Tender Grace (11 page)

August 30

I arrived in Santa Fe this afternoon, and for the first time I walked into a hotel and couldn’t get a room, which is amazing considering how seldom I book ahead. Tom would never arrive at a destination without a reservation, but I’ve done it almost everywhere I’ve gone. And I doubt I’ll reform, because there are several wonderful places to stay on or near the plaza, and I got a great room in the second hotel I tried. It was too late to do much when I got settled, but I strolled along the plaza and found a cafe, opened “since 1918.” It looked like a place where I could get something good to eat to take back to my room. While I waited for one of the best quesadillas I’ve ever had, I took in the ambiance of the checked floor and steel-banded tables and the chatter of happy customers. In less time than I expected, a young man with black hair and blacker eyes handed me a to-go sack, and I left the gathering of locals and tourists, still preferring the privacy of my room when I eat alone.

After I returned to the room, I made an ice run and saw two teenagers, maybe thirteen or fourteen, trying to get a dollar bill into the Coke machine. In the time I stood there, they put it in three times, and three times the machine spit it back out.

“Here,” I said, pulling a crisp dollar out of my billfold, “trade me. Maybe this will work.”

“Thanks,” one of the boys said, handing me his wilted one.

“Did you do anything fun today?” I asked while my dollar slid into the slot without incident.

“We rode horses,” my beneficiary said, punching the Coke button.

They looked more like the four-wheeler type.

“It was great,” the other boy said. “We saw a place in the distance where they make a lot of Western movies.”

“
Young Guns
,” the first boy said, taking a drink from his Coke. “And
Tombstone.
The guide said Billy Crystal made a movie there too.”

“
City Slickers
?” I asked.

“That’s it,” he said. And then with one more thank-you they were off, leaving me to fill my ice bucket and wrangle the Coke machine alone.

I can’t say what I might do while I’m here, but I will not be horseback riding anywhere. I’d go to a zoo first. That movie set surely wouldn’t get me on a horse. Nothing would. I made that mistake once, twenty years ago, visiting my brother in Kentucky.

Our son, Mark, had been ten or so, the perfect age, Henry said, to go horseback riding in the hill country. He made arrangements with a local stable for a two-hour ride and generously paid for the five of us. My brother, my husband, and my two children rode in front of me like seasoned cowpokes. Looking at them made me happy, and I enjoyed the ride—for maybe fifteen minutes.

One of the guides stayed back, riding behind me the whole time, trying to get my horse to quit eating grass. When my mare eventually and grudgingly gave it up, she tortured me by
tharump
,
tharump
ing to catch up with the others, while the guide yelled at me to keep my heels down even though doing so broke both of my knees, the frosting on my miserable cake. One of the happiest moments of my life was looking up to see the roof of the horse barn. When we finally rode up to the corral, it took both Tom and Henry to pry my legs off the horse and lower me to the ground. Tom and the kids couldn’t conceal their involuntary smiles. I faux glared at Tom.

“Henry, whatever you paid for my time on Sasha,” I said, stumbling to the car, “it was too much.”

The boys at the pop machine were lucky I didn’t go into it. They were lucky I talked at all. I wasn’t feeling as sociable as I had sounded when I came to their aid.

My drive to Santa Fe left me ready to hibernate in my room for at least a day or two. I blame the radio. I listened to it as I drove, selecting first one news station and then another. Eventually I found two music stations, Christian Pop and Broadway Show Tunes, and alternated between them. The Broadway station had just started playing the soundtrack from
West Side Story
when I returned to it the third time.

“Would you like me to get tickets to
West Side Story
?” Tom had asked one morning during our first full summer together.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

He looked up from the newspaper. The question had been rhetorical.

This was the day I told him that the fall of my senior year I sang and played the role of Maria in our high school production of
West Side Story.
By this time Tom had heard me sing solos at weddings and church, and I had joined an all-city chorale that spring, but this was the first he’d heard about my starring role in a musical.

“Our high school plays and musicals were quite good,” I said. “We did
The Sound of Music
when I was a junior.”

“Really!”

“Actually, if you want the truth, I was a star.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet you were,” he said. “I wish I could have been there.”

Tom and I saw
The Sound of Music
together several years later, but we never saw
West Side Story.

It belonged to a past I tried hard not to revisit, not because singing the score wasn’t exhilarating, but because my relationship with Andrew began on the first day of rehearsals, and the experience of that musical nurtured it. Unlike most of the cast, Andrew had never been in choir and no one but members of his church even knew he could sing, but he auditioned for and snagged the role of Tony. We were Romeo and Juliet, members of feuding families singing and dancing toward tragedy in New York City. We had a chemistry I had only sensed when he looked back at me with such intensity six months before in Mrs. Henry’s language arts class.

Kissing Andrew for the first time, on stage, in front of the cast, was memorable, but no more so than singing the duet “Tonight.” The school newspaper said we were meant to sing together. The duet “One Hand, One Heart” is a beautiful prayer of commitment, but “Tonight” was the duet we enjoyed most and the song that was most responsible for bringing crowds to their feet at the end of each night’s performance— another newspaper observation. I have enjoyed few things more than the hours of rehearsal and the six performances for that musical, especially singing words that both Andrew and I were experiencing as we, like Tony and Maria, began to fall in love. The lyrics and melody of “Tonight” combine to project the eagerness and passion Maria and Tony felt contemplating an evening together: “Today, the minutes seem like hours, the hours go so slowly, but still the sky is light. Oh, moon, grow bright and make this endless day endless night—tonight.”

Andrew and I felt the same anticipation each time we waited to be together. I have never experienced anything remotely like it except for the night I dressed for dinner and waited for Tom Eaton to pick me up for our first date.

I really can’t believe I didn’t turn off the radio when I realized which Broadway musical was being featured. Instead I ended up listening to the whole score of
West Side Story
. . .

and remembered a time Andrew and I had performed it with such passion.

twelve

August 31

I opened my laptop again to see if I had a reply from the kids. What I found was a one-sentence message from Andrew.

“Do you remember the night Willa climbed on top of that car?”

I can’t think of another thing he could have written that would have made me laugh.

The summer after our senior year, a group of us spent at least one night a week at the drive-in. Sometimes we parked next to one another and sat on blankets or lawn chairs, sometimes we backed up Charles Monroe’s pickup and sat in the bed to watch the movie. Other times the girls sat on the hood and leaned against the windshield of Laura Bradshaw’s finned Dodge and the boys stretched out on top, because dents were indigenous to that old clunker, and Laura always said, “Pile on, the more the merrier.”

The incident Andrew mentioned in his e-mail happened the night we took Mr. Ackerman’s car to the drive-in because Andrew’s was in the shop. We parked it four cars down from Willa and Billy Houser, her then-boyfriend, and another couple who had come with them, and we walked down to talk to them before the movie started. When music blared through the metal speakers and a picture flashed onto the screen, brilliant against the black sky, Andrew started pulling me back to our car, and I informed Willa where we were parked and told her she should come see us between the two features.

The first of the two movies was a horror film, something I typically avoided, and Willa got it in her head to sneak down to our car when the film got intense, climb on the trunk, crawl over the top, and drop her face down onto the windshield in front of us. She hoped to get a scream out of me and maybe even Andrew. Her plan worked perfectly except for the fact that when she slid her contorted face over the top and looked through the windshield, she didn’t see our startled faces but the faces of a middle-aged couple parked next to us in a car very much like Andrew’s. There was some satisfaction in the fact that the woman screamed. We looked over and saw Willa sliding off the car, apologizing, and pointing at us as some sort of explanation.

Yes, I remember that.

I didn’t manage to delete everything from my memory.

I remember singing a duet arrangement of “O Holy Night” our first Christmas as a couple, for his congregation and then for mine. I remember being elected prom king and queen and dancing to “Tonight,” played in our honor. I remember both of us working at an amusement park for two summers, hoping we’d have the same break time, loitering by each other’s workstations if we didn’t. I remember his helping me through math my first semester of college and my drilling him endlessly before history tests. I remember our dressing up in anything orange and heading to the stadium or the gym for Bedlam, any OSU and OU confrontation. And though I hate even to write it, I remember lounging in his car in front of my parents’ house on summer nights or snuggling on the couch in my apartment when winter drove us inside, wondering how much longer I could wait to be Andrew’s wife.

I remember these things and more. But I didn’t tell Andrew. I didn’t reply to him at all.

I have better things to do. When I return to my room tonight, I will have gone to Taos and back.

As it turned out, I’ve been to the Twilight Zone and back.

I should have used a credit card to fill my car with gas instead of paying inside. But I needed a Diet Coke; plus I had an inexplicable yearning for CornNuts. Chances are I would have been spared my brush with death if I could have found the ridiculous things. I searched in every logical place for them before studying paper product and detergent aisles. Back in the snack aisle one more time and still thwarted, I was just about to ask one of the clerks behind the counter where they had hidden the CornNuts when the guy came rushing in from the darkness. I didn’t notice his gun. I was trying to process the fact that he was wearing a canary yellow and cobalt blue ski mask in August.

“Get over here, lady,” he yelled.

I stood halfway down the snack aisle and stared at him. Was he talking to me?

I saw the gun when he pointed it at me. “I said get up here. And you,” he said, turning to point the gun at the young girl behind the counter, “you get over here too.”

He seemed to know what he wanted, but his eyes lacked focus, and his mannerisms were erratic. I’ve never done drugs even though I came of age in the ’60s, but this guy seemed under the influence of something serious. What, I couldn’t guess. Thousands of hours of television viewing told me this was not a good scenario. If this were a segment of
Law and
Order
, it would turn out badly for everyone involved.

The girl came around the counter and hurried toward me, crying. I must have looked dependable because she grabbed my arm and hid behind me.

“You,” he said, pointing at the woman behind the counter, “get the money out of those cash registers and put it in a sack.”

I haven’t quite decided whether she was brave or stupid when she reached for something under the counter. Ski Mask shouted at her, and I watched in disbelief as he aimed his gun and fired. Surely this was one of my dreams and Tom would whip off the mask and show me he was armed with only our grandson’s cap gun.
See,
he might say,
you’re not really
in danger.
But those were not Tom’s calm eyes, and the bullet that had punctured the back wall was real.

“Do it now!” Ski Mask screamed.

Having just experienced a bullet zinging over her head, the woman began pulling bills out of the cash register nearest her faster than fingers can normally move, lifting the tray out to gather the larger bills stored underneath it without being asked.

“You two get down,” he said, turning back to us. The girl was crying harder now.

“Shhh,” I whispered, “we’ll be okay.”

Our assailant pointed his gun at the girl and then at me. “Both of you shut up!”

It was while sitting on the dirty floor of the convenience store with my arm around a girl barely old enough to have a driver’s license that I saw rows of CornNuts clipped on a rounder two feet from my face. I almost laughed. I suppose that means I’m crazy.