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genius !” Gramma croaked suddenly. Which is what she’d later do: croak suddenly. “Geniuses are never wrong. ”
    “Yes,” Mrs. Glass said blankly. She held four dirty plates in a careful stack, towards her floppy breasts like she was nursing them. “Look, Cyn, you tell Joseph. Your father is still upset about it and if you’re going to be here for the summer”—here she parted her lips to me in an impeccably puppeted smile— “he might as well know. The point is for our family to be to- gether. You know, family-making .”
    Cyn grimaced and brushed a strand of hair out of her mouth. “I wish you’d stop using that—”
    “Genius!” Gramma said again. Her eyes hooded over and
    from somewhere in my childhood I remembered that there was always a chance that Gramma was really a wolf in disguise.
    Mrs. Glass exited. Steven poured Gramma some more water out of a pitcher made in Mexico and bought at the Mexican Specialty Market. Cyn leaned toward me and kissed me wetly on the mouth. Gramma snorted at us. Then, still kissing- distance, she told me in a lush, low voice about the Fall of Genius. Usually a tale of shame is introduced with lush low strings, violas or cellos in short loose bursts like something strumming.
    “Three months ago my father finally got the funding to go ahead with the last phase of—well, this project. I told you he’s a bone specialist, right? He’s put together a lot of people’s knees. Famous sports guys and everything. So he had this idea that he’d been testing for years—replacement bones made out of this new ceramic that they’re building plane parts with. Dad read about it in one of those high-tech magazines. So he tested it with computer models and stuff, and then on some animals, although it was really impossible to tell how it would do with animals because of animal tissue. I don’t know quite how.” Offs- tage in the kitchen came the percussion of dropped silverware.
    “How did he test it on animals?”
    “What do you mean how? First they took rabbits and took out their real leg bones and put in these ceramic leg bones in- stead. They were supposed to be better than the metal and plas- tic deals that they use now. Then they tried it on chimps. It worked pretty well but Dad kept saying it was all irrelevant because animal tissue is different from human tissue. So they finally got the go-ahead—the money and the red tape or what- ever. They tried it on this woman. She’d broken her leg in some
    weird way when she fell off a ladder she was standing on to knock a wasps’ nest off of her house. She was swinging the broom to knock it off and she fell. There were some compli- cations, because the woman was stung so many times that they couldn’t reset the bone properly—it turned out she was allergic so her whole body was swollen. Dad said it looked like she was wrapped in a sleeping bag.”
    “So he used the ceramics to cure bee stings? ”
    “ Wasps. No. The wasps made her swell up so they couldn’t set the bone properly, so by the time she swelled down the bone was all messed up. So Dad got the go-ahead—it wasn’t just my Dad, by the way, but when it got screwed up everybody blamed him and the paper blamed him and so it might as well have been just my Dad—Dad got the go-ahead and they put this ceramic leg bone thing inside her leg and when she stood up the leg shattered. Instantly.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. It was awful. There was a big newspaper scandal and Dad was denounced everywhere.”
    “Wow.”
    “Stop that,” she said. “ Really. Wow. He’s upset, is the point. And that stupid secret fault thing you were talking about was exactly the reason. I don’t really get it, but the ceramic was developed in a way to compensate for any minute air pockets or something in the clay.”
    “Not air pockets, ” Steven said in the tired air of somebody who has always done well in math. “They’re—”
    “Whatever they were, it was statisically improbable for