I hated how rational I was at a time like this.
While my parents were grieving, I was reopening their wounds. I could feel my guilt, but beneath the guilt and self-reproach, I still couldn't stop myself from observing and thinking.
The two things they'd mentioned were indeed serious. Whether it was revealing in front of relatives and friends where Grandpa's savings had gone—something I shouldn't have known—or calling the police several times to report that robber and murderer, both were major problems. Anyone who knew about them would notice something strange about me.
But if that was all there was to it, it still wasn't enough to make my parents move away and cut ties with their relatives.
If other people noticed something strange, at most they'd treat it as gossip to chat about over tea. Anyone with a normal brain, no matter how superstitious, wouldn't take some ability possessed by someone close to them and imagine it in the most extreme way possible.
It was like the favors people commonly asked in everyday life. If you knew a teacher and asked him to recommend a school for your child, that was perfectly normal. No one would cling to him shamelessly over something like that, much less quit their job and change careers just because someone asked them for a favor.
In my parents' recollections, they kept bringing up that uncle I no longer remembered.
They used to tell us about family matters. As my sister and I grew up, we'd sometimes been curious about our family and about our parents' and grandparents' lives.
As I remembered it, the inheritance dispute after the old folks passed away was the reason for the falling-out they'd mentioned several times. But they'd never gone into detail about what had happened, and they