When he opened them, everything was almost the same... only standing there just outside the room was Jon's grandmother (on his mother's side; the grandfather who left the stone was on his father's side). She looked suspiciously young.
"Mom, that's my stone!" said Jon. "Please, I need it back."
Only not only did his mother respond, so did his grandmother.
"Crystal," said Jon's grandmother, "do you have something belonging to your brother?"
"Brother?" wondered Jon. But he was beginning to suspect. "It's a red stone, about so big..."
"Give it back," said his grandmother.
"No, I don't want to," she said. "I'm not finished, Mom. I never expected that the wish would work this way, anyway..."
"What in the world are you talking about?" answered Jon's grandmother. "You just admitted you took something from Jon. Give it back." She stepped forwards to snatch the stone from Jon's mother, who backed away. "If you don't, you're grounded."
"But you can't ground me, I'm..." Her sentence trailed off, as if she just realized what had happened. She handed the stone over to Jon.
Jon's grandmother led his mother out, and Jon closed the door. He too had some idea what had happened, but he had to be sure. "I wish I knew what just happened."
It was, again, as if he had had something in his eye, and then, he knew. His mother hadn't originally had a disease making her young. And then she had made a more specific wish--that she wasn't the mother in the family and that it would be someone else instead.
So the stone decided to grant the wish by resurrecting Jon's dead grandmother and making her the mother of the family instead. He and his former mother were brother and sister now; his grandmother was mother to both of them. Now that Jon thought about it, that would probably be one of the better ways to do it. She was already his mom's mom, so that didn't need to be changed; she was at least part of the family, so this wasn't like forcing a random person over the street to become a mother to several children to whom she isn't really related.
But there was one thing Jon needed to find out. "I wish I knew how my life, and Karyn, was different now that I grew up with an extra sister."
