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would be a good picture. Remember?”
    I looked at the picture of us all framed in the barn doorway, with a blur of chicken flying past.
    “Is that the chicken that pecked you?” I asked.
    Grandfather began to laugh.
    “Might be!”
    He threw back his head, and I stared at him, surprised at that sound. It had been a long time since I’d heard him laugh, and suddenly I thought of Mr. MacDougal’s kiss on my forehead, how strange it had felt.
    I watched Grandfather. And then, before he stopped laughing—because I wanted to remember what it was like—I stood on tiptoe and kissed him.

Chapter Twelve
    Two months. Two months and a little more had gone by. It didn’t seem so long when you said it, but Grandma said that time was different dependingon which journey you were taking—a trip to the mountains or a trip to get your tooth pulled.
    “Sometimes things happen quickly before you have a chance to think about them. Like the hummingbird that comes to my bee balm in the garden,” said Grandma. “You don’t see him come, and you hardly see him go.”
    Like Mama’s leaving.
    Two months. The kittens had grown what seemed half a lifetime in that time, staggering around the house, leaping straight up in the air when they came on Grandfather’s boots. Emmett was learning words like “Mama” and “Da.” Cooper was trying to teach him “disintegrate.”
    Grandma, in that time, had made it through an entire song, from beginning to end, on the flute. Vivaldi it was, she said.
    “My
version of Vivaldi,” she added.
    Grandfather made several trips to town in the car, alone, giving us all sly looks as he left and sly ones when he returned. He carried packages, and one large box, into the barn.
    “Do not follow me!” he commanded in a loud, serious voice, making Cat and me burst out laughing and Grandma smile.
    “What’s he doing?” Cat asked Grandma.
    “Secrets,” said Grandma. “Secrets even from me, can you believe that?”
    She walked to the entrance of the barn.
    “Marcus, darlin’ man,” she called. “What are you doing?”
    Grandfather’s voice came from the back of the barn.
    “Don’t sweet talk me, Lottie.”
    Grandma went back to practicing Vivaldi on the porch, surrounded by her claque of cats, and later, when my sister and I went to the barn for raspberry buckets, there was a shiny new lock on the door to the toolroom. Grandfather wasn’t in sight, but we heard sounds behind the door.
    Cat knocked.
    “Grandfather?”
    “I’m busy now.” His voice was muffled. “I’m busy in my office.”
    His office? Cat mouthed the words to me,and we grinned at each other and went to pick black raspberries.
    The raspberries grew past the pasture, at the far edges of the meadow where wild chicory and Queen Anne’s lace grew, too. Grandma had put a net over them to keep the birds away. Cat and I pushed back the net and ducked under.
    “Every third or every fourth?” Cat asked, holding a berry to her lips.
    “Every other?”
    “Third,” Cat said, popping the berry into her mouth.
    We picked for a while in silence. The berries made a soft plunking sound when we dropped them in the buckets.
    “Remember when we used to make tents in the backyard?” I said, sitting back, looking up at the sky through the netting.
    Cat nodded.
    “You liked to build the tents,” she said. “And when you were done you’d sit inside, all restless and jittery, waiting for something more to happen.”
    “That’s because I loved to build them,” I said.
    “And I loved to sit inside after you’d gone,” said Cat.
    There was a silence. Cat reached over to touch my arm.
    “What are you thinking about?”
    “Something Grandfather said, Mama waiting for things to happen. Remember when Mama got into the tent with us once?”
    Cat nodded.
    “She sat for a minute, then looked at us and said, ‘Well, what happens now?’”
    “You and I,” I said, “we weren’t enough.”
    I ate a raspberry. It was sour, and for a