"Nonsense. Tell me the truth. Have you turned down invitations to things, Alice, because .. ."
"No," I said sharply.
"Well, sometimes you have to go halfway. It's hard to find a perfect friend or friends. You have to forgive them for their failures. Why don't you just join something? Isn't there any club, activity that interests you besides your art? Once you're in something, you'll see how much easier it is to make friends, because you'll have common interests."
I didn't say anything. We walked on.
"It's just a suggestion," he said. "I want you to be happier."
He paused and looked out over a field of high, wild grass.
"I was thinking of buying this property once," he said. "Developing some modest housing. It's going to happen soon. People from New York are thinking more and more of this area for second homes. I might still do it. I've sent out some feelers through a real estate agent."
He glanced at me.
I didn't have much interest in any of that and he knew it. He's just trying to change the subject, I thought.
"No one's made fun of you lately, have they, Alice?" he asked sharply.
Last April there was a very bad incident. Two of the girls in my class, Peggy Okun and Mindy Taylor, were slipping nasty notes into my hall locker, asking things like, How can you sleep there? Do you hear the moans of Brandon Doral? (Brandon was supposedly murdered by his wife and buried on the property.) The worst note was, Who's hiding in your attic now? Is your mother back?
I didn't tell anyone about it, but one afternoon, after I had come home, one of the notes fell out of the math book in which I had put it, and my grandmother found it near the front door. She showed it to my grandfather and he went ballistic. I had to tell him it had been going on for some time. At his insistence, the principal put the dean of students on the case. Through observation, they discovered who had been doing it by catching them in the act. The hullabaloo it created was more disturbing for me than the notes had been. Both Mindy and Peggy were suspended for two days and then had a week's detention, but all that did was bring them more sympathy and make me look more terrible.
"No," I said.
"You'd tell me if they were, right?"
"Yes," I said, but not with any enthusiasm. He knew I wouldn't.
"Maybe we should have moved away," he muttered. I didn't think he meant for me to hear it.
He snapped out of his dark mood quickly, however, and talked about taking the family to a fun new restaurant in Middletown tomorrow night.
"Your grandmother made sure she had time off while Jesse and the kids are here."
"Isn't Aunt Zipporah coming to visit?"
"Oh, sure. She'll be here tomorrow morning," he said. "But Tyler will have to stay at the cafe. She'll be with us for a couple of days."
"That's good," I said. I so looked forward to seeing Aunt Zipporah, especially when my father and Rachel had come.
We turned back toward the house.
"Well," my grandfather said, "I suppose I should seriously consider resurfacing the driveway. I've resisted all these years, but your grandmother says it's embarrassing. I imagine the birds have been saying nasty things about us," he joked. "I can't think of anyone else who would care. The rabbits don't seem to mind, right?"
I smiled. It was so much easier to be with him than it was to be with my grandmother. Why wasn't he as worried about what I might have inherited and what I hadn't as she was? I wondered. Did he see or know something I didn't? Did he know the truth all these years?
"Can I ask you something, Grandpa?"
"Sure. Anything," he said. "Just don't ask me to be late for dinner."
"I'm serious," I said.
"Oh, no. When one of these Stein women gets serious, I'm in deep trouble." He paused. "What is it, Alice?"
"Were you absolutely positive that the things my mother claimed Harry Pearson had done to her were never done to her?"
He glanced at the house as if he wanted to be absolutely positive we were too far from it for my grandmother to