At the cashier’s window, he converted two chips into folding money. After the two casinos, this left him ahead four hundred for the night. He intended to give away the other seventeen thousand in chips before leaving the building.
Exploring the house bottom to top with Grady, Merlin was as stealthy as an excited pony. They found no intruder.
Whatever had finished Grady’s dinner for him, whatever had taken the three baked chicken breasts and the pan on the stove, left no sign that it had ventured farther than the kitchen.
Before returning to the ground floor, Grady turned off the lights room by room. In the darkness, he drew aside any draperies that were closed, raised any shades that were lowered.
On the ground floor again, he made sure that the views from all the windows were likewise unobstructed.
In the kitchen, he washed his dinner dishes. He brewed a pot of coffee, poured it into a thermos bottle, and stood the thermos on the dinette table. He set a mug on the table, too.
Merlin watched as if witnessing a ritual with solemn meaning.
Only two chairs served the table. They were at opposite ends of the window that looked out onto the back porch.
Grady moved one of the chairs to face the window from across the table. He switched off the lights and sat in the chair, in the dark, in the lingering aroma of strong coffee, his mug empty.
Merlin stood very still, as if pondering the situation. He was a contemplative dog, always ruminating on some aspect of his world.
Out of sight above the house, the mirror moon reflected the sun of a day not yet dawned, shining the pale light of tomorrow on the yard and on the paper birches.
The porch lay in shadow.
Merlin padded to the kitchen door, a French door with panes all the way to the bottom, installed specifically to allow the wolfhound to see outside. Alert, he stood there, barely visible in the gloom.
Grady’s window had three rows of panes, three panes per row. In another house, miles from here, this was the identical configuration of the window through which Grady’s mother had foreseen her future.
A year before Grady was born, his father gave his mother a puppy – half German shepherd, half everything else. She named him Sneakers because he had a dark coat and paws as white as tennis shoes.
Growing up with Sneakers was a fine adventure, although the dog reserved the greater part of his devotion for Grady’s mother. He loved his human brother, but he adored Ellen Adams.
Grady’s dad, Paul, worked at the lumber mill. A few weeks before his son’s eighth birthday, he was killed on the job.
The huge sizing saw, which cut logs into manageable lengths, had every safety feature. The saw was not the problem.
People were the problem. A group opposed to logging operations had driven dozens of eight-inch spikes into each of numerous randomly selected, mature, mill-ready pines. The spiking didn’t kill the trees but rendered them useless for lumber.
Harvesting crews identified most of the ruined specimens. Only one slipped past their inspection.
The giant circular saw ripped the spikes from the wood, tangled them into bristling knots, and spat them out. When the blade met the resistance of the steel spikes, a sensor killed the power to the saw. But already the mangled spikes were in flight at maximum velocity, as was a piece of broken blade like a wide and toothy smile.
Grady never heard exactly what the shrapnel did to his father. Considering the vivid images his imagination conjured, perhaps he should have been told. But perhaps not.
Millworkers, police, friends, and the family priest advised Ellen not to view the body. But Paul had been, she said, “the other half of my heart.” She declined to heed their advice.
She accompanied her lost husband from the mill to the coroner’s office. Later, she went with him from coroner to mortician.
His mother’s courage in a time of terrible loss, and her faith, were profound. Young Grady had drawn his strength from her example.
He loved his dad. The loss was so grievous, he felt as though he had been cut open and robbed of a vital essence. Every morning for a long time, when he woke, he was aware of being incomplete.
Because his mother endured, Grady endured. For him, endurance led to acquiescence, then to acceptance, and at last to peace.
Long before he found peace, only a month following his father’s death, after waking past midnight, he went downstairs to get a snack. He wasn’t hungry, but he couldn’t just lie in bed and think.
A lamp already lit the downstairs hallway. His mom sat at the table in the kitchen, which was brightened only by the spill from the hall lamp. Her back to him, she gazed at the night beyond the window.
Beside her chair sat Sneakers, his head in her lap. With her right hand, she tenderly, ceaselessly stroked the dog’s head.
His mom didn’t know Grady stood in the doorway. The dog surely knew, but he would not turn from the woman’s consoling hand.
Grady could think of nothing to say. As quietly as if he were the ghost of a boy, he retreated from the kitchen, returned to bed.
A few nights later, waking at one in the morning, he silently went downstairs and found her as before, with the dog.
He stood for a while in the doorway, unannounced. It felt right that he should be with her yet at this distance, watching over her as she stared through the window at the night.
During the next month, he joined her a few more times, as silent and unnoticed as a guardian spirit. When he returned to his bed, he always wondered when his mother slept. Perhaps she didn’t.
One night he went downstairs and found the hall lamp off. His mother wasn’t in the kitchen, nor was Sneakers.
Grady assumed that she had changed her routine. He, too, was sleeping better than in the weeks immediately after his dad’s death.
A year passed before he again discovered her and Sneakers at the kitchen table, in the dark. She had never entirely stopped coming here in the emptiest hours. Perhaps she came more nights than not.
This time he said, “Mom,” and went to her side. He touched her shoulder. She reached up and took his hand in hers. After a moment, he said, “Do you think … he’ll come to visit?”
She had the softest voice: “What? A ghost? No, sweetheart. This is my past and future window. When I want my past, I see your father working out there in the vegetable garden.”
They grew tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, and more, for their own use.
Grady sat at the table with her.
“When I want my future,” she continued, “I see you tall and handsome and grown, with a family of your own. And I see myself with your dad again, in a new world without struggle.”
“Don’t be sad,” Grady said.
“Oh, honey, I’m not sad. Have I ever seemed sad to you?”
“No. Just … here like this.”
“When I say I see myself with your dad again, I’m not saying that I wish it. I mean I truly see it.”
Grady peered through the window and saw only the night.
“Believing isn’t wishing, Grady. What you know with your heart is the only thing you really ever know.”
By then she