Page 35 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

The guy’s brow wrinkled for a moment, but he didn’t run screaming from the car, so that counted for something. “You like my grandpa because he doesn’t promise to send you invitations to things?”

“Your grandfather has called me every horrible, true thing he can think of—and several things that aren’t true but are still horrible.”

Last night, for example, he’d called me a teratoma of hair and teeth. The night before that, it had been a witless Wife of Bath. I had to google both those things once I got home, but it didn’t take long for me to realize they weren’t meant as compliments.

“That doesn’t sound very nice,” the man said.

“It’s not,” I admitted. “But no matter what he says or how many times he says it, he always opens the door when I knock. I bet if you come knock with me, he’ll let you in, too.”

The guy was silent for a moment, and I was afraid I’d scared him away. If he’d spent the better part of two weeks sitting out here, trying to muster up the courage to go inside his grandfather’s house, he needed encouragement, not a depressing picture of what lurked on the other side of that door.

But I meant what I’d said. Arthur McLachlan was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, and there was a good chance he’d shred his grandson to pieces before he managed to get a foot in the door, but if he was willing to accept a middle-aged nobody whose own daughter couldn’t stand the sight of her, I felt sure he wouldn’t throw this poor young man out.

That was $3.99 worth of worldly wisdom right there.

“Yeah. Okay. Thanks.”

I so rarely won any arguments that it took me a moment to realize what he was saying. “You want to go see him?” I asked. “Right now?”

He hunched his shoulder in a half shrug. For the first time, I realized how large a man he was, how careful he’d been not to make himself seem overpowering inside this tiny space we shared. “If you’re not busy, I mean. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“Of course I’m not busy. You saw what happened earlier.”

“That was your daughter?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, but feeling somehow that this young man understood. Especially once he slid out of the car without asking any questions.

“By the way,” I added, heading up the sidewalk to the house, “if your grandfather throws the coatrack, you should probably duck, but the vase is an heirloom.”

He blinked at me, perplexed.

“That one you’ll want to catch.”

11

“It’s about time you got here.”

I stepped through Arthur’s front door to find him sitting on the bottom step of his staircase, the fractured boards trapping him like a broken picture frame.

“Don’t just stand there gawping, woman. Can’t you see I need help?”

I stood there gawping for a few seconds longer, at which point Arthur grunted in irritation.

“Where’s Sloane?” he demanded as he struggled to get to his feet. “She moved all my stair books. How the hell am I supposed to get around without my stair books?”

I was pushed ruthlessly aside by the young man as he made his way into the house. This wasn’t how I’d have planned the first meeting of grandfather and grandson, but one of the things I always told my clients was that we could only choose which path to take to our destination. What happened along the way was entirely up to chance.

In this case,chancewas Arthur McLachlan being lifted bodily into the arms of a young man I felt about eighty percent sure was a construction worker of some kind. Either that or a firefighter. I wasn’t yet ready to mystify him by announcing his vocation in front of an audience, but I was getting close.

“Are you hurt?” he asked. He carried his grandfather toward the living room as though he were lifting a kitten rather than a fully grown man. “Is anything broken?”

“Greg? What do you think you’re doing here?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Arthur struggled to free an arm so he could point an accusing finger. “Didthat meddlesome woman let you in here?”

In case it wasn’t obvious,that meddlesome womanwas me, and he flung the words like he was about to tie me to a stake and light me on fire. Which, I was sorry to say, was a threat I got far more often than you’d think possible in this day and age. When my psychic advice went wrong, or—as was usually the case—because it was spot-on, people had a way of jumping straight onto the witch train.

I was about to open my mouth to defend myself when I caught sight of Greg’s face. What I saw there—guilt and desperation and an all-encompassing panic wrapped up in one—flooded me with a bravery I didn’t know I had.

“Yes, Arthur. It was me.” I put my hands on my hips and did my best imitation of a woman who was about to demand to see the store manager. “He didn’t want to come in, but I told him it was a matter of life or death, and that I’d report him to the authorities for elder abuse if he didn’t do as he was told.”