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neighbors could avoid looking at it.
    We drove through my grandfather’s open wooden gate, where the smooth asphalt turned to chunky gravel beneath our tires and the carefully planned green spaces of the development gave way to the region’s natural landscape: scraggly and dry, barren and brown and unlovely. My father had grown up on this land in an age when there were chickens and horses here. But the last horse had long since died, and now the stable stood like a relic of an ancient era. The wooden fence posts and crosspieces lay bleaching in the sun. The chicken coop was empty of chickens. My grandfather was eighty-six years old. All his old friends were dead. His wife was dead. He had grown bitter about his own longevity.
    “Just hope you didn’t inherent my genes, Julia,” he said to me often. “It’s a curse to live too long.” I liked the way he always said exactly what he thought.
    Years earlier, the developers had tried to buy my grandfather’s property. But he refused to sell. “Dammit,” he said, “I got things buried in this land.” I knew that at least two cats had been interred out behind the woodpile, and I suspected he had also buried certain other valuables over the years. The developers went ahead without him, laying roads and foundations around him, erecting houses and street signs on every side of his property. The new neighborhood rose up around my grandfather’s land like floodwater surrounding high ground.
    My mother and I walked into the kitchen without knocking. When you moved around in this house, the shelves rattled slightly, knickknacks teetering on every surface. My grandfather was sitting at the table in a red sweatshirt, the newspaper and a magnifying glass in front of him.
    “Hi, Gene,” my mother said. “How are you doing?”
    “I told you on the phone I’m fine,” he said without looking up. “Chip’s been here.”
    Chip was a neighbor of his, a teenager who helped keep the house going. Chip wore black T-shirts and black jeans every day, and a lip ring was responsible for the slight drooping of his lower lip. They were an unlikely pair, but I think Chip hated the development as much as my grandfather did, though he lived with his parents in one of the new houses.
    “This is bullshit, anyway,” said my grandfather.
    “What is?” asked my mother.
    “I figure it’s all a trick to take our minds off the Middle East.”
    He had the palest blue eyes, like my father’s but lighter, and they seemed to be fading as he aged, like fabric left too long in the sun. A few wisps of white hair fell now and then on his forehead.
    “Come on, Gene,” said my mother. “How could someone rig all this?”
    “I’m just saying, how do you know it’s true? Have you measured it? They can do anything these days.”
    “Gene—”
    “You just wait. They’ve got something cooked up. That’s all I know. They’re messing with the clocks or some damn thing. I’m just saying I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it for a second.”
    My mother’s cell phone buzzed, and I could tell from the way shw answered that it was my father on the other end. She stepped outside to talk to him. I sat down at the table—this was the same table where my grandfather and I used to play hours of Old Maid together, but his eyesight had grown too poor to see what kind of cards he held. I missed how he used to be.
    “So, Julia,” said my grandfather. “You see anything around here you want?”
    He waved at his shelves of antique glass, his rows of weathered hundred-year-old Coke bottles, my grandmother’s silver tea service, her collections of decorative thimbles and tiny silver spoons, the pewter and porcelain figurines she had arranged on lace doilies in some different, better decade.
    “I can’t take it with me, you know,” he went on. It was sad to hear him talk this way. “You should take what you want now, because when I’m dead, Ruth is going to try to get her hands on