Fall from Grace (14 page)

SOMEHOW 4:20 A.M.
came earlier than normal.

When the alarm went off it was impossibly dark, and he was certain he had screwed it up, setting it for one thirty by mistake. But he had been awake at one thirty—eyes closed, mind racing—stuff too stupid to think about during the day keeping him up all night, stuff about calculus tests and libraries and old movies and Zoë and Grace and plans,
lots
of plans, ridiculous plans, plans that were brilliant at two fifty and forgotten by three, replaced by other plans that were total genius for the ten minutes they lasted.

Two rough nights in a row. Not a record, but he knew the lack of sleep would start to catch up to him.

Sawyer blamed his father. He knew it wasn't his
father's fault, but he was in the mood to blame him for everything and, just like the plans that raced through his head, it made sense at the time.

All his father had done was to remind him about something he didn't need to be reminded about—“Don't forget to set your alarm, son. It's going to be a busy day at St. Mary's, and they're going to need your help.”

Sawyer almost said “If it's going to be so busy, why don't you come with me?” but he realized just in time that it would be exactly the kind of thing his father
would
do. As tough as it was going to be spending the morning prepping for the big Thanksgiving Day meal at the soup kitchen, Sawyer knew it would be worse having his father next to him, telling him what to do, even though he'd been doing it just fine for months. So instead Sawyer said that the alarm was already set and that he'd have no problem getting there on time. Which was easy to say at nine p.m.

The streets were empty, but the small parking lot next to the church was almost full. The team at the kitchen had said that this would happen, that dozens of people would show up that morning, all wanting to help so that they could tell their friends about doing
one day of community service with the unfortunates at a soup kitchen on the west edge of the city. St. Mary's wouldn't turn them away, just like they wouldn't turn away anyone coming to eat, but these twice-a-year volunteers—Thanksgiving and Christmas—would make it all more complicated than it had to be.

It was a good half hour before the kitchen started serving, but there were already a handful of bundled-up shapes shuffling around in the alcove by the front door. Sawyer saw some he recognized—Larry Long Coat, Cowboy Kurt, Angelo, Hey-Howdie Man, Lucy, Tom the Dolphins Fan, Mrs. Morton—and a lot more he didn't. He waved and a few waved back as he walked to the entrance at the side of the building.

“Hey, Sawyer. Thanks for coming in.” Tonisha put a checkmark next to his name on her clipboard. First year out of college, five years older than him, tops, and she ran the whole program. “We've got a lot of volunteers today. I want to make them feel welcome so I'm putting most of them out front. You okay with that?”

He was okay with that. Out front meant working the line, serving food, clearing tables, refilling the milk machine, making coffee. Out front meant getting to
talk with the people who came in, hearing the stories, the jokes, the thanks. Sawyer understood why Tonisha would want the regulars in the back and the one-shot volunteers out front. Being out front, you felt like you were doing something worth doing, making a difference in somebody's life. A small difference, but a good one.

It was the kind of feeling that might get you to volunteer more than twice a year.

It's what kept him coming back.

That, and his father.

Tonisha had him down for scrape-and-load. Not the kind of job that brought in the volunteers. The dirty dishes would come in from the cafeteria through the low window, he'd hose them off, set them on the rack, and run them though the dishwasher. It was loud and hot, and even with the white St. Mary's apron on and the splash guards up around the sink, you couldn't help getting wet.

The cook was a big guy named Wayne, a lot of fun but serious when it came to the food. He had the new people chopping celery for the salads that would go with the Thanksgiving meal. When he saw Sawyer he gave a slow nod and brought his chopping knife down hard
on a carrot, then held up his hand, middle finger bent back out of view, every one of the volunteers at the table gasping. It was his favorite trick and he sold it, eyes all wide and his other hand still holding the knife. The first ten times he saw it, Sawyer fell for it too. Wayne held his pose a bit longer, then flipped up his missing finger, getting them all laughing, breaking the ice. He was good at that teamwork stuff.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Sawyer,” Nellie said, pushing a cart loaded with dirty pots across the floor. “Now how about you getting to work?”

It stayed busy after that, first all the pans and bowls and giant mixing spoons from the kitchen, then the plates and glasses and silverware from the cafeteria. People would come up to the long opening and he'd see their hands as they set their trays down on the metal table, pushing them through to the sink, somebody bending over now and then to shout in a thanks or to compliment the chef, and he'd yell something back even though he doubted they could hear him over the noise. Ten minutes and the bottom of his jeans were soaked through, twenty minutes and water squished out of his Chuck Taylors with every step.

He slipped three times on the soapy floor before the idea clicked and he mentally added another item to Grace's shopping list.

Regular mornings he'd be done by eight and off to school, but today was different, and when Tonisha came by with his replacement, it was already past noon. She put her arm around Sawyer's shoulder, pulling him in for a buddy hug. “Thanks for sticking around,” she said, pushing a wayward dread back up under her hairnet. “Sad to say, but it's our busiest day of the year. You going to get something to eat?”

“No, I can't eat here.”

“Don't tell that to Wayne. At least not when he's holding a knife. He takes that kind of comment personally.”

“What I meant was my family's going to my aunt's house for dinner.”

She smiled. “That's good. You should be with your family today.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What do you mean, you
guess
? Of course you should,” she said, sliding her arm off his shoulder and grabbing his hand, steering him around the steamy, spitting dishwasher to the low window by the sink, pulling
him down so they could see out between the growing stacks of dirty dishes. It was the first chance he had to look all morning.

The place was packed.

Every table taken and a dozen people in line, trays in hand.

Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians.

Everybody.

Jeans and sweatpants, yeah, but some women in dresses, a few men wearing ties, an old guy in a baggy suit. And lots of families.

Looking just like any family.

Like his family.

And kids everywhere. Running around between the rows, sitting at the tables, all smiles and laughing, playing with other kids' toys, having a great time.

It was different for their parents.

This wasn't the regular crowd. There were no shopping carts, no battered backpacks, nobody looking like they'd need to be getting a free meal at a church.

But then, there they were.

“You see all those folks? Do you think any of them want to be spending their Thanksgiving with a bunch of
strangers?
Please.
At least they've got their families with them. Mostly. The ones who come in alone? That's gotta be rough.”

They were easy to spot.

Sitting as far away from anybody as they could, setting themselves apart from the families and from each other, eyes on their plates or staring out at nothing, wolfing their food down and bolting out or eating so slowly it was as if they never wanted to finish. It was mostly men, older, his father's age, but there were some women, just as old, some younger men in their twenties, and a few guys in their teens.

And one lone girl.

Purple jacket.

Red scarf.

Black beret.

Head down.

So small she was easy to miss, easy to ignore.

“It's like that poster over by Father Mull's office,” Tonisha said. “How's it go? ‘To the world they're a nobody, but to somebody they're the world.'”

That girl? Grace? She's a nobody.

Tonisha gave his hand a squeeze and said something about how thankful she was for her regulars and
something else about prayers that he didn't hear, and the next minute she was over by the ovens, joking with Wayne. Sawyer's mind was still out in the dining area.

He knew what he had to do.

It wasn't going to be easy, hell no, and he didn't want to do it, he wanted to do the exact opposite, but it was one of his friends out there, all alone.

No, that wasn't right.

It wasn't one of his friends.

It was his best friend.

And you did things for a best friend that you didn't want to do because you knew that's what your best friend would want you to do, would need you to do.

Sawyer knew what he had to do.

It was the same thing he'd want Grace to do if it was him out there at the table and her back here, watching him.

He took off his apron and hung it with the others, slung his coat over his shoulder, took a deep, long, shaky breath.

You can do this
, he told himself.

And then he did.

He pushed open the door and sprinted out to his car, driving off before Grace knew he was there.

SHE POINTED A
knife at Sawyer.

“One, you got ripped off. And two, this turkey is delicious.”

His aunt was right, he did get ripped off, but things had changed since he made that bet and he had other plans now, plans that had nothing to do with precalc or Wembly, plans they didn't know about. Sure, there was a lot to do—applications to fill out, forms to send in, online admissions essays to write—but he'd get it done. That was the plan. Well, one of them.

“He didn't get ripped off,” his father said. “He lost a bet. We agreed he had to get an A and he didn't. But you're right about the turkey.”

It was Sawyer, his parents, Grandma Edith, Aunt Paula, Uncle Rick, and their three girls—Megan and Shannon, who were still kids, and Erin, who was only thirteen but looked as old as Grace and acted older than Zoë—all sitting around the formal dining-room table his aunt used as her home office. The stacks of papers and files that normally covered the table were missing, the computer and printer moved to the floor by the china cabinet, but it still felt like her office. It was sticky warm in the room, with the gas fireplace going and the steam from the kitchen and everybody just a little too close.

Physically, anyway.

And it was noisy, too, the TV on, the Lions losing to an empty room, tinny Christmas music coming from the cheap computer speakers, Misty barking in the garage, everybody talking—everybody but his cousin Erin and him. She was busy texting a boy her parents didn't like and he was busy thinking about a girl his parents didn't know existed.

“Sawyer, didn't you say you got an A-plus?”

“It was an eighty-six,” his father said. “The teacher marked it on a curve. It wasn't a
real
A.”

“Oh. An
eighty
-six.” His aunt took a sip of her wine.
“Well, that's still a good grade.”

“It's very good. It's outstanding. But it's not an A.”

He was sure Grace hadn't seen him when he snuck out. She still had a full plate in front of her and there were too many people by the main door for her to see him run by. Driving home, all he wanted to do was go back, sit down next to her, maybe put his arm around her shoulder, tell her…what? That there was nothing to be embarrassed about, that a lot of people had to go to soup kitchens now, that she could spend Thanksgiving with him, that he didn't care where she came from or what school she went to or what her family was like or that people thought she was a nobody?

Yeah, that would have gone over well.

“But I'll say this for him, he took the loss like a man. Didn't whine about it, didn't get all pissed off. He accepted it and moved on. Right, son?”

Sawyer smiled. Why not? If that's the way his father wanted to remember it, that was fine by him. Besides, he owed his father one. If his father
had
lived up to the bet, there was no guarantee that he wouldn't change his mind later. It had happened before. This way Sawyer knew where he stood. It had only taken a couple hours
online to see that he didn't need his parents to get him into a school, that there were options, lots of them, and okay, some of them weren't as good as Wembly—not even close—but they were his options.

“So if Sawyer lost,” Uncle Rick said, “what did you win?”

“
I
didn't win anything. It was Sawyer who really won. He got to drop precalculus.”

Uncle Rick laughed at that. “You got an A and you
dropped
the class?”

“It really
wasn't
an A,” his aunt said. “More like a B-plus. Which is still good. But it's not an A.”

“I never got above a D in calculus and I couldn't get out of it. Almost kept me from getting into college.”

Sawyer knew that his parents would be giving him that now-do-you-understand? look, so he kept focused on the turkey, which really was delicious. He wondered what Grace had thought of Wayne's cooking.

“Speaking of which, your mother told me the good news.”

He looked up at his aunt, then around at the others, trying to think of what the good news could be.

“College? That letter?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sawyer said. “I got accepted at Wembly.”

“Well, you could at least
try
to sound excited.”

“I'm sure he is. Do you know what you're going to major in yet?”

“Probably accounting,” his mother said. “He's thinking of becoming an insurance actuary. He even wrote a paper on it.”

“I don't even know what that is,” his aunt said.

“Yes, you do. They work for insurance companies and they—”

“Let
him
tell it, Rick. Go on, Sawyer.”

Sawyer laughed to himself. He had written the career paper that morning. It took him all of fifteen minutes to find it, download it, change a few words, and turn it in to his parents for their approval. He planted enough mistakes to give his mother something to find, and after ten minutes of pulling those out and pasting the original stuff back in, it was done. One day he'd tell them the truth about the paper, maybe even about the precalc test. But that was years away, after he'd graduated from a college he hadn't found yet and earned a degree in a field he probably hadn't even considered.

“Insurance actuaries evaluate risks,” Sawyer said, picturing the Wikipedia entry. “They determine strategies
that will maximize gain and minimize losses using analytical skills that help them predict outcomes. And they're experts at understanding human behavior, too. They know what you're going to do before you even know you want to do it.”

“Wow, did you hear that, Erin?” His aunt turned to look at her daughter, who did her best to ignore that end of the room. “Sawyer, that's
really
interesting. I'd never heard of that before.”

“So, basically,” his uncle said, waving his fork, “actuaries spend half their day imagining shitty situations, then the other half making plans to avoid them. Sound like you, Sawyer?”

“Yeah,” Sawyer said. “It's starting to.”

His father poured the last of the wine into his glass. “Don't let him kid you, Rick. Sawyer's not afraid of hard work. He's been up since, what, four? Volunteering over at St. Mary's. The soup kitchen.”

Aunt Paula smiled at him. “That's
fantastic
. Really, it is. I mean, what kid does any volunteering anymore?”

His cousin Erin, unimpressed, glared down the table. “We
all
have to volunteer. It's a school requirement.”

“Yes, I
know
,” Aunt Paula said, matching the attitude. “But
some
students are willing to volunteer even when it
doesn't fit nicely into their social schedule.”

His uncle jumped in between them. “Lot of people there today?”

Sawyer nodded. “Lot more than usual.”

“That's good. I mean that you were there for them. It's a shame anybody has to go there, but you know what I mean.”

“I'm very proud of him,” his mom said, reaching around his father to pat him on the back.

“That meal? That could have been the best thing to happen to some of them all month,” Uncle Rick said. “The thing is, you never know who you're helping, or how much it means to them. You could've changed somebody's life.”

Erin rolled her eyes. “Yeah, a dead turkey saves the world.”

“Seriously, Sawyer, what you're doing, going in at four in the morning, it's really important. You're making a difference. Even if it's just one person.”

He mumbled something that could pass as a “thanks,” thinking about one person and the difference she made.

“Speaking of four in the morning,” Aunt Paula said to his mother, “please tell me you're not going to be one
of the crazies waiting for some store to open.”

“No, I did my last Black Friday years ago. I wonder how many people are going to get crushed this year.”

“The traffic jams, the accidents—”

“The fights over some toy.”

“Plus all that crowd control.”

“I'd hate to be a policeman tonight,” Aunt Paula said, then said something about the weather being good for shopping, and that got his father going on about a guy at work who loved Black Friday but hated Christmas, and that started Megan and Shannon in on what they wanted Santa to bring them, while Uncle Rick inched up the volume on the game and the dog started barking again.

Sawyer had stopped listening, busy revising a plan.