Free House of Dance by Beth Kephart Page A

arms up into such a big knot that nothing she could say next could hurt me, or surprise me, or throw me off my balance.
    “That doesn’t mean that I don’t love him.”
    “If you loved him, you’d go and visit.”
    “I will.”
    “Yeah? When?”
    “When I can, Rosie. When I can. You have to trust me.”
    “The nurse’s name is Teresa,” I said. “And she has a tattoo for a bracelet.”
    “Teresa has had to make a few changes at Granddad’s house,” my mother said, “which is what I wanted to tell you. Wanted you to know, Rosie, before you got there.”
    I felt my heart throwing itself around in my chest. I felt my tongue get all dry and sticky. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” My voice was louder than my mother liked, but I couldn’t keep it gentle.
    “She’s just making things easier on him, Rosie, is all.”
    “Like what things easier?”
    “Like he needs a wheelchair—not all the time but sometimes. He needs his life all on one floor. He’s getting weaker, honey. Teresa is there to help. She’ll be there now around the clock, sleeping in an upstairs room.”
    My mother turned and looked back out the window. Kept her chin on the table of her knees and her hands wrapped tight around her mug, and I could feel that she loved Granddad, I could feel that it was true, butI was also the kind of frightened that came out as anger, the kind of frightened that blamed her.
    “Rosie, I’m sorry,” my mother was saying, but I couldn’t hear her anymore; I wouldn’t. “Rosie—” but I was already running, flying, through the dining room, through the living room, through the front door. My sneakers slapped the sidewalk and the road and the turn in the road and made tunnel echoes, then, under the railroad tracks, made sneaker sounds beneath the House of Dance. I ran past every single store without stopping. I ran, and I heard the crows flapping behind me. I ran, and I was faster than any train. I ran, and I was calling out his name— Granddad! Granddad! —long before I was close enough for him to know that his true one granddaughter was on her way.

EIGHTEEN
    T ERESA MET ME at Granddad’s side door, her tattooed wrist draped with a towel, her hair back and high in a clip. “Rosie,” she said, blowing her Spanish straight through my name. “Rosie.” Saying it twice, as if she were finishing my mother’s sentence.
    I was out of breath and sweaty. The crows were still so close that I felt their wing wind, the flying electric charges of all their quarreling, and my lungs were chewed up, my voice raspy. “Where is he?” I spat out, not meaning to spit, not really.
    “Waiting for you,” Teresa said. “Like always. But Rosie, listen to me, he—” I didn’t give her time to finish, just motored forward on my hissy sneakers, past her, through the kitchen and around the corner, into the room of books and brown, leaving the squawking crows behind. The couch was gone. A La-Z-Boy too. In their place were a bed and a wheelchair in a little half circle, facing the window. Half the bed was propped up, to make a chair. Thin silver railings ran along the sides. Granddad was wearing his regular khakis and a white, short-sleeved shirt that had no collar and no buttons. He had no blanket, was hooked to no machines, but he sat behind the silver railings, a magazine low in his lap. The place smelled like chemical lemons. The sun was smashed against the window glass, pressing noisily through.
    “Just the person I was looking for,” Granddad said when he saw me, folding a page down in his magazine and setting thewhole thing aside. Slowly. “Vietnam and Cambodia along the Mekong River.”
    I looked around the room, and there was Riot. There was the basket of In Trusts, the basket of D.L., no basket of Toss. On the floor was the Sansui, and beside that the record stash. Not everything had changed. A hot slick of sweat took the short road from the indent of my neck to the indent of my