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“You’ll be in my prayers tonight,” Jack said.

WILLIE THE WEIRDO

Willie’s mom and dad thought their son was strange, with his careful study of dead birds and his collections of dead bugs and the way he might look at drifting clouds for an hour or more, but only Roxie would say it out loud. “Willie the Weirdo,” she called him one night at the dinner table while Willie was making (trying to, anyway) a clown face in his mashed potatoes with gravy for eyes. Willie was ten. Roxie was twelve and getting breasts, of which she was very proud. Except when Willie stared at them, which made her feel creepy.

“Don’t call him that,” Mother said. She was Sharon.

“But it’s true,” Roxie said.

Father said, “I’m sure he gets enough of that at school.” He was Richard.

Sometimes—often—the family talked about Willie as if he wasn’t there. Except for the old man at the foot of the table.

“Do you get that at school?” Grandfather asked. He rubbed a finger between his nose and upper lip, his habit after asking a question (or answering one). Grandfather was James. Ordinarily during family meals he was a silent man. Partly because it was his nature and partly because eating had become a chore. He was making slow work of his roast beef. Most of his teeth were gone.

“I don’t know,” Willie said. “I guess sometimes.” He was studying his mashed potatoes. The clown was now grinning a shiny brown grin with small globules of fat for teeth.

Sharon and Roxie cleaned up after dinner. Roxie enjoyed doing the dishes with her mother. It was a sexist division of labor to be sure, but they could have undisturbed conversations about important matters. Such as Willie.

Roxie said, “He is weird. Admit it. That’s why he’s in the Remedial.”

Sharon looked around to make sure they were alone. Richard had gone for a walk and Willie had retired to Grandfather’s room with the man Rich sometimes called the old boy and sometimes the roomer. Never Dad or my father.

“Willie isn’t like other boys,” Sharon said, “but we love him anyway. Don’t we?”

Roxie gave it some thought. “I guess I love him, but I don’t exactly like him. He’s got a bottle filled with fireflies in Grampa’s room. He says he likes to watch them go out when they die. That’s weird. He’s like a case history in a book called Serial Killers as Children.”

“Don’t you ever say that,” Sharon told her. “He can be very sweet.”

Roxie had never experienced what she’d call sweetness but thought it better not to say so. Besides, she was still thinking of the fireflies, their little lights going out one by one. “And Grampa watches right along with him. They’re in there all the time, talking. Grampa doesn’t talk to anyone else, hardly.”

“Your grandfather has had a hard life.”

“He’s really not my grampa, anyway. Not by blood, I mean.”

“He might as well be. Grampa James and Gramma Elise adopted your father when he was just a baby. It’s not like Dad grew up in an orphanage and got adopted at twelve, or something.”

“Dad says Grampa hardly ever talked to him after Gramma Elise died. He says there were nights when they hardly said six words to each other. But since he came to live with us, he and Willie go in there and talk up a storm.”

“It’s good they have a connection,” Sharon said, but she was frowning down at the soapy water. “It keeps your grandfather tethered to the world, I think. He’s very old. Richard came to them late, when James and Elise were already in their fifties.”

“I didn’t think they let people that old adopt,” Roxie said.

“I don’t know how that stuff works,” Mother said. She pulled the plug and the soapy water began to gurgle down the drain. There was a dishwasher, but it was broken and Father—Richard—kept not getting it fixed. Money had been tight since Grandfather came to live with them, because he only had his pittance of a pension to contribute. Also, Roxie knew, Mom and Dad had already begun saving for her college education. Probably not for Willie’s, though, with him being in the Remedial and all. He liked clouds, and dead birds, and dying fireflies, but he wasn’t much of a scholar.

“I don’t think Dad likes Grampa very much,” Roxie said in a low voice.

Mother lowered hers even further, so it was hard to hear over the last few chuckles from the sink. “He doesn’t. But Rox?”

“What?”

“This is how families do. Remember when you have one of your own.”

Roxie never intended to have children, but if she did, and one of them turned out like Willie, she thought she’d be tempted to drive him into the deepest darkest woods, let him out of the car, and just leave him there. Like a wicked stepmother in a fairy tale. She briefly wondered if that made her weird and decided it didn’t. Once she heard her father tell Mother that Willie’s career might turn out to be bagging groceries at Kroger’s.

James Jonas Fiedler—aka Grandfather, aka Grampa, aka the old boy—came out of his room (called his den by Sharon, his lair by Richard) for meals, and sometimes he would sit on the back porch and smoke a cigarette (three a day), but mostly he stayed in the small back bedroom that had been Mother’s study until last year. Sometimes he watched the little TV on top of his dresser (three channels, no cable). Mostly he either slept or sat quietly in one of the two wicker chairs, looking out of the window.

But when Willie came in, he would close the door and talk. Willie would listen, and when he asked questions Grampa would always answer them. Willie knew most of the answers were untruthful and he was aware that most of Grandfather’s advice was bad advice—Willie was in the Remedial because it allowed him time to think about more important things, not because he was stupid—but Willie enjoyed the answers and advice just the same. If it was crazy, so much the better.