"He's fine," Josie said. "He just forgets sometimes. Everybody's grandpa forgets."
"They sure do," said Marla. She smiled. It was a nice smile, and Josie didn't trust it any farther than she could have thrown Tiny. "You need anything, ever, you tell Dale here, and Dale'll tell me. Okay?"
"Okay."
She rode home fast. She could feel all four of them watching her go.
* * *
On the last Saturday in August it rained, the kind of sudden purple thunderstorm that came over the Rubies in late summer and turned the dirt roads to grease, and Boone said he would not let her ride three miles in that and that was the end of it. He put her bicycle in the bed of his pickup and Penny in the cab between them, and they drove into town with the wipers going and the gravel popping under the tires.
"Pine Street," Josie said. "But you can let me off at the corner."
"In this."
"It's fine."
He didn't let her off at the corner. He drove up Pine Street and stopped in front of the foreman's house with the iron boot scraper, and Josie was out of the truck almost before it stopped, reaching into the bed for her bicycle, and that was when the front door opened and her grandfather came out onto the porch.
He was in his socks. He had his reading glasses on his forehead, and he was holding a coffee cup, and he squinted out through the rain at the truck.
Boone got out. He stood there in the rain with water running off the brim of his cap, and Josie, holding her bicycle by the handlebars, watched him see Aitona and watched something go out of his face, like air out of a tire.
Then Aitona said, "Dale."