“Was he embezzling?” Chuck asked. There was a lot of embezzling in Agatha Christie books. Also blackmail.

“What? God, no!” She pressed her lips together, as if to keep in something not fit for the ears of such a beardless youth as the one sitting across from her. If that was the case, her natural proclivity to tell everything (and to anyone) prevailed. “His wife ran away with a younger man! Hardly old enough to vote, and she was in her forties! What do you think of that?”

The only reply Chuck could think of right off the bat was “Wow!” and that seemed to suffice.

Back at home he pulled his notebook off the shelf and jotted, G. saw ghost of Jefferies boy not long before he died. Saw ghost of H. Peterson 4 or 5 YEARS before he died. Chuck stopped, chewing the end of his Bic, troubled. He didn’t want to write what was in his mind, but felt that as a good detective he had to.

Sarah and the bread. DID HE SEE GRANDMA’S GHOST IN THE CUPOLA???

The answer seemed obvious to him. Why else would Grandpa have talked about how hard the waiting was?

Now I’m waiting, too, Chuck thought. And hoping that it’s all just a bunch of bullshit.

5

On the last day of sixth grade, Miss Richards—a sweet, hippy-dippyish young woman who had no command of discipline and would probably not last long in the public education system—tried to read Chuck’s class some verses of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It didn’t go well. The kids were rowdy and didn’t want poetry, only to escape into the months of summer stretching ahead. Chuck was the same, happy to throw spitballs or give Mike Enderby the finger when Miss Richards was looking down at her book, but one line clanged in his head and made him sit up straight.

When the class was finally over and the kids set free, he lingered. Miss Richards sat at her desk and blew a strand of hair back from her forehead. When she saw Chuck still standing there, she gave him a weary smile. “That went well, don’t you think?”

Chuck knew sarcasm when he heard it, even when the sarcasm was gentle and self-directed. He was Jewish, after all. Well, half.

“What does that mean when he says ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’?”

That made her smile perk up. She propped one small fist on her chin and looked at him with her pretty gray eyes. “What do you think it means?”

“All the people he knows?” Chuck ventured.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but maybe he means even more. Lean forward.”

He leaned over her desk, where American Verse lay on top of her grade book. Very gently, she put her palms to his temples. They were cool. They felt so wonderful he had to suppress a shiver. “What’s in there between my hands? Just the people you know?”

“More,” Chuck said. He was thinking of his mother and father and the baby he never got a chance to hold. Alyssa, sounds like rain. “Memories.”

“Yes,” she said. “Everything you see. Everything you know. The world, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Chuck said. He was overwhelmed with the thought of a whole world inside the fragile bowl of his skull. He thought of the Jefferies boy, hit in the street. He thought of Henry Peterson, his father’s bookkeeper, dead at the end of a rope (he’d had nightmares about that). Their worlds going dark. Like a room when you turned out the light.

Miss Richards took her hands away. She looked concerned. “Are you all right, Chucky?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then go on. You’re a good boy. I’ve enjoyed having you in class.”

He went to the door, then turned back. “Miss Richards, do you believe in ghosts?”

She considered this. “I believe memories are ghosts. But spooks flapping along the halls of musty castles? I think those only exist in books and movies.”

And maybe in the cupola of Grandpa’s house, Chuck thought.

“Enjoy your summer, Chucky.”

6

Chuck did enjoy his summer until August, when Grandma died. It happened down the street, in public, which was a little undignified, but at least it was the kind of death where people can safely say “Thank God she didn’t suffer” at the funeral. That other standby, “She had a long, full life” was in more of a gray area; Sarah Krantz had yet to reach her mid-sixties, although she was getting close.

Once more the house on Pilchard Street was one of unadulterated sadness, only this time there was no trip to Disney World to mark the beginning of recovery. Chuck reverted to calling Grandma his bubbie, at least in his own head, and cried himself to sleep on many nights. He did it with his face in his pillow so he wouldn’t make Grandpa feel even worse. Sometimes he whispered, “Bubbie I miss you, Bubbie I love you,” until sleep finally took him.

Grandpa wore his mourning band, and lost weight, and stopped telling his jokes, and began to look older than his seventy years, but Chuck also sensed (or thought he did) some relief in his grandpa. If so, Chuck could understand. When you lived with dread day in and day out, there had to be relief when the dreaded thing finally happened and was over. Didn’t there?

He didn’t go up the steps to the cupola after she died, daring himself to touch the padlock, but he did go down to Zoney’s one day just before starting seventh grade at Acker Park Middle School. He bought a soda and a Kit Kat bar, then asked the clerk where the woman was when she had her stroke and died. The clerk, an over-tatted twentysomething with a lot of greased-back blond hair, gave an unpleasant laugh. “Kid, that’s a little creepy. Are you, I don’t know, brushing up on your serial-killer skills early?”

“She was my grandma,” Chuck said. “My bubbie. I was at the community pool when it happened. I came back in the house calling for her and Grandpa told me she was dead.”

That wiped the smile off the clerk’s face. “Oh, man. I’m sorry. It was over there. Third aisle.”

Chuck went to the third aisle and looked, already knowing what he would see.

“She was getting a loaf of bread,” the clerk said. “Pulled down almost everything on the shelf when she collapsed. Sorry if that’s too much information.”

“No,” Chuck said, and thought, That’s information I already knew.

7

On his second day at Acker Park Middle, Chuck walked past the bulletin board by the main office, then doubled back. Among the posters for Pep Club, Band, and tryouts for the fall sports teams, there was one showing a boy and girl caught in mid-dance step, he holding his hand up so she could spin beneath. LEARN TO DANCE! it said above the smiling children, in rainbow letters. Below it: JOIN TWIRLERS AND SPINNERS! FALL FLING IS COMING! GET OUT ON THE FLOOR!

An image of painful clarity came to Chuck as he looked at this: Grandma in the kitchen, holding her hands out. Snapping her fingers and saying, “Dance with me, Henry.”

That afternoon he went down to the gymnasium, where he and nine hesitant others were greeted enthusiastically by Miss Rohrbacher, the girls’ phys ed teacher. Chuck was one of three boys. There were seven girls. All the girls were taller.