I opened the bedroom door as quiet as I could, and when I peeked out I saw that my grandpa was still standing on the front porch, but he wasn’t smoking no more. I picked up the chair and carried it back into the kitchen. He must’ve heard me because he turned around and looked at me through the screen door.

“You ready for bed?” he asked.

“Almost,” I said.

I walked back into the bedroom and took off my shirt and my blue jeans and got into bed in my jockeys. The windows were open but it was still warm outside, and I kicked off the quilt and only pulled the sheet over me so I wouldn’t get to sweating during the night. I laid there and stared up at the ceiling and looked at the shadows the moonlight spread out across it. I could hear the crickets chirping outside and some wind chimes tinkling, and way off in the distance I could hear the water running in the creek at the bottom of the hill. Everything was just like it always was except that Stump wasn’t there with me. I rolled over and looked at his side of the bed, and I ran my hand over his pillow. It felt cool against my hand after soaking it in that hot water, and I could feel where my skin had opened up a little after my grandpa used his fingernails to grab hold of that splinter and pull it out.

I tossed my pillow onto the floor by the bed, and then I slid Stump’s pillow under my head. It felt almost cold against my face, and for a second I thought I could smell Stump’s hair. It smelled like the sheets did when Mama hung them to dry on the line outside when the sun was good and hot. I closed my eyes and ran my hand across Stump’s side of the bed, and I imagined he’d just gotten up to pee, and I laid there and listened for his footsteps in the hall.

MY EYES WERE HEAVY AND SLEEPY WHEN MY GRANDPA CAME INTO the room. I felt him sit down on the bed, and I could smell the cigarette smoke in his clothes.

“You asleep, buddy?” he whispered.

“No,” I said. He was quiet, and I laid there and waited for him to say something else. I liked the way the smoke smelled on him and it made me wish Daddy smoked too.

“I hate all this happened today,” he said. “I hate that you’re having to go through all this.”

I opened up my eyes all the way and looked down at the bottom of the bed where he sat. The light was on in the hallway, and I could just barely see his face and the outline of his body.

“When are my mom and dad coming home?” I asked him.

“They’ll be home tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe even before you wake up for school. They’ve got to take care of your brother tonight.” He looked like he thought about saying something else, but he didn’t. He probably figured I wouldn’t understand. I could’ve told him that I understood plenty. I could’ve told him that I understood that the ambulance was on its way to Miss Lyle’s house to get Stump and that its siren wasn’t on because they knew he was already dead, and I understood that he was probably at the hospital with Mama and Daddy and a whole bunch of doctors trying to figure out what happened to him. He would’ve known how much I understood if he’d known what me and Joe Bill had seen.

My grandpa reached out his hand and patted mine through the sheet. “Good night,” he said. He started to stand up.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked him.

He stood up straight and looked down at me. “Out on the porch,” he said.

“I mean, where’ve you been all this time?” I said. “How come me and Stump ain’t never seen you before?” I knew Mama would get mad at me for asking him that, but she wasn’t there so I went ahead and asked him anyway. He sat down real slow and stared at the bedroom door like he was waiting for somebody else to walk through it. He sighed, and I could tell he didn’t want to have to answer a question like that.

“Well,” he said, “if you’ve really got to know, I’ve been all over the place. I spent a couple years driving a rig up and down the coast, hung drywall for a while, worked in a mill up in PA.”

“What’s PA?” I asked him.

“Pennsylvania,” he said.

“But why have you been gone so long?”

“I just have,” he said. “I just went away.”

“Why?”

He sat there quiet like he was thinking hard about what he wanted to say next, and then I saw his head turn like he was looking at me over his shoulder. “Because sometimes we do things we can’t take back, and we need to go away and leave folks alone and let them forget us for a while.”

“What did you do?”

“Lots of things,” he said. Then he said, “Do you always ask this many questions?”

“No,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

He turned around so he could see me better. “Where I’ve been don’t matter as much as me being here now,” he said.

I looked away from him toward the window. I thought about how during the daytime I could see my daddy’s tobacco fields all the way up to the road from here. I kept looking at the window, but I knew my grandpa was staring at me.

“Maybe sometime I’ll take you up to my place,” he said. “Show you where I was raised up. We’ll go up to the old cabin where I was born and where your daddy grew up. Maybe we’ll scout the top field for arrowheads. You think you might want to do that?”

“Sure,” I said, and then I thought about how much Stump liked to find him some arrowheads too so we could sit them on the shelves with the rocks we’d already found. “I wish my brother could go.”

“Me too, buddy,” he said. “I hate that he can’t. But you know what you can do?”

“What?”

“You can keep his memory,” he said. “That’s the best way to hold on to folks. My mama and daddy have been gone so long that I can’t hardly picture them, and I have to remember my memories and hope they’re true. Maybe I’ll see them again someday and they’ll be just how I remember them; maybe not, but I like to think so.”

“You mean in Heaven?”

“Yes,” he said. “In Heaven.”

I laid there and thought about seeing Stump in Heaven, and then I remembered what Joe Bill had said about Stump not being able to sing or talk or nothing. “Do you think Stump will be able to talk when he gets to Heaven?” I asked him.

“Of course he will,” he said. “We’ll all be able to talk.” He pulled the sheet up around me. “And we’ll all be able to understand each other.” He stood up again, and then he bent down to the bed and made a show of tucking the sheet tight all around me. He walked over and put his hand on the doorknob and stepped into the hallway.

“You want this door open or closed?” he asked.

“Closed,” I said.

I LAID IN BED IN THE DARK AND LISTENED TO THE SOUNDS OF THE crickets outside and the little noises of the house settling itself to sleep. That’s what Mama used to say at night when I heard something that scared me.

“That’s just the sound of the house getting settled,” she’d say. “It’s getting comfortable so it can go to sleep too.”

I saw that the kitchen light still burned under my door, and I listened as my grandpa opened and closed the cabinets and the drawers like he was still looking for something. I heard him open the door and go into Mama and Daddy’s room too. I turned away from the door and away from Stump’s side of the bed and looked out the window.

There was just a little bit of breeze out there, and I could feel it coming in on my face and I could see it moving the branches on the tree outside the window and I could hear it playing on the wind chimes. If it had been daylight, I could’ve looked out at the field and seen the tops of the burley swaying back and forth. There were still some lightning bugs out there, and I watched their lights wink off and on while they floated through the yard. My eyes got heavy, and before I knew it I was drifting off to sleep again, and when I looked up I was sitting at the dining room table back at Miss Lyle’s house. I didn’t think there was anybody else there but me.