“Here’s a thing I don’t know,” he says. And I wait, and let him figure out how to say it in his own way. “Nobody really told me why Grandpa didn’t have to go fight in the war. I asked my mom once, but I never really got a straight answer.”
“I can understand that,” I say. “It hits on a touchy subject. But you’re a smart boy, and you’re mature for your age. And you know your great-grandma Pauline was not always very . . . well.”
“In the head, you mean?”
“Yeah. That.”
He nods. He knows.
“It’s like this,” I say. “Grandma Zoe had this thing she used to say. ‘It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.’”
He wrinkles his nose. It almost makes me laugh. “I don’t understand that saying at all,” he says.
“You know, honestly, it never made a great deal of sense to me, either, but for years I didn’t say so. It sounded like it just meant ‘bad things have bad effects.’ And I thought, Yeah, so . . . what’s your point? Finally one day I was a little grumpy and tired, so I called her out on it. Turns out it means even most really bad winds are going to blow something good to somebody.
“Which leads me to my point about Connor and his mom. It would be nice to report that everybody’s story had at least a fair or satisfying ending, but that’s not life, is it? And you’re old enough to know it. And I’m not going to lie to you about life, Harris. Your great-grandma Pauline didn’t fare well. She had a breakdown when Connor was sixteen. At the time we all thought, well, people come back from breakdowns. But she never did.
“They couldn’t afford to put her in any kind of facility, at least not one Connor could bear to think of using. And they couldn’t afford any kind of in-home nursing or professional care. So Connor took care of her.
“In our last year of high school, Zoe came over and sat with Pauline every day while Connor went to school. After he graduated, Connor found a college that would let him earn a degree from home—you know, a correspondence course sort of thing.
“He got a nice, cushy job in the county planning department and bought a house for your grandma Dotty before he even asked her to marry him. It’s just who he was. He didn’t want to live and raise a family in that spooky old house he’d grown up in, which I think was a smart move. So he sold it and got a new one with no bad memories, where they could make a life from scratch. With four bedrooms. One for them. A couple for all the kids he knew they wanted. And one for his mom.
“Your grandma looked after Pauline for years while Connor worked. It wasn’t all that hard a job to do. Pauline was never difficult or unpleasant. She just couldn’t do much of anything for herself. She died of a blood infection in 1984. But maybe that part you knew.”
“Right,” he says, “I did. But I still don’t get the part about the wind.”
“I was getting to that. So that ill wind blew something good to someone. Connor—your grandad—was her sole caretaker when he turned eighteen. And that kept him deferred from the draft. And he didn’t have to go.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I think I finally get the part about the wind.”
I feel a little tug on my jacket sleeve. I’m wearing a suit jacket, even though it’s summer, just like it was where I started this story. Even though it’s hot. I look down, and it’s Connor’s youngest granddaughter, Evvie. Tugging at my jacket sleeve.
“Uncle Luke, Uncle Luke,” she says.
For some reason, Evvie has a tendency to say important things twice. Most things, actually. I think she’s at that age when everything on her mind feels terribly important. The repetition must make her feel that she’s properly expressing her urgency.
Life is a very urgent place when you’re seven. I seem to recall that, though it’s been a long time.
“Yes, Evvie?”
“Why are you just standing here? You’re just standing here.”
She doesn’t say, “My mom told me to come get you.” She doesn’t need to. I know.
“I guess we should go, then,” I say to Evvie, in that voice you use with a child when you’re admitting that they’re entirely right and you’re entirely wrong. That’s always a satisfying moment for a kid.
“Grandma wants to know if you’re coming to the house after. She wants you to come to the house.”
I look up at Dotty in the distance and offer her a sad little smile, but she might be too far away to see.
“Try to keep me away,” I say.
“But we don’t want to keep you away,” Evvie says, clearly frustrated with me. “We want you to come.”
“Okay,” I say. “Fair enough. Let’s you and me go together.”
Evvie and Harris and I walk back to the cars, through the neatly tended gravestones. Evvie and I walk hand in hand.
“What about the kitten?” Harris asks me. “You never told me what happened to the kitten.”
“What kitten?” Evvie asks, but her cousin shushes her.
“Oh,” I say. “Right. I forgot about the kitten. Well. She didn’t stay a kitten for long, of course. Connor named her Sky after the color of her eyes, and she grew into a big cat. Nearly twenty pounds. She lived to be twenty-two years old. No joke. He got her when he was fourteen, and his little girls knew her through most of their childhoods.”
“My mother knew her?”
“She absolutely did.”
“And my mother knew her?” Evvie asks.
“She absolutely did. Everybody cried like a baby when she died. Even me. But I wouldn’t say anybody was devastated. Just sad. I mean, she lived so long.”
Harris stops walking. Suddenly. We almost leave him behind before we
