The old stone-and-brick church is just down High Street from her house, but I never saw her come inside. Sometimes, we would take Boomer and walk through the graveyard, searching the mossy gravestones for funny names or making up stories for how the people under them died. (In the old section, of course—not the new one, where people still put flowers by the stones.)

Anyway, you would be surprised by how many people died in the killer skunk attacks of 1919, including poor Billy Snagglehook, May God Rest His Soul.

But mostly, we spent our time in the Spinney or down by the river, where Gram told me fairy tales while she painted.

In fairy tales, things are always changing into something else. Pumpkins turn into carriages, frogs into princes, mermaids into girls. Nothing is ever what it seems. Nothing ever stays the same. And I guess that’s the way it is in real life, too.

Gram didn’t tell us she was sick until a couple of months ago. Not until she knew she was going to die. I still didn’t believe it, though. Not until the sickness changed her, turning her into a weak old woman.

Then one day, she fell into an enchanted sleep.

That’s the part fairy tales get wrong, see. In Gram’s stories, things usually come out right in the end. Sleeping Beauty wakes up. Little Red Riding Hood gets to go home.

Gram did not wake up. Gram is never coming home.

And with her gone, I don’t know how the story is supposed to go.

2

After the service, Gram’s ashes are buried next to Grandpa’s, under an old oak tree. Their grave is just one row up from the grave of a woman named Isabella Fortune, who was born eight years before Gram but died when she was only twenty-four, which doesn’t sound very fortunate to me. I asked Gram about her once, and she said that Isabella had been one of her favorite teachers before she’d gotten sick and died. Now the grass around her grave is overgrown and dotted with weeds.

People keep saying we should be grateful that Gram led a long and happy life, and I guess that’s true. But as we stand over the gravestone she will share with Grandpa, listening to Ruth blow her nose, I imagine that the stone belongs to someone else. To two strangers. I pretend that Gram is standing right next to me, her whispered words crackling in my ear.

“What do you reckon?” she would say. “What carried these poor souls away?”

“Maybe he came home when his wife was doing one of those face masks,” I’d murmur back. “The kind that Lily and Mom do. And the sight of it was so scary it gave him a heart attack.”