“Sit down, George,” said Mrs. Urquhart. “The boy made his decision, just the same as his uncle did.”

“My uncle?” I said. “What do you know about Jeremiah?”

Mrs. Urquhart smiled.

“A hell of a lot more than you do,” she said. “Now get the fuck out of my house.”

“With pleasure,” I said.

And I left.

Chapter 27

I was pretty spacey at dinner that night. I kept wondering about the Urquharts, about what had happened in their house. I wanted to ask Grandma about it, but I didn’t want to do it around Murphy.

So I kept my mouth shut about everything. It was weird how far apart my sister and I seemed to be drifting. Murphy was so tired after all her work that day—Grandma made her chop firewood all day even though it was summer and we had plenty already, and I was absolutely forbidden to help—that she barely spoke a word to me all through dinner.

“Go on to bed, Murphy,” I told her after she declined Grandma’s dessert. “I’ll finish up the dishes myself.”

Murphy shot me a look like she knew I was up to something, but I guess she was so tired she didn’t care.

“Whatever you want,” she said. “I don’t even give a shit anymore.”

And she slumped upstairs to bed.

Grandma had made peach cobbler for dessert, and the two of us sat there together in silence and ate.

“I saw the Gentlemen again,” I said after a while. “They were playing a card game with your father.”

Grandma raised an eyebrow at me.

“What else did you see?”

“I saw your father win, and the darkness of the world changed to light, and the desert became a garden.”

Grandma clapped her hands. “That’s my daddy for you. I wish you’d known him. It was like the sun rising in your heart every time he walked into a room.”

“But what was that game they were playing?” I said. “What kind of dice were those?”

“Folks had strange ways of deciding things back in those days,” said Grandma. “I wouldn’t worry much about it if I were you. That kind of game is gone from these parts, and dice like those are long forgotten. We have to focus on the future, Lee. We’re trying to build something here from what your great-grandfather started. Try not to worry about the past so much. After all, we can’t change it any, can we?”

“No,” I said. “But it seemed weird to me, how my great-grandfather won. It seemed like he cheated.”

Grandma leaned in close to me, staring me straight in the eyes.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the Urquharts, does it?” she said.

“It might,” I said.

“You can’t be trusting those people, Lee,” she said. “They are trash, I already told you. Treacherous. You mustn’t believe anything they show you.”