"What was your question, anyway?" he asked out of nowhere.
For a moment she couldn't think what he was talking about. Then she remembered that she had denied that he was right when he guessed her question. "Oh, nothing," she said.
"It was important enough for you to come out here into the cold, wasn't it? Might as well ask me, cause here I am, and next week you can't be sure, I'm seventy-four going on seventy-five."
She still couldn't bring herself to admit that he had been right. Or rather, she couldn't admit that she had lied about it. "It was a silly question."
He said nothing. Just waited.
And as he waited, a question did come to her. "Your grandson, Dougie, he said that there were some things that nobody in town knew, and one of them was his father's middle name."
Grandpa Spaulding sighed.
"You can tell me," said Rainie. "After all, I'm a ghost."
"Douglas has never forgiven me for naming him the way I did. And sometimes I'm sorry I did it to him. How was I supposed to know that the name would turn trendy -- as a girl's name? To me it was a boy's name, still is, a name full of sweat and sneakers and flies buzzing and jumping into the lake off a swing and almost drowning. A name that means open windows and hot fast crickets chirping in the sultry night."
"Summer," she said. A murmur. A whisper. A sweet memory on a cold night like this.
"That's right," he said. "I named him Douglas Summer Spaulding."
She nodded, thinking that Summer was the kind of name a sentimental, narcissistic fourteen-year-old girl would choose for herself. "You're lucky he didn't sue you when he came of age."
"I explained it to him. The way I explained it to my wife. I wanted to name him for something perfect, a dream to hold onto, or at least to wish for, to try for."
"You don't have to try for summer," said Rainie. "You just have to have the guy come and service the air conditioner."
"You don't believe that," he said, looking appalled.
"Oh, aren't ghosts allowed to tease old eccentrics?"
"I didn't name him for just any old summer, you know. I named him for one summer in particular. The summer of 1928, to be exact, the perfect summer. Twelve years old. Living in Grandpa's and Grandma's boarding house with my brother Tom. I knew it was perfect even at the time, not just thinking back on it. That summer was the place where God lived, the place where he filled my heart with love, the moment, the long exquisite twelve-week moment when I discovered that I was alive and that I liked it. The next summer Grandpa was dead, and the next year the Depression was under way and I had to work all summer to help put food on the table. I wasn't a kid anymore after summer 1928."
"But you were still alive," Rainie said.
"Not really," said Grandpa. "I remembered being alive, but I was coasting. Summer of '28 was like I had me a bike at the top of Culligan Hill and from up there I could see so far -- I could see past the edge of every horizon. All so beautiful, spread out in front of me like Grandma's supper table, strange-looking and sweet-smelling and bound to be delicious. And so I got on the bike and I pushed off and never had to touch the pedals at all, I just coasted and coasted and coasted."
"Still coasting?" asked Rainie. "Never got to the supper table?"
"When you get down there and see things close, it isn't a supper table anymore, Rainie. It turns out to be the kitchen, and you aren't there to eat, you're there to fix the meal for other people. Grandma's kitchen was the strangest place. Nothing was anywhere that made sense. Sugar in every place except the canister marked sugar. Onions out on the counter and the knives never put away and the spices wherever Grandma last set them down. Chaos. But oh, Rainie, that old lady could cook. She had miracles in her fingers."
"What about you? Could you cook?"
He looked at her blankly.
"When you stopped coasting and found out that life was a kitchen."
"Oh." He remembered the stream of the conversation. "No," he said, chuckling. "No ma'am, I was no chef. But I didn't have to do it alone. Didn't get married till I got back from the war, twenty-nine years old in 1945, I still got the mud of Italy under my fingernails and believe me, I've scrubbed them plenty, but there was my Marjory, and she gave me three children and the second one was a boy and I named him Douglas after myself and then I named him for the most perfect thing I ever knew, I named him for a dream ..."
"For a ghost," said Rainie.
He looked at her so sadly. "For the opposite of a ghost, you poor child."
Douglas opened the parlor door and leaned out into the night. "Aren't you two smart enough to come in out of the cold?"
"One of us is," said Grandpa, but he didn't move.
"We're starting up," said Douglas, "and it's still your turn, Ida."
"Coming," said Rainie, getting up.
Douglas slipped back inside.
She helped Grandpa Spaulding out of the swing. "Don't get me wrong," he said, patting her back as she led the way to the door. "I like you. You're really something."
"Mmm," said Rainie.
"And if I can feel that way about you when you're pretending to be something you're not, think how much I'd like you if you actually told the truth about something."
She came through the door blushing, with anger and with embarrassment and with that thrill of fear -- was she found out? Did Grandpa Spaulding somehow know who she really was?
Maybe he did. Without knowing the name Rainie Pinyon, maybe he knew exactly who she was anyway.
"Whose turn is it?" asked Tommy.
"Ida's," somebody said.
"What is she, an emu?"
"No, human. Look, she's a human."
"How did she get so far without us noticing?"
"Not to worry!" cried Douglas Summer Spaulding. He raised a red-lettered card over his head. "For the good of the whole -- Release the Pigs!"
The others gave a rousing cheer.
"Give me my good karma," said Douglas. Then he grinned sheepishly in Rainie's face. "You have only five life-pennies and there are seven piglets and the pig-path is only three dots long, so I sincerely hope with all my heart that your karmic balance is of a sort to send you to heaven, because, dear lady, the porkers from purgatory are going to eat your shorts."
"Heaven?" said Rainie. "Not likely."
But she popped every one of the pigs before they got to her. It was like she couldn't roll anything but ones and twos.
"Grandpa's right," said Tommy. "She really is a ghost! The pigs went right through her!"
Then she rolled eighteen, three sixes, and it was enough to win.
"Supreme god!" Tommy cried. "She has effed the ineffable!"
"What's her karmic balance?"
She flipped over the karma cards. Three evils and one good, but the good was a ten and the evils were all low numbers and they balanced exactly.
"Zero counts as good," said Douglas. "How could anyone have supposed otherwise? So I bet I come in second with a balance of nine on the good side."
They all tallied and Grandpa finished last, his karmic balance a negative fifty.
"That's the most evil I ever saw in all the years we've been feeding the baby," said Tommy. He switched to a midwestern white man's version of black dialect. "Grandpa, you bad."
Grandpa caught Rainie's eye and winked. "It's the truth."
They all stayed around and helped finish off the refreshments and clean up from dinner, talking and laughing. Tom was the first to go. "If you're coming with me, Ida, the time is now."