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created, the rabbits had the best of it. All sorts of birds brought the woods to life with melodies. I could distinguish a robin from a blue jay just by the sounds they made. I knew there were wild ducks on the lake in the summer. I could see them fly in, but except for the one time my grandfather took me there, I never saw them floating on the water.
    My grandfather kept a nice patch of grass in the rear of the house. Occasionally, he would permit me to cut the lawn, but only in the rear. Sometimes, when I sat in the backyard and thought about all this, I imagined I was truly some sort of nature child, so alien to the world around me that I’d be considered as wild as an aborigine or some girl in a lost African tribe. If my grandmother stepped out to see what I was up to, she almost always warned me about thinking too much.
    “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” she would say. “Find something useful to do instead of just sitting there thinking.”
    Why did that frighten her? I wondered. Should it frighten me?
    I imagined that despite my good deeds and my obedience, my grandmother never stopped believing that somehow, for some reason, I would let the devil into their lives. It was as if he was just biding his time. He knew where I lived. After all, he didn’t create evil progeny and just let them drift away, did he? When the time was right, he would call on me. It got so I began to watch for him myself. Maybe he would just come walking out of the dark forest one day, smiling, his arms out.
    “You’re ready,” he would say, and the actions and thoughts my grandmother always expected would begin.
    My grandfather slapped his hands together, shaking me out of my reverie. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s set out. I’m getting hungry.”
    I put on my sweater, and the three of us walked out to their car in the driveway. The cross was cold and heavy on my chest, but I said nothing. I’ll get used to it, I thought. I kept my head down and tried desperately not to look too excited, but this was going to be my first time in a restaurant.
    I got into the rear of the car and sat back with my hands folded on my lap. Grandmother Myra looked at me, and for a moment, I saw her face soften in a way I hadn’t seen.
    “She’s getting to look more like Deborah,” she said.
    My grandfather turned to look back, as if he hadn’t ever looked at me. “Yep,” he said.
    “Thank God for that,” Grandmother Myra said.
    I had to agree but not for the same reason she was thinking. I thought my mother was a very pretty woman in the pictures I had been permitted to see.
    Because of the relaxed atmosphere, I thought I might risk asking a question or two about my mother.
    “What college did my mother attend?”
    “She went to the state university at Albany,” my grandfather said before my grandmother could object to our talking about her. He started to back out, turning around to see, and added, “She could have gone to a few colleges. She had decent school grades, thanks to your grandmother making sure she did her work properly.”
    Grandmother Myra grunted. “That wasn’t an easy task. If I didn’t ride herd on that girl . . . besides, her grades weren’t that good, Prescott. She was barely above average.”
    “She couldn’t finish college, then?” I asked.
    She spun on me this time. “Of course not! How could she even contemplate such a thing? All that was ruined. All the college tuition lost. Why do you think you’re here?”
    “I just wondered,” I said.
    “She might have gone back to school,” my grandfather offered.
    “Believe that, and I’ll offer you a bridge in Brooklyn for sale,” Grandmother Myra muttered. “Where would she have gotten the money?”
    Even then, without yet meeting her, I thought perhaps she got it from Uncle Brett, the mysterious, handsome, and adventurous Uncle Brett. My grandfather might have suspected that possibility, too, but wouldn’t dare suggest it.
    I wondered if I