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Authors: Elizabeth Bass

BOOK: Wherever Grace Is Needed
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Lou lifted his brows. “There are people here who could stand to take some style pointers from Fred Astaire.”
The ladies laughed.
“We’re going to go to the rec room and get good seats,” Frances said, getting up. “Should we save you one, Lou?”
“Oh, yes, please. I’ll be right there,” Lou said.
Grace shook her head in frustration.
“Well, let’s go upstairs,” he told her. “Not much to see, I’m warning you. Just the same old furniture. I might have you help me move the couch, though. Sam swore I wanted it in the wrong place, but I don’t like it where he put it. There’s a glare from the morning sun.”
They took the elevator up. “I brought you something,” she said when they got there. She showed him the barbecue she’d left on the table, and the chess set.
He sniffed at the food. “But I just ate.”
“I forgot that you’d probably be at dinner.”
“You should take this home with you. The chess game, too. I don’t know anyone here who plays.”
“We
could play.”
“Tonight?” he asked, looking panicky. “What about
Top Hat?”
She took a breath. “Don’t worry, Dad. You won’t miss the movie. I’m just going to put this food in your fridge.”
“All right.”
He brought up the couch again. She helped him shift some pieces around, during which time she wondered if they should splurge and buy him a replacement for the uncomfortable velvet couch.
Moving the furniture took all of five minutes. Then he was heading for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“
Top Hat,”
he reminded her.
“Dad . . .”
His eyes widened. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.” She gathered her purse, in a hurry to leave before she started to cry. This was shaping up to be the weepiest birthday ever.
He looked at her anxiously. “There is, I can tell. Did I do something wrong? Do you want me to eat dinner again? I will, if it will make you happy.”
“No, Dad. Save it for tomorrow . . . or whenever. It’s just . . .” Her throat closed up, making it hard to gulp in a breath.
“What’s wrong?” he asked again.
“It’s just so hard to have to leave you here.”
His face pinched into a frown and he came toward her, taking her hand. “Christopher Columbus.”
She flicked a tear off her cheek. “What?”
“Remember?” he asked her.
She remembered, but how did he?
He gave her hand a squeeze. “Always new places to go, separations,” he said. “But we’ve always managed to find ways to be together sometimes, haven’t we, Gracie?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Then she escorted her father down to watch Fred Astaire with his new friends.
45
M
EMORIZING THE
F
UTURE
W
hen Grace got home, her first stop was at the remnants of the small woodpile Crawford had given them after chopping up the elm tree branch. The previous winter hadn’t been very cold, so they hadn’t used much firewood. It wasn’t cold this night, either. She just craved the coziness of a fire.
Inside, she stacked the wood in the grate and tucked a few twisted newspapers left over from packing around the logs as kindling. She intended to go to the kitchen and fix something to eat, but the flames mesmerized her. Her mind wandered randomly through memories: of the hospital waiting room where she had spent the night before, and of riding her tricycle to Peggy’s, and of a giant Styrofoam boulder collapsing at a prom she’d never attended. She might have sat there hypnotized all night if someone hadn’t knocked.
When she opened the front door, she found herself face-to-face with a massive red poinsettia. Her spirits lifted on the assumption that this was Ray, so that when another man’s face poked over the top of the plant, disappointment crept into her voice. “Oh. Wyatt. It’s you.”
Her lackluster greeting did nothing to dim his smile. “Yes, it’s me, Wyatt—coming to wish my favorite neighbor happy birthday.”
“If a pretty coed moved into the student house next to you, I’m guessing my most favored neighbor status would be rescinded instantly.” Nevertheless, she let him in, closing the door behind him to keep the chill out. “How did you know it was my birthday?”
“I woke up this morning and the birds singing outside my window told me.”
She crossed her arms. “How did you really find out?”
“I ran into Muriel Blainey today.” He laughed. “Hell hath no fury, Grace. You’re the talk of the town today. Or at least the talk of the street.”
“Muriel didn’t know it was my birthday.”
“Actually, Crawford went over to Dominic’s house and came back with the news.” One of his eyebrows shot up. “But then I saw you poking around your woodpile, puttering around all alone on your birthday, and I decided to run out and remedy the situation.”
It was a thoughtful gesture. There was even a card buried among the leaves. “Did you write me a poem, too?” She pulled the card off its plastic stick to see.
He frowned in confusion. “Oh—wait!”
He reached out to grab the card, but she feinted to the side and read aloud,
“ ‘Mary Jo—Forgiveness is divine. Yours, Wyatt.’ ”
She laughed. “I’m touched! You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble.”
“Okay, Mary Jo flew to Denver before I could give this to her.” He looked shamefaced. “Still, it’s a perfectly good plant. You wouldn’t want it to go to waste.”
“No, it’s not the poinsettia’s fault.”
Behind them, there was a knock, and, still laughing, she turned and pulled the door open. Ray, holding a slightly lopsided cake with a single blue candle in it, looked surprised—then dismayed—to see Wyatt standing behind her.
For a moment, the two men gazed from poinsettia to cake, measuring up their respective gifts.
Wyatt greeted him with a terse “West.”
“Hello, Wyatt.” Ray turned to Grace. “Happy birthday, Grace.”
“Should we sing?” Wyatt asked.
“I would be unbelievably happy if you didn’t,” Grace told them. “When did you get back, Ray?”
“This evening. They released Lily this afternoon.”
“Is she doing okay?”
He nodded. “She’s still exhausted and zonked from the painkillers they’ve given her—especially from the morphine shot last night.”
“Poor thing.” Wyatt shook his head and addressed Ray. “Crawford told me what happened. You probably want to get right back to Lily’s bedside.”
“I think she’s actually fairly content now that it’s all over,” Ray said. “She’s over there now, propped on the couch and giving people orders. Crawford was going over to visit her as I was leaving.” He turned back to Grace. “Anyway, Dominic and Jordan made this cake for you this afternoon. It’s white with chocolate icing, I think.”
She looked into Ray’s eyes, and the memory of kissing him by the river came back to her. The desire to kiss him again surged in her. So did the desire to get rid of Wyatt.
She and Ray both looked at him, and in his eyes they could see realization dawning. In the battle of plant vs. cake, cake had won.
“Well!” Wyatt said, handing the poinsettia over to Grace. “I should be running along. Got phone calls to make tonight, evidently.”
She opened the door for him. “Good luck.”
When she turned back to Ray, he asked, “I hope I wasn’t interrupting . . .”
“Only from Wyatt’s perspective, and I don’t think he really minded. When it comes to romance, his skin is as thick as rhinoceros hide.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t buy flowers for you.”
“Don’t worry—Wyatt didn’t, either.” She led him toward the kitchen. “And the cake is even better. I was just about to resort to making dinner.”
“You haven’t eaten?” He started searching through all his pockets.
“What are you looking for?”
“Matches.”
She laughed. “That’s okay. Honestly.”
“No, I promised the kids that I would do this right. Even if you won’t let me sing . . .”
It seemed strange suddenly that Jordan and Dominic, or at least Dominic, hadn’t come over to present the cake in person. “Dominic didn’t want to come over and have a piece?” she asked. “Or Jordan either?”
Ray finally found an old matchbook that he’d obviously dropped into the breast pocket of his shirt for this purpose. “They said they wanted to watch a movie.” He struck the match and lit the candle. “There. Make a wish.”
For the first time in her life, Grace didn’t know what to wish for. All the things she wanted—for her father to be well, to not lose the house—were out of her grasp.
She wished for them anyway and blew.
She cut off two hunks of cake and put them on plates from the set of everyday china that would soon be boxed up like everything else. “Why don’t we eat in the living room?” she suggested. “Next to the fire.”
From the leftover furniture, Grace dragged an old end table to set up next to the martyr’s chair. Another chair—an unmatched replacement chair that had been in the dining room before the dining room table had been hauled away by an antique dealer Muriel knew—she brought in for herself.
“Oh!” Ray dug into a jacket pocket and pulled out a small wrapped cylinder. “From Jordan.”
She took it from him. It weighed very little.
“I’m sort of curious to find out what it is,” Ray said, encouraging her to open it. “Jordan wouldn’t say.”
Grace unwrapped the package—although
unwound
it would have been a better term. The paper was rolled around the small object, and when she pulled it away, she found herself holding a push puppet of a tall man with brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
Laughter bubbled out of her. Mystery solved.
Ray frowned. “What is
that?”
She pushed the plunger, demonstrating. “Actually, I think it’s you.”
She handed it over to him and smiled as he inspected it with a sort of wonder growing in his eyes. “Where did she get this?”
“She made it.” Grace pointed to the mantel, where the parallel push puppet neighborhood Jordan had been fashioning resided at the moment. “She made all of those, too.”
Ray inspected them. “
Jordan
did these?” he asked. “How?”
“She’s an artist.”
He smiled. “I think she must be.” He pushed Iago’s plunger and laughed. “I’ve wondered what she’s been up to, locked up in that crazy room of hers. I never would have guessed this.” He looked at Grace. “Did you know?”
She shook her head. “I only suspected.”
“You think you understand people,” Ray said, “even your own kids, and it turns out you’ve barely nicked the surface.” He sat down in the armchair. “I’m sorry I don’t have a real present for you, Grace.”
She smiled at him. “Don’t let it go to your head, but just your being here is a sort of gift. I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have a lonely birthday night at home with my cat. How pathetic does that sound?”
His gaze held hers. “You miss your dad already, don’t you?”
“More than anything,” she said, choked by a jolt of sadness.
Ray leaned toward her in sympathy. “I’m sorry. I wish there was something . . .”
She shook her head and lifted a forkful of cake. “Eat cake. It’s good for what ails you.”
As they ate, they talked about what had happened at the hospital after she left, and about chauffeuring Lily home with her in the backseat requesting he change the satellite radio every five seconds until they came upon the Sirius audiobook channel. They had hit the middle of
Wuthering Heights
and Lily had made him listen to it all the way to Austin, even though they had missed the beginning and Ray really didn’t have much idea of what was going on. And then he’d missed the end.
“It couldn’t have turned out well,” he guessed.
“It didn’t,” she confirmed. “Unless you think being ghosts, wandering the moors and creeping people out generally is romantic fulfillment.”
“No, I don’t. Lily said you do, though.”
She laughed.
“After that, we finally arrived home and discovered the dog had moved in and Dominic had made a cake. I didn’t remember it was your birthday.”
“Did I ever tell you?”
“Well, no.” He shrugged. “It just seems like one of those things I should know about you. One of many things. Sometimes I feel there’s the relationship I think we have, and the relationship we actually have. Does that sound odd?”
She laughed again. “I’ve felt the same way too. Maybe it’s just proximity that does that to people. The neighbor thing.”
“That’s not what I meant.” His expression was serious. “I always felt that there was a connection between us.”
“The first couple of times we met, you barely seemed to remember who I was,” she felt compelled to remind him.
“Really?”
She nodded.
“But later,” he continued quickly, “once we started talking—I can’t tell you what that meant to me. I probably bored the stuffing out of you, but sometimes it felt as if you were the only person in the world who I could talk to. And you seemed to understand me
and
what the kids were going through. You were like a magnet for all of us.”
“A grief sponge.”
“No.” His hand covered hers. “Maybe I should stop talking about the past.” He stood up and coaxed her to her feet, too. “Could we take up where we left off yesterday?”
“Isn’t yesterday the past?” she joked.
“Grace . . .”
She looked around the room. “I’m sorry. I’m in a funny mood. I haven’t felt so unbalanced since I was a kid.” She pulled away from him, remembering. “When I was seven and my mother was moving us to Oregon, I remember I came and stood in this room and tried to memorize everything. I put my hands up like this—like a camera lens—and tried to stare at everything, every nook and cranny, so I could memorize it. I worried I would never come back.” She dropped her hands to her sides. “But now I’m here, and the house I knew is slipping away from me anyway.”
“Try this.” Ray moved behind her and, reaching with his longer arms, lifted her hands again, keeping them locked in viewfinder position. “Look at the shelves and see your CD collection there, and your books, and your puppet collection on the mantel.” He turned her slowly. “And the furniture—well, it would probably be a mishmash of old and new, but everything comfortable, just how you want it. Definitely keep the chair. And over there, at the dining room table, there are a couple of kids playing Yahtzee, and a black-and-white dog underneath waiting to catch any crumbs that fall off the table.”
Her heartbeat quickened. “You want to buy my dad’s house?”
He lowered his hands and wrapped them around her waist. “I want you, Grace. In this house, or any house, mansion or hut.”
She exhaled a nervous laugh and turned in his arms so she could look into his eyes. “Are you out of your mind? Just yesterday I was wondering if you had a thing for Muriel!”
He shook his head. “That would be an indication to me that you were out of your mind, actually.”
She laughed again, amazed to find herself so tempted by the ideas he was spinning. “We hardly know each other.”
“We’ve known each other for a year and a half. Maybe house hunting would be premature. But surely a year and a half is long enough to start thinking about kicking a relationship up to the next level?”
He smiled and brought her to him for a kiss. She floated into him, letting herself sink into his arms. The kiss tasted of chocolate icing and optimism, a tantalizing combination.

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