Chuck wasn’t in the car when it went flying upside-down from the turnpike overpass because his parents were having a dinner date and he was being babysat by his grandparents, who at that time he was still calling Zaydee and Bubbie (this mostly ended in the third grade, when kids made fun of him and he reverted to the more all-American Grandma and Grandpa). Albie and Sarah Krantz lived just a mile down the road, and it was natural enough for them to raise him after the accident when he became what he first believed to be an orphant. He was seven.

For a year—maybe a year and a half—that was a house of unadulterated sadness. The Krantzes had not only lost their son and daughter-in-law, they had lost the granddaughter who would have been born just three months later. The name had already been picked out: Alyssa. When Chuck said that sounded to him like rain, his mother had laughed and cried at the same time.

He never forgot that.

He knew his other grandparents of course, there were visits every summer, but they were basically strangers to him. They called a lot after he became an orphant, your basic how-are-you-doing-how’s-school calls, and the summer visits continued; Sarah (aka Bubbie, aka Grandma) took him on the plane. But his mother’s parents remained strangers, living in the foreign land of Omaha. They sent him presents on his birthday and at Christmas—the latter especially nice since Grandma and Grandpa didn’t “do” Christmas—but otherwise he continued to think of them as outliers, like the teachers who were left behind as he moved up through the grades.

Chuck began to slip his metaphorical mourning garments first, necessarily pulling his grandparents (old, yeah, but not ancient) out of their own grief. There came a time, when Chuck was ten, that they took the boy to Disney World. They had adjoining rooms at the Swan Resort, the door between the rooms kept open at night, and Chuck only heard his grandma crying once. Mostly, they had fun.

Some of that good feeling came back home with them. Chuck sometimes heard Grandma humming in the kitchen, or singing along with the radio. There had been lots of take-out meals after the accident (and whole recyclable bins full of Grandpa’s Budweiser bottles), but in the year after Disney World, Grandma began cooking again. Good meals that put weight on a formerly skinny boy.

She liked rock and roll while she was cooking, music Chuck would have thought much too young for her, but which she clearly enjoyed. If Chuck wandered into the kitchen looking for a cookie or maybe hoping to make a brown-sugar roll-up with a slice of Wonder Bread, Grandma was apt to hold out her hands to him and start snapping her fingers. “Dance with me, Henry,” she’d say.

His name was Chuck, not Henry, but he usually took her up on it. She taught him jitterbug steps and a couple of crossover moves. She told him there were more, but her back was too creaky to attempt them. “I can show you, though,” she said, and one Saturday brought back a stack of videotapes from the Blockbuster store. There was Swing Time, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, West Side Story, and Chuck’s favorite, Singin’ in the Rain, where Gene Kelly danced with a lamppost.

“You could learn those moves,” she said. “You’re a natural, kiddo.”

He asked her once, when they were drinking iced tea after an especially strenuous go to Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” what she had been like in high school.

“I was a kusit,” she said. “But don’t tell your zaydee I said that. He’s old-school, that one.”

Chuck never told.

And he never went in the cupola.

Not then.

He asked about it, of course, and more than once. What was up there, what you could see from the high window, why the room was locked. Grandma said it was because the floor wasn’t safe and he might go right through it. Grandpa said the same thing, that there was nothing up there because of the rotten floor, and the only thing you could see from those windows was a shopping center, big deal. He said that until one night, just before Chuck’s eleventh birthday, when he told at least part of the truth.

2

Drinking is not good for secrets, everybody knows that, and after the death of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-to-be (Alyssa, sounds like rain), Albie Krantz drank a great deal. He should have bought stock in Anheuser-Busch, that was how much he drank. He could do it because he was retired, and comfortably off, and very depressed.

After the trip to Disney World the drinking tapered off to a glass of wine with dinner or a beer in front of a baseball game. Mostly. Once in awhile—every month at first, every couple of months later on—Chuck’s grandpa tied one on. Always at home, and never making any fuss about it. The next day he would move slowly and eat little until afternoon, then he was back to normal.

One night while watching the Red Sox get thumped by the Yankees, when Albie was well into his second sixpack of Bud, Chuck once more raised the subject of the cupola. Mostly just to have something to talk about. With the Sox down by nine, the game wasn’t exactly holding his attention.

“I bet you can see way past the Westford Mall,” Chuck said.

Grandpa considered this, then pushed the mute button on the TV controller, silencing an ad for Ford Truck Month. (Grandpa said Ford stood for Fix Or Repair Daily.) “If you went up there you might see a lot more than you wanted,” he said. “That’s why it’s locked, boychick.”

Chuck felt a small and not entirely unpleasurable chill go through him, and his mind immediately flashed to Scooby-Doo and his friends, chasing down spooks in the Mystery Machine. He wanted to ask what Grandpa meant, but the adult part of him—not there in person, no, not at ten, but something that had begun to speak on rare occasions—told him to be quiet. Be quiet and wait.

“Do you know what style this house is, Chucky?”

“Victorian,” Chuck said.

“That’s right, and not pretend Victorian, either. It was built in 1885, been remodeled half a dozen times since, but the cupola was there from the start. Your bubbie and I bought it when the shoe business really took off, and we got it for a song. Been here since 1971, and in all those years I haven’t been up to that damn cupola half a dozen times.”

“Because the floor’s rotted?” Chuck asked, with what he hoped was appealing innocence.

“Because it’s full of ghosts,” Grandpa said, and Chuck felt that chill again. Not so pleasurable this time. Although Grandpa might be joking. He did joke from time to time these days. Jokes were to Grandpa what dancing was to Grandma. He tipped his beer. Belched. His eyes were red. “Christmas Yet to Come. Do you remember that one, Chucky?”

Chuck did, they watched A Christmas Carol every year on Christmas Eve even though they didn’t “do” Christmas otherwise, but that didn’t mean he knew what his grandpa was talking about.

“The Jefferies boy was only a short time later,” Grandpa said. He was looking at the TV, but Chuck didn’t think he was actually seeing it. “What happened to Henry Peterson… that took longer. It was four, maybe five years on. By then I’d almost forgotten what I saw up there.” He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “I said I’d never go up there again after that, and I wish I hadn’t. Because of Sarah—your bubbie—and the bread. It’s the waiting, Chucky, that’s the hard part. You’ll find that out when you’re—”