“Sometimes rabbit. Mostly deer. You cut it up and add a little water and boil it and it makes the strongest glue you could want.”

Which sounded awful to me. But if that was what it took to make a mandolin, then it couldn’t be all bad.

And that explained why Cate had given deer skins to his daddy.

But it didn’t explain the rest.

Chapter Forty-Two

“That still doesn’t explain why your mother doesn’t like Cate.”

He thought back. “I guess that’s the wrong way to put it.” He paused. “My grandfather died a few months before the crash. He had a heart attack.” Larkin paused again, thinking back. “I didn’t know him all that well. I told you, he was a doctor. And that’s most of what he was, being a doctor. When my grandmother came up here to see us, he stayed in town. He didn’t like to leave his patients.”

Which was something I understood: how a sick stranger might count more than a grandson, even.

“We went to town sometimes,” he said. “And I saw him then, but he was a serious man. I don’t think I ever saw him in anything but a suit and waistcoat. Always very proper . . . and a little cold . . . and it was always my grandmother who was the big, warm, jolly one.” He looked over at her in her little bed. “Not like she is now.” He sighed. “She’s changed a lot.” The look on his face made my heart hurt. “After he died, she waited too long to come out of her grief and decide how she would live. She waited too long to sell the house. The crash came and no one wanted to buy a big house like that. So she locked it up and left it behind and kept nothing much but her books, really, when she came to live with us.”

“Almost like we did,” I said, thoughtful, though the house we’d left behind was no longer ours.

“A season before you.” He gave me a sad little smile. “And not quite as you did. She was from these mountains. From this one. And she came to us, who had made our home here because we wanted to. Not because we had to.”

I looked at my boots. “You said it before. How hard it was to watch us in the beginning. How sad that was.”

He nodded. “But it was different for her. For us. When she first arrived, everything was fine. Everything was really good.” He looked at nothing in particular. “But then, a few weeks before you came here to live, my daddy took sick.” He swallowed hard. “I don’t know what it was. Something terrible. And he was dead before we could do anything about it.”

I waited.