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Excerpt:

“Grandpa died just before I turned fifteen, and the following summer, Mom sent me to Connecticut to help Grandma pack up the trailer. Those summer visits to the lake were the only time I saw my mom’s parents, with them living so far away.

So they were always strangers. And they always weren’t.

With Grandpa gone and me being fifteen, the summer felt like a dead thing. Mom didn’t come with me, and I was pissed at her for it. It was the biggest fight we’d had, and no matter how much I complained, begged, and pleaded with her, she wouldn’t let me stay home. I didn’t talk to her for days after arriving, not until the night of the fire.

That lakeside trailer used to be all barefoot Connecticut summers catching fireflies in glass jars, lying in the shade under blueberry bushes and bursting into their bitter flesh with my tongue, and riding with Grandpa on the boat after he let me drive. Grandpa would take me fishing, teach me how to hold a rod, how to reel it in, the way to hook a worm. I kept a straight face in the shadow of his instruction while the worms danced, dying  beneath my fingers. I hated sitting still, being quiet, but I was a good girl for him.

Grandma spent most of her days cooking or crocheting blankets and dish rags. She even crocheted a set of red and white checkered lawn chairs. I have one of them now, on my back porch, that I got after she died last year .

The lake seemed the same, but the trees pointed up, up, and up, like they were telling me to look away, and their leaves turned early; green tipped orange in July , a change that came too soon.

And Grandma was still Grandma, just worse.”