His shoulders started to shake and he may have been crying. I stared. I didn't know what to do with this. I really hardly knew him, hadn't known before a few days ago about all these tragedies piled on top of him.

But it was all so long ago! Darry died in '72, 12 years ago. Johnny and Dally in '66, 18 years ago, his parents nearly 20 years ago now.

He stood up. He hadn't been crying but it was close. He took a shuddery deep breath.

"Um, are you alright?" I said cautiously, wishing my dad was here, or I was somewhere else.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine,"

We walked on, the sun shining off the faces of the polished stones. Away from 1966 and toward 1965.

His parents' stones, my grandparents. Side by side, my grandfather born in 1925, my grandmother in '26. How old would they be now? I figured it quick in my head. 58 and 59. Not so old. Not so old at all.

Ponyboy stared at these stones but didn't touch them as I noticed he'd touched the others. Impossible to say what he was thinking. Maybe that these two deaths kick started his bad luck, set his life on this bleaker hopeless course.

"What were they like?" I said, staring at the names and dates, remembering the pictures I'd seen of them up in the attic.

He smiled, kind of a bittersweet smile.

"They were…God, sometimes it's like I can hardly remember them. Any of them. They're all I think about but they're so faded. It's like now, I can only remember remembering them, I can't really remember at all,"

I squinted up at the sun, the bones of my grandparents, or the dust of the bones, somewhere under my feet. How long did it take bones to turn into dust?

I looked down but could still see the sun like a phantom, burned onto my retina. My dad had found the better way. He didn't live with relics and ghosts like Ponyboy did. He didn't live with shadows, reflections of reflections.

It occurred to me suddenly in an unnerving burst of clarity, that maybe I had to help Ponyboy. Maybe my dad couldn't do it, because they'd been too close once, or they were still mad at each other or whatever. But Ponyboy really had no ties to me. I was a stranger. And I'd read his essay "The Outsiders". I understood it on a different level than my dad did, maybe.

But I groaned inside, shrinking from the chore. I was 14, out on a little vacation with my dad. I didn't exactly plan on becoming a pseudo psychoanalyst for wayward uncles.

The dust beneath me seemed to shake, and I could feel my grandparents' little twists of DNA vibrating in my cells. 'Help him' they'd say if they still could. So I nodded, to them and to myself. It was hard work pleasing the dead.

"Um, uncle Ponyboy?"

"Yeah?" His voice was slow, dreamy. I looked at the lines on his thin face, lines my dad didn't have. I heaved a sigh and started again.

"Uncle Ponyboy, do you still have that letter you got from Johnny, you know, the one from the book?"

He nodded and turned to me, his look getting sharper. I knew he had it.

"Well, uh, what did Johnny say in it?"

Ponyboy cleared his throat. Scanned the sky for passing planes. He knew damn well what it said. I'd drag him back to life if it killed me.