Wherever Grace Is Needed (19 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Bass

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23
F
OUR
K
INDS OF
P
IE
T
he mattress sank and squeaked, waking Grace with a start. Her eyes popped open; she was so tired it felt as if her eyelids were being dragged across sand.
She lifted onto her elbows and discovered Sam poised on the edge of her bed like Rodin’s
Thinker.
“What is it?” she asked.
He glanced at her with red eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you about what?”
He drew back. “About Dad! He’s
really
not doing well at all.”
She shot up to sit. “Has anything happened?”
“Grace, he got lost!”
She dropped back against the pillows.
Yesterday.
“I was worried that something was going on now.”
“I didn’t realize it was this bad,” Sam said.
His words made her want to pull her hair out. Hadn’t he been reading her e-mails? Or listening during phone calls?
He sat up straighter. “I’ve made my decision, Grace. I’m coming home. For good.”
She tilted a skeptical glance at him.
“What?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you’d go crazy here, for one thing. And you and Dad don’t even get along all that well when you’re together. It’s not like you would be a soothing presence.”
“I’m bound to be better than this Darla What’s-Her-Name.”
“No, you won’t. Because she at least has training dealing with old people. She won’t start weeping when Dad forgets the word for broccoli.”
He looked offended. “That just took me by surprise.”
“All along, I’ve told you what’s been happening.”
“I know, but I didn’t expect him to have deteriorated so quickly. He even looks rumply. When was the last time he got his hair cut?”
“A few weeks ago. I don’t like to badger him. He really hates being nagged.”
“Tough. It’s for his own good.”
His imperious tone irked her. “He’s not a different person, Sam. He still has a will of his own.”
“If he’s the same person, I doubt he would want to look as if he slept in his clothes.” He shook his head. “Anyway, there’s no reason I can’t take care of him as well as anyone else. He’ll hate a home-care person, and you . . . well, you’ve already had your life screwed up completely by this.”
At that moment, Grace would have liked to whip the covers over her head and pretend to be invisible. She’d barely slept last night for chewing over what Ben had done. Now she had to deal with Sam envisioning himself as Florence Nightingale. And Thanksgiving. Why had she even woken up?
Sam glanced over at her, eyes narrowed and forehead scrunched. “Grace, you’re crumpling again.”
She sat up straighter. Poor Sam. She’d cried on Sam’s shoulder most of yesterday. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do now.”
“What do you mean? It’s decided. You’re going to go home and get back to your store and your friends and that other family in Oregon. I’m going to stay here.”
“You can’t, Sam. You have a fabulous job, a dream job. You would be wasted here. What would you do for work?”
He shrugged, but she could see the dread that lay behind his stoicism. “I’ll find something. I imagine I can land some local gig and write about city planning commissions and the school lunch menus.”
She shook her head. “There’s no point. We’ve got Darla. And even if you moved here and found a job, we’d still need her.” But in her mind, she was thinking,
On the other hand,
I
could stay.
“Anyway, you and Dad together are a train wreck.”
“That was before.” Her expression must have been doubtful, because he lifted his chin. “Look, I’ll prove it. You’ve got enough to do today. Let me take care of Dad.”
“Sam, Dad was looking forward to your visit so he could hang out with you. Not so you could harass him about his hair.”
“I know how to be tactful,” he said, growing as prickly as their father would have under the circumstances. “Besides, you’ve got enough to worry about with dinner.”
“That’s practically all done.”
He sent her an incredulous look. “You’ve mastered the art of cooking in your sleep?”
“I didn’t sleep. I got up in the middle of the night last night and loaded up the turkey. It’s already baking. In fact, it should be done soon.”
“A little early, isn’t it?”
“Better too soon than too late.” At least, that’s what she had been thinking at four in the morning. She went through the checklist in her head. “I made the cranberry sauce yesterday, and the stuffing is in with the turkey. The potatoes are peeled and sitting in water in the fridge, waiting to be boiled and mashed. Even the table is set.”
She needed to keep focused on today, minute by minute. If she ran out of tasks, she would just have to redo things she had already done. Mash potatoes into oblivion and reset the table until she fell into bed tonight in a stupor. Most of all, she needed to not think about Ben, or the fact that she was alone again and two years older than the last time she had had to date, and that she didn’t feel like dating at all because her life was unraveling at the seams. She didn’t even know the answers to the basics anymore—like where she belonged.
“I need to get up,” she said.
Sam was eyeing Egbert with horror. “What is
that?”
Glancing at the silly melting smiley face immediately had the opposite effect on Grace. She grinned. “Egbert. He cheers me up.”
Sam’s gaze then fell on Heathcliff, who was crouched on one side of her in his brooding chicken pose. The flaps of fat at the bottom of his belly seeped away from him like a furry puddle. “Too bad the painting can’t do something for your cat. He does not look good. Do they make kitty amphetamines?”
“He’s just old.”
“Pathetically old. You should get him a friend or something.”
“He has a friend. She’s under the bed. She’s old, too.”
“Having an old friend under the bed probably doesn’t do him much good.”
“Those kitties are devoted to each other. The shelter I adopted them from said they couldn’t be separated. Heathcliff is probably just glad to know his old friend’s there.” She gave him a gentle nudge with a sheet-draped knee. “Kind of like having an old brother in Beirut.”
After Sam left her in peace so that she could get up and get dressed, she fought the urge to burrow under the covers and go back to sleep. She craved oblivion. But there was too much to do today to waste time wallowing in self pity. She sprang out of bed in the hope that brisk movement would bring on a more zippity-doo-dah outlook. The strategy worked—at least until the view of her closet stopped her cold. All her boring clothes.
No wonder Ben had dumped her.
After that, every routine seemed to contain a mental sand trap. In the bathroom mirror she noted blemishes that hadn’t been there before, and she began to wonder about teeth bleaching. Amber had perfect teeth.
Downstairs, Sam and Lou were already in a fracas over his record collection.
“They don’t need rearranging,” Lou was saying, his voice tense.
“But I could alphabetize them.”
“I don’t want them alphabetized! I want them where I can find them.”
She swerved away from the argument, but of course the idea of music made her start chewing over the possibilities for Rigoletto’s. If she did decide to stay in Austin permanently, what would become of the store, and its customers?
The trouble was, the thought of Rigoletto’s didn’t pain her like it had before. She didn’t feel the pull toward Portland that she had during the summer. Yet for so long, Rigoletto’s had been her baby, her life. Could she give that up for good?
In the kitchen she was surprised to find Dominic sitting alone at the table, staring intently at the salt and pepper shakers. Iago, obviously walked and fed, was under the table, his backside propped on one of Dominic’s sneakers. The dog looked up at Grace when she entered the room and smacked his jaws in greeting.
“Hey.” Dominic’s tone was somber.
“What’s going on?” she asked him. “Didn’t I see another car in front of your house?”
“My grandparents are here,” he said in a monotone.
“That’s great. Must be good to see them.”
“It’s awful,” he said. “I don’t think they even wanted to come—they just thought they had to. And now they’re acting as if everything is normal. Lily’s all dressed up and keeps trying to impress everybody, but nobody cares, and Jordan went to a friend’s house. Nobody mentions my mom’s name, or Nina’s. It’s like they’re trying to pretend they never existed. Sometimes I even wonder myself, except they had to have existed or I wouldn’t feel this way, would I?”
“What way?”
“Like someone hit my chest with a rock.” He started fiddling with the salt and pepper shakers.
And she thought she had problems. She sank down in a chair. “Did . . . your mom always do a lot for the holidays?” She’d almost referred to her as Jennifer, as if they’d been acquainted. After hearing Ray talk about her, Grace did feel like she knew her. A little.
“From Halloween on, Mom was always busy,” he said. “Before Thanksgiving she made food for days. I’d help her sometimes. We ate leftovers for a week afterward. Last year was really great. Nina and I made three kinds of pie, and then Granny Kate brought a pineapple chess pie, so we had four. Just the pies took up a whole counter. It was crazy. This year Granny Kate brought two, but Jordan stole one.”
“That’s awful!”
“And now when I’m in the kitchen and I look at the one sorry pie, I keep thinking about last year. I can’t help it. Last year was so much better—we had everything.”
She nodded. Poor Dominic. To lose so much, so young. She couldn’t imagine how he felt.
He sighed and stood up. “I have to go back.”
“Come over later, if you have time. Dad will probably be glad for a rest from Sam and Steven and me.”
After he’d left, she got up to check the oven. There was shouting in the next room.
A moment later, Sam skittered in as if he’d been ejected from the living room by a boot to the rear. “Some people just refuse to be helped!” he snapped.
“Not me,” she assured him. “You can help me by hauling this turkey out of the oven.”
He did as he was told, donning oven mitts and then wincing under the weight of the bird as he pulled the rack out. “What’s this stuffed with? Gravel?”
She laughed. “I hope not. But I’m never thinking my clearest at four
A.M.
”
A car door slammed outside and Iago let out several sharp barks.
“That might be Emily,” Grace said. “I should go see.”
“Who’s Emily?”
She was already on the way out of the kitchen, although she nearly bumped into her dad on the way through. “I think someone’s here.”
“I know, Dad. I’m heading for the door.”
“What’s going on in here?” Lou asked, gaping at the opened oven. “Why is Sam taking the turkey out already?”
“Because it’s done, Dad,” Sam said.
“We’re not about to eat, are we?”
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t let it sit in an oven forever or it will have the consistency of shoe leather.”
She left Sam to sort out the turkey situation with their father and ran to the front door.
The new arrival was only Steven. He smiled, holding up a foil-covered platter.
“Where’s Emily?” Grace asked.
“She couldn’t make it. She sent along something for us, though.”
As the arguing from the kitchen ramped up into shouting, Grace peeled back the foil on the plate Steven was holding, revealing a festive ring of three-colored, wriggling Jell-O. “This is really weird. Did I miss the memo on the retro Jell-O revival?”
Steven frowned. “What are they yelling about in there?”
Grace waved her free hand as she took the plate from him. “Don’t mind them. They’ve been spatting all mor—”
A clattering crash from the kitchen cut her words short, and was followed by Sam’s voice, yelling,
“Oh, great! Just great!”
Steven and Grace hurried toward the kitchen.
Shoulders and heads bowed, Sam and Lou were standing in the middle of the kitchen in a puddle of turkey juice, which Iago was frantically lapping up as fast as he could. The turkey itself was sprawled on its side on the floor, looking like a crime victim with its stuffing guts spilling out over the linoleum.
“This
could be a problem,” Sam observed.
24
P
AUL
M
C
C
ARTNEY
A
LL
O
VER
A
GAIN
B
etween Emily’s gift and the Jell-O turkey that Muriel brought over, Grace felt she had consumed more gelatine-based food in one meal than she had in all the years since preschool. The real turkey had been a lost cause, though Truman had questioned whether some part that hadn’t touched the floor might still be perfectly good. But Sam was a witness to the fact that the bird had rolled once it hit the floor, and neither he nor Lou could vouch that Iago hadn’t slobbered on it before being shooed away.
But even if the balance of the food had been Jell-O, Grace wasn’t off the hook in terms of dishes. She did them all, washing the good china by hand to preserve the gold pattern. She was glad for the time alone, and even gladder to hear her father laughing with everyone in the next room. When Peggy came in to ask if she needed help, Grace sent her back to the others. She felt much more generous toward her neighbor since the rescue of the day before.
“Dad is so happy to have you all here,” Grace said. “You should stay with him.”
Peggy held her gaze for a moment. “Promise we’ll have a chance to talk again before you go back.”
That word,
back
, stabbed at her heart. “We’ll have a chance,” she assured her.
As she was finishing up, the back door opened and Dominic came in, followed by Lily. “Are people still here?” Lily asked.
“Some people,” Grace answered. “Muriel, and my brothers. You should go in and meet Sam.”
“Okay,” Lily said, passing on through.
Dominic saw the huge piles of dishes and went closer to inspect. “Did you do all those by hand?”
“Yes.”
“We were lucky. Granny Kate did all the dishes before she and Pop Pop decided to leave.” He grabbed a leftover roll from a basket on the counter and took a bite.
“I thought your grandparents were supposed to stay the weekend.”
“They were, but I think they got tired of us. They left right after we ate, so we came over here.”
“What about your dad?”
Dominic shrugged. “He’s having one of his zombie days. He was probably hoping we’d all leave so he could sit in his office and listen to Mom’s piano music.”
Grace pictured Ray over there, holed up in his office lair, and a little of her self-pity melted away.
When Dominic joined the others, the sounds in the next room spiked up again. Crawford appeared, and a Monopoly game was suggested.
Grace went upstairs to fetch her brothers’ old game that she’d seen in the storage closet, but instead of staying to play, she slipped on a cotton cardigan and went out onto the back porch. Iago, who had been put outside because all the food was putting him on snuffle overdrive, waddled over and nuzzled her. She buried her face in the soft roll at the nape of his neck and breathed in his comforting doggy smell. Part of her couldn’t wait till everyone went home and she could be alone again.
Although, come to think of it, she was all alone now.
Or so she thought. Someone nearby cleared his throat.
She jerked her head up. It was Ray.
“I didn’t expect to see you all alone today,” he said.
She laughed. “I didn’t expect to be all alone.”
“Can I join you?”
He sat down next to her. “Am I right in thinking all my kids are over here?”
She smiled.
Not
sitting in a funk and listening to piano music, then. That was an improvement. “And probably will be for a while yet. They just started a Monopoly game.”
His brown eyes studied her face. “You’re sad. Or worried about something. What’s wrong?”
She lifted her shoulders. “Oh, it could be a lot of things. The past twenty-four hours haven’t been the greatest. First my father got lost, and then today he and my brother wrestled with a twenty-pound stuffed turkey and dropped it on the floor, and I got next to no sleep last night. Oh, and yesterday Ben broke up with me over the phone as I was on the bus on the way to the airport to pick him up.”
Ray looked gratifyingly horrified. “Why didn’t he tell you before?”
“Just a coward, I guess. See, he had a very good reason for breaking up with me. He’d gotten a mutual friend of ours pregnant.”
“Oh God.”
She drew in a ragged breath.
“How long had you and Ben lived together?” he asked gently.
“Two days.”
Ray gaped at her, obviously thinking she’d misspoken.
She couldn’t help smiling at his reaction. “He had just moved in when Dad had his accident. We had planned for Thanksgiving to be our big reunion. But instead, he left me.”
“Hmm.”
She glanced over at him. “What do you mean, ‘hmm’?”
He hesitated. “Well, some people might say that you were the one who did the leaving, Grace.”
“But I had to—to take care of Dad.”
“
Had
to?”
“Wanted to.” She sighed. “Chose to. And you’re right—it was mostly my fault. Not the pregnancy, of course, but leaving Ben, and then stringing him along and telling him I’d be back, and then not coming back. I didn’t intend to string him along, but I guess that’s how it seemed to him. I should have thought more about how he was feeling, but I was so wrapped up in what was going on here.”
“It’s natural that you would be.”
“I know, but you said it yourself. If I’d really loved Ben, I wouldn’t have left him at all.”
“I said that?”
“Well . . . you implied it.” She sighed. “The problem is, I wanted an Olivia-Newton John man, but I wasn’t willing to be hopelessly devoted myself.”
Ray shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”
She smiled. “Ask Lily sometime. She’ll explain it.”
He took a moment to think. “So it sounds to me that you’re not completely broken up by losing Ben?”
“No, not entirely. But now I’m uncertain about what to do. Everyone tells me I should leave, that I would be giving up too much if I stayed with Dad. The word
martyr
comes up a lot. But it doesn’t feel that way to me. I keep thinking that I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I did leave.”
“You’d be missed.”
His words gave her heart a gentle lift, even though she knew she was being a dope.
He’s not talking about himself.
He meant Lily and Dominic. Or he was just being polite.
The trouble was, she had almost developed an addiction to these quiet conversations with Ray. She’d almost . . .
No.
She would not go there. She was still less than twenty-four hours away from having been dumped by one guy, and wasn’t going to tell herself fairy tales about falling in love with anyone else. There was no basis for it. Yes, they had talked—but usually about Jennifer, and their extended courtship. Was it possible to fall in love with someone for the way he had fallen in love with someone else?
Possible, perhaps, but certainly not wise.
She cleared her throat, wanting to veer the conversation away from her problems and back to his. “I heard the in-laws left early.”
“It wasn’t much of a visit for them. Now I can’t imagine why they wanted to come in the first place.” He looked down at his feet. “It was tense. Jordan was the smartest—she just went to a friend’s house. The rest of us sat around pretending we were all glad to be there. Pretending to be thankful. The holiday felt like a sham to me. I can’t help thinking about how it was before, thinking of . . .”
His words broke off, so she finished for him. “Four kinds of pie.”
He looked baffled “What?”
“Dominic told me your family had four kinds of pie last year. Riches.”
His brows scrunched together over his glasses. “Dominic said that?”
She nodded.
“I hadn’t remembered that. But yeah, I guess this holiday must have seemed pretty awful to the kids.” He shook his head. “There are so many hurdles to get over before any of us can settle into some kind of normal. I can’t even think about Christmas, or . . .”
“Or what?” Grace asked.
He turned to her. “The twins’ birthday is coming up.”
Jordan’s birthday. Nina’s birthday.
“December sixteenth. I’d like to just forget it,” he said.
“But you can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
His jaw remained clenched.
“It wouldn’t,” she said. “Look, I can see how Jordan might be . . . a handful. I don’t know exactly what’s happened, but I do remember that sixteen can feel awful even when everything’s going right. You make mistakes that five minutes later cause you to cringe and want to be invisible. Knowing there are people around who will forgive you is essential to survival.”
She waited for him to say something, but for a moment it looked as if she might have shut down conversation between them for good.
When his gaze focused on her, his dark eyes were bright. “You remember from experience?”
She held back for a moment, but caved in to impulse. What the heck. She stripped off her cardigan sweater, then yanked her V-neck T-shirt down off her left shoulder. Ray’s eyes bugged in surprise.
“Look,” she said, twisting toward him.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
She wiggled her shoulder a little. “You don’t see a scar?”
“Uh, no.”
Her bra strap was probably in the way. She flicked it off her shoulder and then told him to look again. “See? There should be a faded scar.”
It was the remnant of a tattoo she’d gotten at age eighteen—a tattoo of her first serious boyfriend’s initials. Trouble was, she and Mike Mulcahey had broken up three weeks later. She’d attempted to have the letters removed, but now the spot on her skin just looked like a giant botched vaccination scar.
Ray leaned so close she could feel his breath on her skin. She closed her eyes. “So what do you see?” she asked.
“MM . . .” he said, sounding the letters out so that it sounded like a murmur.
A door slapped shut behind them, and they both whipped around to see Jordan towering over them with a glare. “This is just great! I leave my friend’s house early to be with my family, and not only do I have to hunt everybody down next door, I find my father pawing the neighbor!”
Several more faces peered around her as a pileup occurred at the side door. Crawford, Dominic. Truman and Peggy. Her dad.
“Did you guys sneak back here to make out?” Jordan’s voice was charged with outrage.
Ray flipped Grace’s bra strap back into place and surged to his feet. “Grace was just showing me her scar.”
Grace couldn’t help smiling to herself as she stood up.
“Look at her—smirking!” Jordan turned to make sure everyone else took note. “See?”
“Grace and I were just talking,” Ray explained.
Jordan sneered. “Really? ’Cause it looked to me like you were trying to get her bra off.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ray said. “It’s just Grace.”
Grace did a double take.
Just
Grace?
“We were just—”
“I can’t believe you’re already forgetting about Mom!” Jordan railed. “And with
her
, of all people!”
“I’m not—especially not with Grace,” Ray said.
“Wait,” Grace said. Where did all this
especially not, of all people, just Grace
language come from? What was the matter with her?
Jordan crossed the porch to get right up into Grace’s face. “Just because my little brother befriended your dad doesn’t give you the right to try to take over our whole family!”
“Jordan,” Ray said in a warning voice. “Apologize to Grace. And go home.”
The girl rounded on him. “I can’t believe how you’re acting!” she yelled. “Heather was right. You’re Paul McCartney all over again!”
Everyone stood in puzzled silence until Sam laughed.
His laughter just riled Jordan up further. “I can’t believe I’m the only one who even seems to care about Mom anymore!” She turned on her heel and ran toward her house.
Ray raked a hand through his thick hair and released a ragged sigh. “I’d better go.” He turned, and caught the glances of Dominic and Lily, who were blinking at him in confusion and, it had to be said, mistrust. Maybe they didn’t believe that he had been tearing Grace’s clothes off, but they didn’t seem to believe his story in its entirety, either. “Why don’t y’all come home with me?”
“We haven’t finished our game,” Lily said.
“Yeah,” Dominic echoed.
“Oh.” Ray turned back to Grace, lifting his arms in an exasperated, helpless gesture. “I’m sorry, Grace. I just can’t . . .” His words petered out, and all the warmth seemed to drain from his features. “Have a good trip home.”

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