He wouldn’t be welcome to visit following the birth of their baby, and if he had the gall to send the child a present then or later, it would be returned. Stay out of my life, Dad. This time you’ve gone too far to forgive. There are undoubtedly diplomatic ways of handling an offended child, some wise and some crafty. . but ask yourself this: would a diplomatic father have gotten himself into such a situation to begin with? Would a man with even minimal insight into human nature have offered his son’s fiancee a bounty (one so enormous it probably had little real sense or meaning to her) to give up her firstborn child? And he’d offered this devil’s bargain to a girl-woman of seventeen, an age when the romantic view of life is at absolute high tide. If nothing else, Devore should have waited awhile before making his final offer.

You could argue that he didn’t know if he had awhile, but it wouldn’t be a persuasive argument. I thought Mattie was right—deep in that wrinkled old prune which served him as a heart, Max Devore thought he was going to live forever. In the end, he hadn’t been able to restrain himself.

There was the sled he wanted, the sled he just had to have, on the other side of the window. All he had to do was break the glass and take it.

He’d been doing it all his life, and so he had reacted to his son’s e-mail not craftily, as a man of his years and abilities should have done, but furiously, as the child would have done if the glass in the shed window had proved immune to his hammering fists. Lance didn’t want him meddling? Fine! Lance could live with his backwoods Daisy Mae in a tent or a trailer or a goddamned cowbarn. He could give up the cushy surveying job, as well, and find real employment. See how the other half lived! In other words, you can’t quit on me, son. You’re fired. “We didn’t fall into each other’s arms at the funeral,” Mattie said, “don’t get that idea. But he was decent to me—which I didn’t expect—and I tried to be decent to him. He offered me a stipend, which I refused. I was afraid there might be legal ramifications.”

“I doubt it, but I like your caution. What happened when he saw Kyra for the first time, Mattie?

Do you remember?”

“I’ll never forget it.” She reached into the pocket of her dress, found a battered pack of cigarettes, and shook one out. She looked at it with a mixture of greed and disgust. “I quit these because Lance said we couldn’t really afford them, and I knew he was right. But the habit creeps back. I only smoke a pack a week, and I know damned well even that’s too much, but sometimes I need the comfort. Do you want one?” I shook my head. She lit up, and in the momentary flare of the match, her face was way past pretty. What had the old man made of her? I wondered. “He met his granddaughter for the first time beside a hearse,” Mattie said. “We were at Dakin’s Funeral Home in Motton. It was the ’viewing.” Do you know about that?”

“Oh yes,” I said, thinking of Jo.

“The casket was closed but they still call it a viewing. Weird. I came out to have a cigarette. I told Ki to sit on the funeral parlor steps so she wouldn’t get the smoke, and I went a little way down the walk. This big gray limo pulled up. I’d never seen anything like it before, except on TV. I knew who it was right away. I put my cigarettes back in my purse and told Ki to come. She toddled down the walk and took hold of my hand. The limo door opened, and Rogette Whitmore got out. She had an oxygen mask in one hand, but he didn’t need it, at least not then. He got out after her. A tall man—not as tall as you, Mike, but tall—wearing a gray suit and black shoes as shiny as mirrors.” She paused, thinking. Her cigarette rose briefly to her mouth, then went back down to the arm of her chair, a red firefly in the weak moonlight.

“At first he didn’t say anything. The woman tried to take his arm and help him climb the three or four steps from the road to the walk, but he shook her off. He got to where we were standing under his own power, although I could hear him wheezing way down deep in his chest. It was the sound a machine makes when it needs oil. I don’t know how much he can walk now, but it’s probably not much. Those few steps pretty well did him in, and that was almost a year ago. He looked at me for a second or two, then bent forward with his big, bony old hands on his knees. He looked at Kyra and she looked up at him.” Yes. I could see it… except not in color, not in an image like a photograph. I saw it as a woodcut, just one more harsh illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The little girl looks up wide-eyed at the rich old man—once a boy who went triumphantly sliding on a stolen sled, now at the other end of his life and just one more bag of bones. “In my imagining, Ki was wearing a hooded jacket and Devore’s grandpa mask was slightly askew, allowing me to see the tufted wolf-pelt beneath. What big eyes you have, Grandpa, what a big nose you have, Grandpa, what big teeth you have, too. “He picked her up. I don’t know how much effort it cost him, but he did.

And—the oddest thing—Ki let herself be picked up. He was a complete stranger to her, and old people always seem to scare little children, but she let him pick her up. “Do you know who I am?’ he asked her. She shook her head, but the way she was looking at him… it was as if she almost knew. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Yes.”

“He said, Tm your grandpa.” And I almost grabbed her back, Mike, because I had this crazy idea… I don’t know…”

“That he was going to eat her up?” Her cigarette paused in front of her mouth. Her eyes were round. “How do you know that? How can you know that?”

“Because in my mind’s eye it looks like a fairy tale. Little Red Riding Hood and the Old Gray Wolf. What did he do then?” ’te her up with his eyes. Since then he’s taught her to play checkers and Candyland and box-dots. She’s only three, but he’s taught her to add and subtract. She has her own room at Warrington’s and her own little computer in it, and God knows what he’s taught her to do with that… but that first time he only looked at her. It was the hungriest look I’ve ever seen in my life. ’5nd she looked back. It couldn’t have been more than ten or twenty seconds, but it seemed like forever. Then he tried to hand her back to me. He’d used up all his strength, though, and if I hadn’t been right there to take her, I think he would have dropped her on the cement walk. “He staggered a little, and Rogette Whitmore put an arm around him. That was when he took the oxygen mask from her—there was a little air-bottle attached to it on an elastic—and put it over his mouth and nose. A couple of deep breaths and he seemed more or less all right again. He gave it back to Rogette and really seemed to see me for the first time. He said, “I’ve been a fool, haven’t I?’ I said, “Yes, sir, I think you have.” He gave me a look, very black, when I said that. I think if he’d been even five years younger, he might have hit me for it.”

“But he wasn’t and he didp.’t.”

“No. He said, “I want to go inside. Will you help me do that?’ I said I would. We went up the mortuary steps with Rogette on one side of him, me t sort of like a harem girl. It wasn’t a very nice feeling. When we got into the vestibule, he sat down to catch his breath and take a little more oxygen. Rogette turned to Kyra. I think that woman’s got a scary face, it reminds me of some painting or other—”

“The Cry? The one by Munch?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the one.” She dropped her cigarette—she’d smoked it all the way down to the filter—and stepped on it, grinding it into the bony, rock-riddled ground with one white sneaker. “But Ki wasn’t scared of her a bit. Not then, not later. She bent down to Kyra and said, “What rhymes with lady?’ and Kyra said “Shady!’ right off. Even at two she loved rhymes. Rogette reached into her purse and brought out a Hershey’s Kiss.