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Show / . Moon - 44 The rats chewed through the wall after all. Joy woke up when the overhead light was flipped on. She heard a scrabbling noise, a thump, something being knocked over. Then her mother screamed, a terrible sound. Her mother told her later that one of the rats had run over her bare feet. James yanked down the yellow curtain, wrapped his daughter in a blanket and lifted her out of the cot. The new family of three drove out to the green of Long Island in the dead of night and camped in the livingroom of Grandfather Tad's apartment, where they stayed until James found them a house. Evenings, Joy was left alone with her grandfather, who sat at a table and listened to the radio. Joy felt something like love for the thin old man, perhaps because he had eyes, which, while they were not sad like her other grandfather's, looked just beyond her shoulder like a cat's, seeing things that were invisible to everyone else. Sometimes she tried to talk to him. Then he would move closer to the radio, turn up the volume, and lay his head on his arms. Her father had brought her a pad of art paper and a box of crayons, and this was enough. And so they spent the evenings, Grandpa Tad and Joy, until it was time for her to go to sleep on the cot in the corner of the livingroom. On the chest near the cot was an old framed photograph of a cottage surrounded by trees. "That's Grandpa Tad's cottage," James explained. "He never goes there now. It'll be ours someday." James bought a house in Hempstead, a town not far from where he was born. It wasn't as grand as his childhood house, he liked to tell them, but it was, at least, much better than a room with rats. Joy thought it was wonderful. The house was white with green shutters and big rooms with enormous windows. The yard had lilies of the valley under the thick bushes, hollyhocks, daisies and |