Wherever Grace Is Needed (6 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Bass

BOOK: Wherever Grace Is Needed
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Iago lay in the neighbor’s yard, surrounded by a privacy fence, in the shade of an old pecan tree. The furry truant hadn’t just landed there recently, either, by the looks of things. He’d dug himself a cool trough to relax in.
So that was why Dominic had looked so anxious. Nervy little dognapper.
In less than a minute, Grace was standing at the front door of the neighbor’s house. The first doorbell wasn’t answered, although she caught the rustle of a curtain out of the corner of her eye. She buzzed again, leaning on it this time.
She was braced to give the dog thief a dressing-down. But when the door finally opened, instead of Dominic, she found herself looking down at a girl. Her face was a teenager’s, but she was still at that awkward late-bloomer stage where the head seemed unnaturally big for the body, like a Pez dispenser. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face in a severe ponytail, and her Harry Potter glasses made her brown eyes appear larger than they were.
“I had nothing to do with it,” the girl declared. “I told Dominic it was dumb, unethical, and maybe even illegal. Are you going to call the police?”
The matter-of-fact way she asked that last question made it sound as if troopers coming to haul away her little brother would not be an entirely unwelcome development.
Grace crossed her arms. “Before we get the authorities involved, can I just see Iago?”
The girl hesitated a moment before cautiously stepping aside and letting Grace in. She ushered her through a short entrance hall that led on one side to a dining room. The table piled with books and mail indicated the room hadn’t actually been used for eating in a while. On the other side of the hall was a living room with a grand piano and music stand.
“What a pretty piano,” Grace said. “Do you play?”
The girl tossed the instrument a somber look. “I play clarinet. My mother played piano, but she died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Grace mumbled.
Double doors led out from the living room to a deck and the backyard beyond. When he saw Grace cross through the doors, Iago heaved his belly up from the dirt and waddled toward her, his heavy tail flopping from side to side in greeting. She bent over and scratched the soft droopy ears, which he loved. Wriggling, he sank down on his rear and let out a yodel of pleasure.
Dominic appeared, his face crinkled with worry. He wasted no time justifying his theft. “The thing was, I could hear the dog on the other side of the fence. He was whimpering. I thought the old man had died. I couldn’t just leave him there.”
She darted a skeptical glance at him. “And when I saw you yesterday . . . it slipped your mind?”
“You didn’t even mention the dog!”
True. She hadn’t noticed Iago was missing at the time. Still . . . “I assumed a neighbor would inform me if my dog was sitting in his yard.”
“He’s not your dog, technically. You’re just loosely related.”
“And you’re just a dog snatcher.”
He rubbed his hand over his hair, unable to deny the charge. “I took really good care of him. I even spent all my allowance this weekend buying a bag of dog food.”
His face was so white with panic, and she felt so relieved to have found Iago, she couldn’t keep up the pretense of anger. “Don’t worry—I can tell you were a good dog-sitter. Dad’ll be glad that Iago was taken care of while he was gone.”
The boy deflated in relief. “I call him Lefty, on account of his left paw is black. But I’ll understand if your father wants to change his name back.”
Chutzpah.
She laughed. “You can talk it over with Dad. He’ll be back home tomorrow.”
The boy’s eyes widened. “You mean go over there?”
“Iago might not understand if you don’t pay him a visit or two,” she pointed out.
He registered her lack of anger and smiled. “Okay.”
Grace turned to lead Iago out via the backyard gate, but Dominic’s sister blocked her way. She looked stunned, even a little outraged.
“That’s it?”
“What’s it?” Grace asked.
“He
stole a dog!
The only consequence is you’re going to invite him over for a visit?”
“Iago’s fine. I can tell Dominic wasn’t being malicious.”
“He was
hiding
him,” the girl pointed out.
Whose side was she on?
Dominic seemed to wonder the same thing. “Please don’t tell anybody else,” he begged Grace. “Especially not my dad. Please?”
“Where did your father think the dog came from?” she asked.
“He still doesn’t know about the dog,” the girl said.
Grace felt her jaw go slack. The father didn’t know? Iago had been there for two days. How could a man cohabitate with a basset hound for two days and not know it?
“Dad hasn’t seen him yet,” Dominic affirmed.
“Hasn’t seen what?” a deep voice asked.
At the sound of the deep voice, they all jumped and turned. Standing on the deck was a tall man with hair and brown eyes like Dominic’s. But that was where any father-son resemblance ended. Dominic had a doughy quality to him, while the man was tall and lean. And his expression was as reserved as Dominic’s was open and readable.
“Dad!” Dominic said, clearly alarmed. His Adam’s apple bobbed visibly.
The man took Grace in warily through his wire-framed glasses. “Hello.”
She smiled. “I’m Grace Oliver. I’m staying with my father for a while after he gets home from the hospital.”
“I was sorry to hear about Lou’s accident,” he said.
“And you’re . . . ?”
“He’s my dad,” Dominic explained unnecessarily.
“Ray West.”
“I’m Lily,” the girl interjected before shooting her father a curious look. “Why are you home so soon?”
“Is something wrong?” Dominic asked.
Grace sensed that this was her moment to slip away.
“Actually, there is,” Ray said. “At the office, I got a call from your grandfather.”
In a flash, the atmosphere changed. Grace stopped. The kids’ bodies went rigid, and Dominic’s face was suddenly as pale as his sister’s.
“They’re sending Jordan back,” Ray announced.
“Back!” Lily exclaimed. “Back
here?
Why?”
Her father shook his head. “I don’t understand it myself. She was so certain she’d be happier there, and now . . .”
“What happened?”
Ray let out a breath. “I don’t know. I couldn’t get much out of your Pop Pop. I’ll have to call back tonight when the dust has settled. Jordan’s on a flight from Midland right now. I’ve got to go meet the plane.”
“Yes!” Dominic gave a hop and then spun toward Grace. “Jordan’s one of my—I mean, she’s my other big sister.”
He seemed so thrilled that it was impossible not to smile back at him. Yet it was also impossible not to notice that they were the only ones smiling.
Lily’s face was a thundercloud of unhappiness. “Oh, great!” She stomped into the house.
The father said nothing more, but trailed after his daughter, head lowered mournfully. He seemed to have forgotten Grace was there.
And he never did notice the dog.
6
G
OING
, G
OING
, G
ONE
W
hatever pleasure Lily could have received from Jordan’s getting kicked out of Granny Kate and Pop Pop’s house—what
on earth
could she have done?—was completely overshadowed by the fact that she was back now. Apparently for good.
Lily was rinsing off the breakfast dishes when she heard a rumbling upstairs from Nina and Jordan’s bedroom. (She refused to call the room
just
Jordan’s.) What was she doing up there? Jordan had been home for two days . . . two days fraught with tension. She had been relatively quiet until now, and careful to stay out of their dad’s way, but it didn’t matter because bad feelings and conflict just seemed to ooze out of Jordan anyway.
The only positive Lily could take from Jordan’s being back for good was that
for good
might not be all that long. In two years Jordan would be eighteen, and there was no way she’d want to live at home after high school. So two years was all they had to endure.
Two years of being known as the sister of the freak with blue hair. The geeky little sister.
The ugly duckling.
She always tried to get that horrible expression out of her head, but it stayed there anyway, dancing around in her consciousness, mocking her.
In her opinion, Hans Christian Andersen had a lot to answer for. People told that dumb story as if it was supposed to be a source of hope to less attractive kids. As if every ugly person ended up being a swan! A true fairy tale. As far as Lily was concerned, the incredible aspect of the whole tale was that it took so long for the swan—to say nothing of its mother—to figure out that he was an entirely different species. The story should have been called
The Stupid Swan,
because that poor bird could have saved himself a lot of trouble and heartache if he’d just looked at his reflection and realized that he was in the wrong family to begin with.
Unfortunately, there was no doubting Lily was in the right family. Everyone said she resembled Granny Kate’s older sister, Jeannie, when Jeannie was a kid. Family photos confirmed this, and it was
not
comforting. Even as a teen, Aunt Jeannie looked like an undernourished refugee from the land of bad fashion decisions. Her plain, ill-fitting shirts always emphasized her pancake-flat chest, and the tweedy skirts she wore bunched awkwardly around her thick waist. The girl could have had a flashing neon sign over her head:
FUTURE SCHOOL LIBRARIAN AND AFRICAN VIOLET ENTHUSIAST
.
Lily shuddered whenever she looked at those photos, because apparently that’s how other people saw her. But that’s not how she saw herself. It wasn’t how her mother or Nina had seen her, either.
One of her best memories was of Nina, eight going on nine, parading her through the halls of their elementary school to Lily’s first grade classroom on her first day of real school. Other kids had looked at her like she was special, because her big sister—a third grader who already had the poise of a sixth grader—had escorted her right up to the teacher’s desk and announced, “Miss Collins, this is my little sister, Lily. She should probably be in second grade, because she already knows how to read and add and everything.”
(If only Miss Collins had listened—it would have saved Lily two very boring years until her third grade teacher had gotten a clue and bumped her up to fourth.)
Nina had waited for her outside the classroom after school at the end of the day, too, and had taken her to the girls’ rest room to help her unstick the two braids that Tommy Dewes had glued together during storytime. “The first day is the hardest,” Nina told her. “Tomorrow afternoon will be better.”
She’d looked blurry through Lily’s hot tears. “How do you know?”
“Because tomorrow at lunch, Jordan will punch Tommy Dewes in the nose.” And then, before they left the bathroom, she’d given Lily a fierce, bracing hug. “You don’t even belong in first grade anyway.”
Nina had always known what to say to her. She’d been her cheerleader, and confidante, and practically her best friend. Her only friend, sometimes. When they got older, Jordan started treating Lily like a pest, but even when Nina was with her school friends she sometimes invited Lily along to movies or whatever. Nina would play tennis with her, too, though Lily stank at tennis. Nina would laugh when Lily worried about not being good enough. “Who cares? It’s just to have fun together, right?”
Lily’s throat tightened. She really shouldn’t think about Nina, not unless she was sure she was alone. She didn’t want to get all upset and set Dominic off. It had been horrible those first weeks to hear him crying in his room. Almost four months later, they were all just now getting back to normal. The new normal. That was what made Jordan’s return so especially awful. She was one of those people who seemed to rampage through life like a demented rhinoceros—as if she were the only person in the world and the rest of them were just little rodents who had to scatter or get squished.
Something crashed upstairs, shaking the ceiling hard enough to set the light fixture over the dining room table swinging. What the heck was Jordan doing?
Dominic ran into the kitchen, skidding the last few feet across the linoleum in his socks. “Did you hear
that?!”
“What’s going on?”
Her brother’s entire torso lifted in a shrug. “I’ve knocked at the door, but she won’t let me in.”
Lily bit her lip. She wondered if Jordan was doing drugs. That would explain why Granny Kate and Pop Pop had been in such a hurry to get rid of her. She’d asked her dad for details, but he wouldn’t explain anything.
She dumped baking soda down the drain and flipped the garbage disposal switch. During the ten seconds the disposal was making its god-awful noise, Lily reconsidered her suspicions. Not that she knew anything about it, but she doubted taking drugs involved anything that sounded like dropping a large boulder on the hardwood floors. After she flipped the switch off and quiet descended on the kitchen again, she announced, “I’m going to find out.”
Her brother barred her path. “You know how she is when she doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“So? Who does she think she is? The queen?”
At that moment, Jordan herself slouched into the room. “I prefer empress, if you don’t mind. Or tsarina. Sounds more . . . well, like a bossy person.”
Lily smirked. “I think the word your tiny brain is reaching for is
dictatorial.
”
“Yeah, whatever,” Jordan said. “Could you guys get the door if the bell rings? Some people are coming by.”
“What people?” Lily hadn’t seen any of Jordan’s friends at the house in months and months. Did she still have any? “Who?”
“Never mind,” Jordan said. “Just answer the door and show them up to my room.”
Nina’s room.
Lily fumed.
“I’m not your maid,” Lily told her.
“I’ll do it,” Dominic said quickly, before a fight could erupt.
“Thanks, Dominickel.”
When she was gone, Dominic turned back to Lily, who tried not to convey what a traitor she thought he was.
Apparently her effort failed. “I’m just trying to help,” he said defensively.
Lily was determined not to waste any more of her time thinking about whatever it was that Jordan was up to. She had more important things to do, like read
Hamlet.
Her original goal for the summer had been to read the complete works of Jane Austen, but that had taken her less than a month. After
Pride and Prejudice
she hadn’t been able to stop herself. It was like eating M&Ms. She’d just popped one down after another.
It would take her more than a month to get through all of Shakespeare, she was pretty sure. Just this one play was probably going to take her more than a month. Every other line she had to stop and figure out what the heck was going on. She hadn’t even reached the part with Hamlet in it. There were just a lot of guys running around exclaiming,
Tush!
and
Peace!
and
Stand, ho!
Her task was made a little more difficult because she couldn’t stop tensing up every time she heard a noise outside. She kept thinking it would be those mysterious people Jordan was expecting. But the first time she heard a car door shut and stood up to peek through the curtains, it was just that lady from next door, bringing Professor Oliver back. He had cut off the leg of one of his pairs of khakis at midthigh, just past where his cast began.
When the doorbell rang, Lily jumped up, forgetting she wasn’t going to answer the door. She reached it the same time as Dominic, who was running full tilt from the dining room. The two came inches away from colliding like cops in an old silent movie. As Lily opened the door, she expected to find a teenager on the other side of the threshold, but instead there was a scruffy guy who had to be at least sixty. He had on baggy jeans and wore his scraggly gray hair in a ponytail. Behind him stood a younger guy—younger, as in forty-five or so.
“I’m here about the dresser,” the scraggly one announced.
“The
what?
” Dominic exclaimed.
Maybe
dresser
was code for “I’m here to sell drugs.” She debated calling her dad. Or the police.
Then she heard Jordan call out from the staircase, “Hey! The stuff’s up here.” She gestured with a roll of her shoulder and headed back up, with the scruffy men trailing.
As Lily and Dominic exchanged confused glances, a paneled van pulled into their drive. Another middle-aged guy popped out and came loping up the stairs. “This is the sale, right?” he asked as he shouldered past them.
“Sale?” Lily repeated.
Dominic ran upstairs and came racing down again a few minutes later as more people trickled in. This time there were women too. An invasion had begun.
“She’s selling everything!” Dominic announced excitedly.
“What do you mean, everything?”
“I mean
everything.
All the furniture, and clothes, and books and CDs. She told me she put an ad on Craigslist.”
“Is she selling Nina’s stuff?”
Dominic nodded.
“She can’t do that!”
Lily ran to the staircase but couldn’t get up it because the first two guys were now carrying down Nina and Jordan’s old dresser. Quivering with impatience, she flattened herself against the wall. When they were finally out of her way, she took the stairs two at a time, nearly knocking over someone on his way down with a boxful of loot.
She stopped short at Nina and Jordan’s door. The room was filled with people dragging open drawers and holding up articles for inspection. Stuff was strewn everywhere—all of Nina’s clothes and books and purses. Everything. The vultures were picking through it. They were looking at Jordan’s things too, but Lily didn’t care about that.
“You’re selling everything!” she yelled at Jordan.
Jordan tossed her an annoyed look. “Brilliant detective work there, Lils.”
“But you can’t!”
“But I am.”
A lady picked up Nina’s tennis racket, and Lily felt a pain shoot through her heart. She turned on her heel and raced back downstairs to the phone. When her father answered on the second ring, she didn’t waste time with niceties.
“Dad, you have to come home.
Now.
”
Tension crackled over the line—that palpable fear disaster had struck again. “What’s wrong?”
“Jordan’s selling everything in her and Nina’s room!”
There was a slight pause before her dad answered, but when he did, it was with exasperation. Aimed at
her.
“For Pete’s sake, Lily. You scared me half to death.”
“They’re taking away all the furniture, and Nina’s tennis racket!” she said, trying to convey the extreme urgency of the situation.
“Well, just see they don’t start hauling away things from the rest of the house.”
“But—”
“I need you to keep your eyes open, Lily. Make sure all the other doors are shut and watch to make sure no one makes off with the family silver. Can you do that?”
“But
Dad—
”
“I have to go now,” he said, cutting her off. “I’m supposed to be in a meeting.”
She hung up, feeling more and more panicky. And outraged. This was really going to happen! All that was left of Nina was just going to be carted away like so much garbage. Thank goodness she had already pilfered a few of her sister’s books.
Dominic trooped through the hallway with the neighbor lady. Grace. He was tugging her up the staircase and telling her to “come see.” As if this were a carnival going on instead of a tragedy.
The terrible thing was, Lily couldn’t think of a way to stop it. She wanted to run up and screech at everyone to get out, but what words would make a dent in the determination of these estate sale buzzards? She wished she were a soldier with a sword and could charge in yelling,
Stand, ho!
She wished there was another person left in the world who would understand her anguish at seeing a stranger carrying a stuffed toy rabbit and a tennis racket out the front door.

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