38

I found Gracie sitting on a wooden bench bolted to the patio in front of the nursing home. I sat next to her and waited, but she just stared, sniffing, at the river flowing at the bottom of the hill.

“Nurse Janine told me not to come back,” I said.

“It’s not like they can afford to be picky,” she said.

“She didn’t like my career goals.”

Gracie wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Do you have career goals?”

“Of course. I plan on lifting the zombie curse from our fellow students.” I pulled a wadded-up tissue out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Don’t tell Ms. Benedetti.”

She blew her nose. “Okay.”

“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.

“They have three Candy Land games and no red pieces.” She kept her eyes on the river. “Everybody wants to be red, the whole world knows that.”

“You’re not crying about the red pieces.”

“No.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and sighed. “Mom blew up my phone ’cause I wasn’t on the bus. Left a million messages begging me not to go to the quarry.”

“Why would you go there?”

“Every couple of years someone jumps and kills themself. If you ask me, there has got to be a better way to go. Anyway, I called Mom back to tell her I hadn’t killed myself and then we got into a fight. Why? Because I didn’t make my bed this morning. That’s when I started crying again.” She tossed the tissue at a trash can and missed. “And now I’m a lump of snot.”

“A useless lump of snot who can’t even throw out her Kleenex.”

“Jerk,” she said with a faint smile. “Who won the card game?”

“I never figured out the rules.” I picked up Gracie’s used tissue and a couple of cigarette butts and threw them in the trash. “The nurse thinks that Doris is lucky because she can’t remember her life. She doesn’t understand how much she’s lost.”

“My nonna died of Alzheimer’s,” Gracie said. “The last ten years of her life she didn’t recognize anybody, not even Grandpa, and he visited her every day.”

“Was she in here?” I pointed at the building.

Gracie shook her head. “Connecticut. A week after we buried her, Grandpa died, too. Mom barely talked for a month after that.”

“What made her start again?”

“Talking?”

“Yeah.”

“Garrett.” She pulled a pack of gum out of her purse, handed a piece to me, and folded a piece in her mouth. “One day he told Mom he wanted to visit Grandpa in his grave. We packed a lunch and ate it at the cemetery. At first I thought it was gross, but it was actually kind of sweet. Hanging out with our dead grandparents became a thing. We go a couple times a year now.”

“You go to a cemetery on purpose?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Isn’t that the point?”

A gust of wind rose from the river, shaking the last gold leaves of the fragile birches planted around the patio.

“Sounds creepy.”

“It’s not like we dig them up. We have a picnic. Tell them what’s going on in the world. Garrett brings his report card and soccer photos. Haven’t you been to your grandmother’s grave yet? Didn’t your dad take you?”

Gracie had spent months patiently weaseling the hows and whys of our return to Belmont out of me. She didn’t know everything, of course, but she knew enough to be able to ask questions that could mess with my head.

“Time to go.” I stood up and pointed. “The bus is coming.”