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expectation and I whispered that I would tell him everything later. In the meantime, I helped serve dinner. Since I had just eaten, I ate only dessert: a piece of Aunt Sara's blueberry pie.

After I helped clean up, I went upstairs and joined Cary in his attic room. I told him everything Grandma Olivia had told me. He had not known about any fortune.

"I'm not even sure my father knows about that," he said. "That's wonderful, Melody."

"Money isn't very important to me right now, Cary. The truth is, I think Grandma Olivia was hoping I would willingly forget all the lies just so I could get my inheritance. It was as if she were trying to buy me off with the promise of it."

He nodded, thinking.

"Can we talk to your father now? Would he talk to us?" I asked. I was afraid to approach him myself. "Let's try," Cary said.

We descended the stairs together and found Uncle Jacob reading his paper and listening to the news on the radio. He looked up, surprised.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Melody has some questions to ask you, Dad," he said. "Because of the things Grandma told her and me about her mother."

"You know how I feel about talking about that." He started to raise his paper.

"Grandma feels we're old enough to know things, why can't you?" Cary challenged. I think he was braver with me standing beside him, only now I felt responsible for any bad feeling between him and his father.

Uncle Jacob thought a moment and then lowered the paper to his lap. He turned off the radio. "You want to hear about your mother? You want to hear the ugly truth?" he said with a note of threat.

"I want to know the truth," I replied undaunted, "ugly or otherwise."

"All right. Sit," he said, nodding at the settee. We both went to it. Uncle Jacob lit his pipe and puffed for a few moments.

"Haille was always getting in trouble with boys. Either Chester or I had to come to her aid all the time, trying to save her from herself. On more than one occasion, I found her down on the beach with someone doing things I'd rather not describe. I got into fights and so did Chester. We were teased a lot. The family was disgraced a lot, but nothing seemed to change her. She was fascinated with herself.

"Your mother was always a source of misery for my parents," he said, pointing with his pipe. "She was caught smoking, drinking, and doing all sorts of immoral stuff in school dozens of times. If my mother hadn't had influence in this town, they would have thrown Haille out of the public school. She was actually arrested twice for lewd behavior on the beach when she was in high school." He paused. "You still want to hear this?"

I swallowed back a throat lump and nodded.

"About when she was fifteen, sixteen, she got caught with a truck driver out on the dunes. They were going to throw the book at the guy. He was about twenty-eight or so and she was obviously under age. Only, my mother was worried about the scandal, so it was kept quiet and the truck driver was let go. Mother tried to get a doctor to help Haille, the same doctor who was treating Belinda at the time, I recall, but nothing seemed to help. She was a wild creature. She'd do whatever she wanted, whatever she fancied. Chester and I did our best to cover up for her, to protect her."

He paused and sat back, thinking. The lines in his face grew deeper, his eyes colder. Then he took a breath and continued. "The year she was supposed to graduate from high school, Kenneth Childs began coming up and spending time with us more and more. We liked Kenneth and our families were close. In those days Chester and I thought of him as another brother. Kenneth was going to college in Boston. He would come up weekends. Sometimes Chester and I didn't know he was in town, but Haille always did. She was over at the Childs' lots of times, and sometimes, there was no one else there but Kenneth.

"That was the year she got pregnant. She made up that story about my father. Chester always favored her more than I did, overlooked her sins. He made excuses for her all the time. He refused to believe Kenneth would make her pregnant and not own up to it. Haille filled him with lies about Dad and he swallowed them, because he was so hypnotized with her himself.

"I told him she was a liar and a whore. I told him she once tried to seduce me, and he got into a fight with me. He took her side and they ran off together. That's the story," he concluded, like a slap of thunder at the end of a rain storm.

There was a heavy silence in the room. Cary looked at me.

"Have you ever spoken with Kenneth Childs since?" I asked.

"We've had some words, mainly because of the judge.

I went to his mother's funeral, of course, but it's hard for me to look him in the face and not think about what happened."

"Did you ever ask him outright about it?"

"No," he said, "and I don't intend ever to talk about it. You're my mother's sister's grandchild. Your Aunt Sara is fond of you, and from what I hear, you're doing well in school. You're welcome to stay here as long as you need to or until your mother decides to be a mother instead of a tramp. That might never happen, of course, and soon you'll be on your own anyway. But I won't have any more talk about those days in my house," he said firmly. "And I don't want any scandals." He looked at Cary. "Satisfied?"

Cary turned to me. "You want to ask him anything else, Melody."

"No," I said. I was crying inside, the tears falling behind my eyes and over my heart.

Uncle Jacob went back to his paper and put the radio on again. I left the room, pounding up the stairs. I threw myself on the bed and lay there embracing my stuffed cat.