth,” she said. “But we’ll work it all out.”

It didn’t make sense. How could the grandparents Mom had told us were so horrible be the kind of people who’d be willing to move to another city so their grandchild wouldn’t have to go to a new school? How could oppressive and judgmental people never say anything less than a kind word to me, even when I hadn’t been kind to them? I’d never questioned Mom. Never. But it didn’t add up. The things she’d said about Barry and Patty were… well, they seemed wrong. And did it really matter anymore, anyway? Mom was gone; my grandparents were all I had.

We drove a little while longer, until I couldn’t take it anymore. “What happened?” I blurted out as we turned onto the highway.

She glanced at me, then changed lanes. “What do you mean?”

“What happened between you guys and my mom? Why did she hate you so much? She told us you disowned her.”

My grandmother’s hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, her eyes locked straight ahead. She hesitated, and for a moment I worried that nobody would ever tell me what had happened. I would never know the truth.

“We did,” she finally said. “She got mixed up with Clay. His whole family was a mess. A bunch of criminals and drunks. We told her that we didn’t approve and that she couldn’t see him, but Chrissy was so strong-willed. Always had been, ever since she was a toddler.”

I thought about my mom. I’d hated arguing with her, because there was no winning. When Mom got her mind set on something, it was going to happen, whether you liked it or not, no matter how much begging and pleading you did. It was good to be reminded that some of the things I knew about her were absolute truths.