They stopped talking as she entered, but she pretended she didn’t notice. She walked to the refrigerator and looked inside. The smell of fried chicken still lingered in the air, so she wasn’t surprised to find a container of it sitting on the top shelf. There was also a container of potato salad, one of raw vegetables soaking in water, and a bowl of Jell-O. When had Gran done all this? Had she done it while they were in church?
She glanced over her shoulder at the old woman. “I’m amazed,” she said, smiling. “It looks great.”
Gran nodded. “I had help from the wood fairies.” She shot Old Bob a pointed look.
Old Bob responded with a strangely sweet, lopsided grin. “You’ve never needed any help from wood fairies, Evelyn. Why, you could teach them a thing or two.”
Gran actually blushed. “Old man,” she muttered, smiling back at him. Then the smile fell away, and she reached down for her drink. “Nest, I’m sorry about Mrs. Browning. She was a good woman.”
Nest nodded. “Thanks, Gran.”
“Are you feeling all right now?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. You both had phone calls while you were in church. Cass Minter called for you, Nest. And Mel Riorden wants you to call him right away, Robert. He said it was urgent.”
Old Bob watched wordlessly as she took a long pull on her drink. He was still wearing his suit coat, and he took time now to slip it off. He looked suddenly rumpled and tired. “All right. I’ll take care of it. Excuse me, please.”
He turned and disappeared down the hallway. Nest took a deep breath, walked over to the kitchen table, and sat down across from her grandmother. Sunlight spilled through the south window and streaked the tabletop, its brightness diffused by the limbs of the shade trees and the lace curtains so that intricate patterns formed on the laminated surface. It fell across Gran’s hands as they lay resting beside her ashtray and drink and made them look mottled and scaly. The tabletop felt warm, and Nest pressed her palms against it, edging her fingers into one of the more decorative markings of shadows and light, disrupting its symmetry.
“Gran,” she said, then waited for the old woman to look at her. “I was in the park last night.”
Gran nodded. “I know. I was up and looked in on you. You weren’t there, so I knew where you’d gone. What were you doing?”
Nest told her. “I know it sounds a little weird, but it wasn’t. It was interesting.” She paused. “Actually, it was scary, too. At least, part of it was. I saw something I don’t understand. I had this … vision, I guess. A sort of daydream-except it was night, of course. It was about you.”
She watched her grandmother’s eyes turn cloudy and unfocused. Gran reached for her cigarette and drew the smoke deep into her lungs. “About me?”
Nest held her gaze. “You were much younger, and you were in the park at night, just like me. But you weren’t alone. You were surrounded by feeders. You were running with them. You were part of them.”
The silence that followed was palpable.
Old Bob closed the door to his den and stood looking into space. His den was on the north side of the house and shaded by a massive old shagbark hickory, but the July heat penetrated even here. Old Bob didn’t notice. He laid his suit coat on his leather easy chair and put his hands on his hips, He loved Evelyn, but he was losing her. It was the drinking and the cigarettes, but it was mostly Caitlin and all the things the two of them had shared and kept from him. There was a secret history between them, one that went all the way back to the time of Caitlin’s birth-maybe even further than that. It involved this nonsense about feeders and magic. It involved Nest’s father. It went way beyond anything reasonable, and it imprisoned Evelyn behind a wall he could not scale, a wall that had become impenetrable since Caitlin had killed herself.
There. He had said the words. Since Caitlin had killed herself.