The Blue Bottle Club (22 page)

"Honey, are you all right?"

Addie felt a gentle slapping against her cheeks and opened her eyes to see a hazy form leaning over her. Her eyes focused, and the image of a tall, broad woman with a homely face and bright red hair came into view.

"Where—where am I?"

"You're in Grace Duncan's Hometown Cafe." She grinned. "I'm Grace. And you are—"

"Addie. Addie—" She closed her eyes.

"How long has it been since you ate, hon?"

"I don't know. Couple of days, I guess."

"Well, come on, sit up. We're going to get some food into you pronto."

Addie struggled to a sitting position and then realized she had been lying across the seat of a booth in the back corner of the restaurant. She propped her chin in her hands and rested her elbows on the table. The redhead had disappeared.

But not for long.

"Here, now, eat up." The woman set a big bowl of stew in front of Addie, along with a wedge of homemade bread and a tall glass of milk. She slid into the booth and watched Addie while she ate. "You got family?"

Addie shook her head. "No."

"Husband?"

"No." Addie eyed her over the stew and gave her a scathing look.

"Nobody to take care of you?"

Addie bristled. "Why should I need anyone to take care of me?"

Grace threw back her head and laughed. "Well, just look at you, hon. You look like you've been sleeping in the streets and standing in the bread lines." She narrowed her hazel eyes. "But you sure don't look like it suits you much."

"I'm okay."

"Sure you are. You're just peachy." Grace reached out a work-roughened hand and fingered the lapels of Addie's filthy coat. "Nice fabric. Expensive. You haven't been out there for very long, have you?"

Addie let out a little snort of contempt. "You certainly ask a lot of questions."

"And you certainly don't seem to have many answers." Grace laughed again and leaned forward to peer over the table at Addie's swelling abdomen. "When's the baby due?"

Addie shrugged. "Couple months. Maybe three."

Grace eyed the empty soup bowl. "Would you like some more?"

"I—I don't have money to pay," Addie said. The admission shamed her, and she felt a hot flush creep up her neck.

"I know that." Grace left the table and came back with a second bowl of stew and more bread. "Drink your milk. It's good for the baby."

It was midafternoon, and the restaurant was deserted and quiet. "Why are you doing this?" Addie asked after she had eaten several more spoonfuls of stew.

"Doing what?"

"Giving me food, being so nice to me."

Grace chuckled. "Angels," she replied cryptically

"Angels?" Addie shook her head. Just her luck, to be cooped up in a deserted restaurant with a madwoman who hallucinated about celestial beings.

"In the Bible. It says if you give help to strangers, if you feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, you just might be entertaining angels unawares."

Addie's stomach wrenched, and she laid the spoon aside. "Well, go out on the sidewalk, then. There's hundreds of angels everywhere you look. Are you going to 'entertain' them all?" She knew the words sounded harsh and cynical, but she couldn't help herself.

Grace, however, didn't seem to take offense. "Don't I know it," she said. "Too many, far too many." Her eyes took on a distant expression. "Too many to help them all."

"Then why help me?" Addie peered at the woman. She didn't look crazy, to tell the truth. She looked like a woman with a sense of purpose.

"Because you were the one who was sent." She said it simply, matter-of-factly, as if she were repeating the daily specials.

"Nobody sent me," Addie objected. "I just wandered by and apparently fainted in front of your door."

"You were sent, all right," Grace repeated firmly. "You got a job? A place to stay?"

"Do I look like I have a job?" Addie snapped.

"Well, you've got one now." Grace stood and gathered the empty dishes from the table. "There's a small apartment upstairs. It's not much, but it's clean, and it's yours if you want it. Go on up there, wash up, and get some rest. You can start tomorrow morning."

"Just like that?" Addie gaped at her. "You don't even know me."

"I know enough," Grace said. "Now, shoo. I've got work to do."

November 1931

Addie finished wiping down the last of the tables, turned the sign on the door so that it said "Closed," and eased her bulk into the nearest chair. Grace, sitting on a high stool next to the cash register, looked up from the till and smiled at her. "You doing okay, hon?"

"I feel like a watermelon on duck feet," Addie responded. "Do you think my ankles will ever be normal size again?"

"You're asking the wrong person." Grace shrugged. "Ask somebody who's had a baby." She chuckled. "But, yes, I think you'll get it all back soon enough. The ankles, the face, the figure—everything."

"How do women do this over and over again?" Addie asked, half to herself. "I had a friend back home who was the oldest of eleven children. Eleven! Can you even imagine it?"

"I can't, but then some women seem to feel differently about childbearing. Take my mama, for example. Best mother you'd ever hope to meet. Had six of us, and treated every one of us like we were the most special gift the good Lord had ever given her."

"Is that where you learned your faith, Grace? From your mother?"

"You don't learn faith, hon, at least not the way you learn arithmetic or grammar. Yes, you can be taught some principles of good living, but the real thing goes a whole lot deeper. It's like—well, it's like having a baby You can know all the facts—where babies come from, and what those changes do to a mother's body when she's carrying her child. You can even imagine some of the pain and joy of delivering that baby and holding it in your arms for the first time." She sighed wistfully. "But until you do it for yourself, you never really know. You never really understand."

This wasn't the first discussion Addie'd had with Grace about religion, not by a long shot. But with Grace it wasn't really about
religion.
It was about something far more personal, something that had little to do with doctrines and worship styles. Personal relationship, she called it. Faith that makes a difference in the way you live your life.

And Addie had to admit that Grace's faith did make a difference. The woman lived as if she was accountable to God for everything she said and did and even thought. But the accountability she talked about wasn't some kind of hard-handed justice, meted out by a God who was just waiting for her to step out of line. It was more like a marriage, like being in love. Grace adored Jesus and didn't want to let him down.

The woman's faith was unlike anything Addie had ever witnessed, even though she had grown up in the church as the daughter of a minister. Grace Duncan took the Bible to heart, not quoting it or using it as a weapon, but letting it guide her actions and attitudes. She provided food to those who, in her words, "were sent to her," not as haughty charity, but as lowly service, an honor placed upon her by the Lord who valued "the least of these." She spent free time serving in bread lines and working in shelters. When she could afford it, which wasn't often, she hired men off the street to do odd jobs—and wept when they were gone because she couldn't do more for them.

And what she had done with Addie had been nothing short of a miracle. She had opened herself, heart and soul—taken her in and treated her as a member of the family. Addie suspected that Grace was more thrilled about the baby than she was. A new life, imprinted with the stamp and image of God, she said. To Grace, every child was the Baby Jesus in the manger.

"Think about it," she had told Addie more than once. "We make Christmas into something it was never intended to be. When Jesus came, he was born to a poverty-stricken, homeless woman who wasn't even properly married at the time. Just like—"

"Just like me," Addie finished.

Before, Addie had always perceived the mother of Christ the way she was portrayed in the creches and stained-glass windows of her childhood—a serene, bright-faced angel of a woman, her clothes unstained by the blood of childbirth, her son quiet and smiling and holy, surrounded by a halo of light and an array of heavenly choristers lulling him to sleep with a celestial lullaby.

But now, thanks to Grace's down-to-earth faith, Addie could identify with Mary. A stranger in a strange land, with little more than the clothes on her back and scant hope for the future, giving birth in a dank stable. A terrified girl facing the blood and agony of delivery alone, attended only by a cadre of animals who had been ousted from their place and one panic-stricken man who was probably less than useless.

The difference was, in Addie's case there had been room at the inn.

Not only room, but an innkeeper who showered her with love, protection, and assurances that everything was going to be just fine.

Addie looked up and smiled fondly at Grace. The woman stopped counting money and raised an eyebrow. "Something on your mind, hon?"

"No, just thinking." Addie wouldn't tell Grace, at least not yet, but she was beginning to suspect that the woman's faith was rubbing off on her. It was so real, so right. If her father and Downtown Presbyterian represented Christianity, Addie didn't want it, not in a million years. But if Grace's kind of Christianity was a reflection of the true nature of God, Addie found herself drawn to it, and to the Lord Grace loved and served.

It was too soon to talk about it, of course. But it gave her hope. Hope for her own future, and hope for the child who waited to be born.

Addie felt a kick—a strong one. Then something gave way, and she looked down. Wetness flowed over the chair and onto the hard tile floor, gathering in a puddle under her feet.

"Grace—"

"Just a minute, hon." The woman held up a hand and kept counting.

"Grace, now!"

Grace looked up and suddenly she was all action.

She stuffed the uncounted bills into a bag and shoved it into her purse, then raced around the counter to Addie's side.

"Oh, my heavens!" Her eyes took in the puddle at Addie's feet. "Just keep calm. I think we should get the midwife, don't you?"

Addie laughed out loud. "That might be an idea."

"All right. Now, first I'll get you upstairs, and then I'll go for her. Or should I go for her first and let her help . . . "

Addie struggled to her feet and headed for the stairs.

"Right. Upstairs first." Grace took her arm. "There's plenty of time, hon—first babies usually take a long time coming."

"Like you know anything about babies?" Addie grinned.

"Okay. Point taken." They got to the top of the stairs, and Grace settled her on the bed and made a beeline for the door. "I'll be back as soon as I can.

You need anything?"

"Yeah," Addie said. "I need you to shut up and get going."

"Right. Okay. Don't get up, all right? Just stay there."

"I'm not going out dancing, Grace. Now, go!"

When the door closed behind her, Addie lay back on the bed and sighed. Another contraction came, and she winced against the pain, but when it subsided she found herself giggling at Grace's panicky fussing. Everything would be all right. Grace would get back here with the midwife, the baby would be born, and her life would take on a whole new direction.

What direction that was, only God knew.

But in the meantime, she could count her blessings. She wasn't alone on the streets. She didn't have a dark and smelly stable for a delivery room. Grace and the midwife would at least be more capable attendants than Joseph and the cows and sheep.

And despite all her questions and uncertainties, Addie felt something else with her in the room. A presence, warm and comforting. A sense of joy and hope and possibility for the future.

"Thank you," she whispered as a tear seeped past her closed eyelid.

"Thank you for sending me here . . . for Grace . . . for everything."

22

IN MEMORIAM

May 15, 1932

A
ddie sat on the sofa in the upstairs apartment and gazed down at the infant asleep in her arms. Was it possible that he was six months old? Nicholas A. Lovell. A for Archer.

Addie still wasn't sure why she had given him that middle name. It was a name she had fled halfway across the country to escape. Despite her abysmal failure as an acrtess, she had held on to the stage name, Lovell—a new identity she supposed. A new life unmarked by the past. And yet when the moment of truth came, when the midwife asked the name for the birth certificate, she'd returned to it like a compass seeking magnetic north.

Maybe, even after all this time, she still held out hope. Hope that little Nick would someday know his grandparents and be loved by them. Hope that
home
was still an option.

She had put it off for a long time, writing the letter that burned in her soul. She loved Grace Duncan, of course—the woman had given her everything, and most of all a place to belong. But now that this baby was a reality, a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood extension of herself, Addie couldn't shake the feeling that she owed it to him, and to her own soul, to try to reconnect with her parents.