ONE

It happened when the Major was deployed overseas for a month. To be honest, I was glad to see him go. Mr. Hard-Ass. Mr. Military Police. Mr. You-Can’t-Put-One-Over-on-Me. Mr. Eyes-in-the-Back-of-His-Freaking-Head. And always angry about something.

Pick up your clothes, Rennie.

Don’t slouch, Rennie.

What do you mean, you passed? This is a C. You think a C is okay? What would your mother say?

Only it was always in French. Toujours en français. Qu’est-ce que ta mére aurait dit? And the inevitable You’ll thank me one day—Tu me remercieras un jour.

As soon as Grandma heard about his assignment, she called him and offered to look after me—as if I needed looking after. I was fourteen already, going on fifteen.

“Put him on a plane, André,” she said. “I’ll meet him at the airport.”

But no, that was no good because I might miss a couple of weeks of school, and then look out! Apparently, they have some kind of heat-seeking missile they deploy against kids who deke off school to go visit their grandmothers. Geez, like it was going to make any difference.

So Grandma came to us. She arrived in a taxi with enough luggage for the duration. The Major’s plan: she would ride herd on me until the end of term, and then I could go back to Toronto with her.

The Major came out of his bedroom with his bag. His uniform was crisp. His boots were buffed to mirrorlike finishes.

“Make sure he does his homework, Melanie,” he said to Grandma with just enough of an accent that you could tell English wasn’t his first language. “And look at what he’s done. Don’t just take his word for it.”

Grandma glanced quizzically at me but said nothing.

“No TV or Internet during the week,” the Major continued. “I used to give him privileges—after he finished his homework—but all that did was encourage a hurried, slap-happy attitude to his schoolwork.”

He meant slapdash. The Major messed up words all the time. Some people thought it was funny. He didn’t.

My ears burned, even though I told myself I didn’t care what he said. I looked at Grandma. She smiled pleasantly at the Major and said, “We’ll be fine. Won’t we, Rennie?”

We followed him to the door and watched him stride to the car waiting for him in the driveway. He stowed his gear in the trunk and climbed in beside the driver without looking back. The car drove away.

Grandma closed the door against the cold. She rubbed her hands together and grinned wickedly.

“We’d better get you packed,” she said. “We have a plane to catch.”

“A plane? I thought I was supposed to stay here.”

“Rennie, darling, your father left me in charge. So what do you say you humor him and let me decide what’s best?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “Okay.”

TWO

Grandma is a grandma, which means she’s old. But practically the only way you’d know how old is by checking out her birthday cakes (she insists on the correct number of candles, and lately the cakes have been lit up like major cities) or by zooming in on her wrinkles with a magnifying glass. There’s no Grandpa. He died so long ago that even my mom didn’t remember him. But she used to get a dreamy kind of look in her eyes when she told me what she knew about him. It was like she was imagining him, even though she knew him only through old photographs.

No Grandpa meant that Grandma could pretty much do as she wanted. And Grandma wanted to have fun for as long as she could. To make sure she would be able to, she ate properly, exercised regularly, meditated and was a yoga fanatic. So when she said, “We’re going skiing,” I wasn’t surprised—not until she said, “Where is your passport, darling?”

“Passport?”

“I know the perfect place. I was there, oh, I can’t tell you how long ago. I used to take your mother there when she was a girl. She was wild about the backcountry.” Her eyes lost their focus, and I knew she was thinking about Mom. I felt bad.

“And we need a passport to get to this place?” Right away I’m thinking, The Alps! Grandma used to go every year and have what she always called a grand time both on the slopes and aprèsski. She always winked when she said that, and my mom used to roll her eyes and say, No way do we want to hear about that, do we, Rennie? I always agreed with her because Grandma’s visits put her in such a good mood. “So where is it, Grandma? Where are we going?”

Grandma grinned. “You’ll see.”

Definitely the Alps.

I ran and got my passport from a supposedly locked drawer in the Major’s desk. Okay, so it was locked, and I just happened to know, after a few hours working at it—okay, many, many, many hours—how to jimmy the lock. By the time I got back to my room with it, a suitcase lay open on my bed, and Grandma was elbow-deep in my underwear drawer.

“Grandma, geez!” She was holding up a couple of pairs of what I had to admit were pretty sad-looking briefs. I grabbed them and shoved them into the bottom of the suitcase.

“You could do with a shopping trip,” Grandma said dryly.

If you ask me, I could have done with some privacy. But it was impossible to get mad at Grandma. Besides, she wasn’t criticizing—not like the Major did. She was just being Grandma.

She zipped my suitcase. Outside, a car horn tooted.

“That must be our taxi,” Grandma said.

“Taxi? What if Dad saw—”

She looked disappointed. “Really, Rennie. Give me a little credit. Besides, your father runs like a Swiss watch. I gave us a ten-minute margin of safety.”

* * *

Here’s the great thing about traveling with my grandma: She always goes first-class. We checked in at a special counter at the airport. We waited for our flight in a special lounge. We spent our air time in wide, comfortable seats with plenty of legroom in the front part of the airplane. When I flew with the Major, we always ended up where 90 percent of the passengers sit, packed so tightly that you could barely slip a piece of paper between your knees and the back of the seat in front of you.

When we got off the plane, we breezed through border control—don’t ask me what Grandma’s secret is with that—and were greeted by a man who handed her the keys to a four-wheel-drive rental. Grandma piloted the heavy vehicle over unfamiliar snow-covered roads at knuckle-whitening speed. She sang along to the nasally voice of one of her all-time faves, Bob Dylan. Well over an hour later, she turned off the main road and onto a narrow, winding one that snaked up into the mountains. She made a final turn at a sign that read Disaster Peak Ski Resort and coasted to a stop in front of a large, chalet-style ski resort. Oh yeah—Disaster Peak isn’t in the Alps. It isn’t even in Europe. It’s in the eastern Sierra Nevada range in California, good old USA. But hey, it wasn’t the army base, and it wasn’t school.

My first impression was that the place was quiet. Too quiet. I got the feeling the biggest disaster around here was the resort’s lack of paying guests. It turned out I was wrong about that. The place only looked deserted because Grandma and I had arrived in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone was out skiing. By the time we had unpacked in our adjoining rooms and Grandma had had a cup of tea, people had started drifting back from the slopes. We watched them from the terrace.

“We’d better go and rent our equipment,” Grandma said. “I want to hit the slopes first thing in the morning, if that’s okay with you.”

We got our gear—and a lecture about staying inbounds and not venturing into the backcountry, certainly not without a guide, because of the danger of avalanches. A person could get killed, the man behind the counter said. People did get killed, just about every year.

“I thought you said you brought Mom here because she loved the backcountry,” I said. “Did they have avalanches here back then too?”

“I made sure she knew what she was doing and didn’t take any chances,” Grandma said. “I expect the same from you.”

* * *

We ate dinner in the chalet’s large dining room. There were candles on every table and tablecloths like the one Grandma uses for special occasions. Soft music played in the background. After we had our main course—which was just about the best steak I’d ever had, with a side of fries and (Grandma insisted on it) a big salad—and while I waited for my crème brûlée and Grandma her latte, she fixed me with her steely gray eyes.

“I want you to do something for me, Rennie.” She leaned forward a little. “I need your word on it.”

Uh-oh. What was going on? Had Grandma tricked me? She’d brought me here—I wasn’t going to complain about that; here was definitely better than there—but now it looked like she was going to tell me what she wanted in return. Had she stashed schoolwork in her suitcase? Had she talked to my school principal? Was that it? Had she called him up and said, I’m taking my grandson out of school for a while. What do you require him to learn in his absence? She’d say it just like that too, laying it on all aristocratic like she was a grande dame, which is what the Major sometimes called her, only he said it in French and I think it means something slightly different in that language.

“Do you promise, Rennie?”

She hadn’t even told me what she wanted yet. I guessed she figured she didn’t have to.

“It’s not like I have a choice, Grandma.”

She reached into a pocket and pulled out a small booklet. I groaned. She handed it to me.

“Read it. Memorize it. I plan to quiz you, young man. And then abide by what’s written there.”

It wasn’t homework after all. Not school homework anyway. It was a list of rules about skiing and ski safety at Disaster Peak and the surrounding area. At least half of the booklet was about avalanches.

“Is that all?” I asked. It would be a breeze. I may hate school—I do hate school—but I have a good memory. You have to if you want to keep your stories straight for the Major.

“That’s it,” Grandma said. “But it’s not all. I’m serious, Rennie. I want you to read that carefully. And I want you to understand that we’re sticking to the established runs. We—you—are not to go out-of-bounds. Okay?”

What did she think? That I had a death wish? “Okay. No problem, Grandma. I heard what the man at the rental place said about avalanches.”

It was a jackpot answer. Grandma smiled as soon as she heard it. At least, I thought that’s why she was smiling. It took a few seconds for me to realize that her mood had nothing to do with me. She was all pink in the face over a long-haired, grizzled old guy who zipped past me without a glance, grabbed one of Grandma’s hands and kissed it. Grandma’s cheeks went from pink to red, like one of those Disney princesses when the prince or whoever finally gets around to laying one on her. And yeah, I’ve seen a couple of those movies. Girls like them, and sometimes you have to do what they want. So what?

“Melanie.” The old guy let go of her hand. “I saw your name in the register. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“I didn’t know you’d be here, Rod. I thought you’d be retired by now.”

Rod? I stifled a laugh. Old Rod was taller than average. He looked fit too, kind of what I imagined the Major would look like when he was that age—no gut, arrow-straight posture and enough muscle to handle himself in pretty much any situation. A guy who knew that treating his body right could save his life or someone else’s. Maybe it even had. Maybe more than once. Rod wasn’t bad-looking either. Shaggy hair, more white than gray, but it looked okay on him. Shaggier white eyebrows, the old-man kind that fly out in all directions. Blue eyes that looked like patches of sky between the snowy eyebrows above and the snowy mustache below.

Rod laughed. “Me? Retire? And do what?” His eyes changed, and he looked all mushy when he stared at Grandma. “You look fantastic, Melanie,” he said.

“As do you,” Grandma said. “Rod, this is my grandson, Rennie. Rennie, this is Rod Billingsley, an old friend. He owns this resort. His father built it.”

Rod peeled his adoring gaze off my grandma for just long enough to shake my hand, but by the time he released me, his eyes were on her again.

“Please join us, Rod,” she said.

Please don’t, I thought.

“I don’t want to interrupt your dinner, Melanie. I’m sure you and Rennie came here for quality time alone.”

That’s the spirit, Rod. Now go away.

“Nonsense,” Grandma said. “We’re just finishing dessert. Please. Sit. I’d love to catch up, and I’m sure Rennie would be interested in hearing some of your stories.”

“Um, actually, Grandma,” I said, with a mouth full of crème brûlée, “if it’s okay, I was kind of hoping I could take a look around and maybe get some air.” Because who wanted to watch some old guy flirt with his grandma if he could avoid it? Who even wanted to think where that could lead? Grandma had a lot of boyfriends—well, men friends. She always did. I heard her say once to Mom…on second thought, never mind what I heard. I don’t want to think about that either.

Grandma seemed surprised that I didn’t want to hang around and hear some old geezer drone on about the good old days. To Rod, she said, “We’ve been traveling all day, and boys have a lot of pent-up energy. Or so I’ve learned.” To me, smiling: “You can be excused. And Rennie? You have the key to your room with you, don’t you?”

I nodded as I gobbled down the last of the crème brûlée. I could have eaten a bucket of the stuff. “I’ll be fine, Grandma. See you in the morning.” I got up and kissed her on the cheek.

When I glanced back as I left the dining room, I saw Grandma and Rod leaning in close to one another. Grandma was laughing at something Rod was saying. A lot of things about Grandma were a big mystery to me, but it was no mystery why she had chosen to come to this ski resort.