Circle of Grace, page 6
But Liz didn’t rise to the bait. “Yes, it is different. But you still have questions. Lots of them.”
“Like what?”
“Like what and why and who and how. What happened that night? Why was your father out in a snowstorm, driving a woman’s car? Who was she, and what was her relationship with your father? And most of all, how could your father do such a thing?”
Grace shut her eyes and swallowed hard, trying vainly to push back the lump in her throat. Liz’s questions, along with so many of her own, hung out there like loose threads on a badly woven sweater. Pull one, and everything might unravel. And here Liz was, picking at them one by one, as if daring Grace to find out if she would hold together.
“I believe in my father,” she finally said, the words coming out with greater difficulty than Grace could ever have imagined. “He was a good man.”
“I know.” Liz waited.
“I have to believe in him. If I ask too many questions—”
“You might find out something you don’t want to know?”
Grace stared at her hands, at the ragged fingernails bitten down to the quick.
“And you might end up blaming him.”
“Blaming him for what? For dying?”
Liz shrugged. “Or for doing something stupid that led to his death.”
“He was helping out a friend. That’s all.” Grace tried to sound firm and confident, but her voice quivered.
“And you believe that.” Liz raised her eyebrows. “Yeah. Like I believed my mother went out for milk and bread and just never found her way home again.”
“It’s not the same,” Grace persisted.
“It is, and it isn’t.” Liz’s tone was uncharacteristically subdued and cautious now, as if she were walking barefoot across a pit of live coals. “Listen, I’m not trying to be obstinate. And I’m not trying to undermine your faith in your father. You’ve got a perfect right to believe whatever you want. Believe in the tooth fairy, if that makes you feel better. Just make sure you’re being true to yourself. Grieve your father’s death. Get mad, if you need to. That’s all part of the process. Just don’t shut down. Denial never did anybody any good.”
“You think I’m in denial?”
“I’d be surprised if you weren’t. Maybe it was easier for me, in the long run, to accept the truth about my mother. She betrayed us and left us, but she didn’t die. Eventually I had no choice but to face the reality of what she’d done.”
“I don’t know what reality is where my father’s concerned,” Grace admitted after a minute. “I know he loved me. And I loved him. But—”
“But what if he wasn’t the man you believed him to be?” Liz supplied. “What if—”
Grace held up a hand, and Liz fell silent. “I—I can’t,” she stammered.
“Can’t what?”
Can’t shake the doubts, Grace wanted to say. Can’t shake them, but can’t face them. Can’t find my way back to the surface.
But she didn’t. Instead, she swallowed down the lump, patted Liz’s arm, and forced a smile. “I can’t accept what you’re implying about my father.” She shook her head. “I know you mean well, Liz, and I appreciate it, honest I do. But you didn’t know him like I did. There’s an explanation for the circumstances surrounding his death, and I’m going to find it. And when I do, I know my faith in Daddy will be justified.”
A shadow passed over Liz’s face—an expression, Grace thought, of disappointment. Frustration. Disillusionment, even. Then she shrugged. “I hope so, Grace,” she said. “For your sake, I truly hope so.”
The conversation ended as Tess came into the kitchen. “Am I interrupting something?”
Liz got up. “Grace and I were just talking while I cooked dinner.”
Tess peered at the charred chicken in the frying pan. “More talking than cooking, apparently. Mind if I lend a hand?”
“Be my guest.” Liz resumed her seat at the table and watched while Tess sliced the burned portions off the chicken, cut what was left into chunks, and deftly created a casserole out of the remains of the meat and some leftovers she found in the refrigerator.
“Someday you’re going to have to teach me how to do that,” Liz said.
“Why would you want to learn when you can get somebody else to do it for you?”
Liz grinned. “Good point.”
By the time dinner was ready, Lovey had appeared, and they all sat around the table, waiting awkwardly for the meal to begin. Everyone looked to Grace, obviously waiting for her to give thanks, but she avoided their eyes. “Well, let’s dig in before it gets cold,” Tess said at last, and the icy spell was broken.
“This casserole is absolutely delicious, Tess,” Lovey said with her mouth full.
“It wasn’t just Tess.” Liz feigned a crushed look. “I helped. I cooked the chicken.”
“That much I believe.” Lovey removed something black and crusty from her mouth, held it up for all to see, then laid it delicately on the edge of her plate.
Liz grimaced. “Oops. Guess Tess didn’t get all the burned pieces off. Sorry.”
“Never mind. We’ll keep it as evidence of you making something that doesn’t fit between two slices of white bread.”
“Let’s change the subject, OK?” Liz said. “Tess, do you have time to proofread my psych paper and give me some suggestions? I’ve got the research done, but I’m having trouble putting it all together.”
“Sure, if you’ll quiz me for my English Lit exam.”
The conversation continued, discussions of midterms and unreasonable professors and the upcoming Spring Break. Words swirled around Grace like smoke from a brush fire, but she barely noticed.
She felt herself withdrawing, receding, rising above the talk and laughter. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t dislodge her mind from memories of her father, her declaration of faith in his character, and the troubling suspicion that he might not have been the man she believed him to be.
The dream came again, Grace struggling to stay afloat in a cold, dark sea. Far away, ahead of her, she could just make out a faint light, as if she were looking into a small, misty window that revealed her father’s laughing face and her mother’s tight-lipped glare. And someone else. Someone laughing with her father, a woman, all her attention focused on Daddy, her back turned on Mama’s scowl. It was like watching a silent movie on a fuzzy screen—the mouths moving, but no sound coming out.
The screen receded, as if Grace were drifting backward, out to sea. This time the water was colder, the waves higher. Frantically, she felt for the bottom, but the water was deep and all she had to buoy her up was a battered raft, a few cracked lengths of bamboo strung together with ragged ropes.
The raft shifted, and as Grace flailed for a more secure hold, a portion of the bamboo splintered off and floated away, out of reach. And then she saw the problem.
The rotted ropes that held the raft together were separating. She clung tighter, but it was no use. Piece by piece, the raft was breaking apart. Soon there would be nothing left to hold her up except the dwindling energy of her own will.
She was sinking. The whole thing was unraveling, and she could do nothing to stop it.
-7-
TRANSFORMATIONS
Grace decided she wouldn’t go home for Spring Break, or for the Easter weekend. She felt vaguely guilty about leaving her mother alone, but she simply couldn’t stand the thought of having to face that house, so filled with Daddy’s presence, so empty with his absence. She invented several semi-plausible excuses—a late term paper, being behind in her Lit readings. Justifications that turned out to be a waste of time and energy.
“That’s fine,” Mama said when Grace broke the news. She sounded weary and apathetic. “You will be coming home for the summer?”
“I guess so,” Grace said. What else could she do? She had neither a good reason nor enough money to stay in Asheville.
“I’ll come get you, then,” her mother said. “When does the semester finish?”
“The third week in May,” Grace answered. “I’m not sure which exact days I have exams, though. I’ll have to look at my schedule.”
“All right. I’ll plan to pick you up on the Monday after, unless I hear otherwise. You’ll let me know if that won’t work?”
“Sure.” Grace hesitated as remorse kicked in. “Mother, are you sure it’s OK for me to stay here during Spring Break? I could change my plans—”
“No, don’t do that.” Her voice went rigid and steely, and Grace could almost see her facial expression, the thin straight line of her mouth. “I’ll call you next week.”
Somehow Grace managed to get through the remainder of the spring semester without completely wrecking her grade point average. Two weeks before exams, the nation was stunned by the news that four college students had been gunned down by the National Guard at an antiwar protest in Ohio. Liz went ballistic about the massacre, but Grace couldn’t get herself focused enough to manage more than a feeble indignation. While Liz attended protest rallies on campus, Tess and Lovey did their best to help Grace cope—taking on her chores around the house, helping her study for finals. Occasionally one of them would broach the subject of grief, expressing concern that she was keeping everything inside. But for the most part, they just continued to be there, and to keep things as normal as possible.
Grace was grateful to them for not pressing her. She couldn’t explain what she was feeling—or more precisely, what she wasn’t feeling. All her emotions—fear and grief and anger and longing and a dozen others she couldn’t even name—seemed to have congealed inside her, a huge, amorphous mass, a shapeless dark lump at the pit of her stomach. There was no way to sort them out; she didn’t even dare to try. The best she could do was endure.
Finally, mercifully, the semester came to a close. Liz and Lovey and Tess had all found jobs around Asheville and would stay in the little house on Barnard Street. Grace had tried to manufacture a reason not to go back to Spartanburg County to spend the summer with her mother, but she’d come up empty. There was nothing to do but grit her teeth and try to get through it the best she could.
What would it be like, she wondered—two months in a house devoid of her father’s laughter and filled instead with her mother’s depression? How was she possibly going to stand it, day after day?
But the Mama who arrived in a brand-new Cadillac DeVille to pack Grace up and take her back to the country was not the woman Grace was expecting. This Mother was smiling and laughing. She hugged Grace and kissed her on both cheeks—a little awkwardly, but with genuine warmth—then made the rounds to hug Grace’s three roommates as well.
“So, do you like it?” she asked, stroking the hood of the sleek sedan. It was green—not a discreet dark forest green, but a cross between spring grass and a Granny Smith apple, with sort of an electric sheen. “The color is called Briarwood Firemist.”
“It’s—it’s a convertible!”
“I know. What do you think?”
Grace stared at her mother. “Where did you get it? It must have cost a fortune.”
“I bought it, of course. The sale of your father’s truck paid for it—at least most of it.”
“But, Mama, why on earth would you buy a Cadillac? A convertible? When you’ve got a perfectly good—”
“A perfectly good Chevrolet, I know. I’ve always had Chevrolets. Usually white. Always used. Your father bought them for me, every five years, like clockwork.” Mama shook her head. “All my life I’ve dreamed of having a car like this. There’s nothing like driving down a country road with the wind in your hair. It makes you feel so…so free.” She turned toward Grace’s roommates, who had been standing on the front lawn all this time, listening to the interchange. “You girls want to go for a ride?”
Tess watched Grace out of the corner of her eye. Liz and Lovey grinned at each other. “Yes!” They opened the door and scrambled into the back seat.
“Come on, Grace. I’ll let you drive.”
Grace got into the front passenger seat. “No, Mother. You drive. It’s your car.”
Grace soon discovered that the Cadillac was not the only transformation she had to contend with. Their two-story farmhouse out in the country, where Grace had lived for as long as she could remember, had always been white with green shutters like every other farmhouse in the county. Now it was a soft blue-gray with bright white trim and a front door the color of cranberries.
Grace dropped her suitcases in the front hall and stood dazed and disoriented. The old brown living room carpet had been pulled up to reveal the hardwood floor underneath, and a new leather sofa and matching chairs clustered around a deep-toned area rug. The coffee table was an antique wooden sled with a glass top. “Mama, what happened to all the furniture?”
“I bought a few new things,” her mother said. “Do you want a snack before dinner? I made beef stew.”
“No, I don’t want a snack.” Impatience caused Grace’s tone to come out harsh and accusing. “I want to know what’s happened to you.”
“Come sit down,” Mama said. She led Grace into the kitchen—also repainted, in a lemony yellow with new curtains at the windows—and took a pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator. When she had poured two glasses, she set them on the table and brought a platter of brownies out of the pantry.
Grace pushed the brownies aside. “I’m not hungry.”
“Grace, listen—”
Grace’s composure snapped. “No, you listen. I want to know what’s going on, why everything’s completely different. There’s not a trace of Daddy anywhere in this house. He died in January, Mother. Five months ago. And now it’s like he never existed.” She swallowed hard against tears of fury. “Like you never really loved him at all.”
A brief expression of anger flared across her mother’s face, then subsided. She bit her lip and reached across the kitchen table for her daughter’s hand. Grace pulled back. It was a mean thing to do, but she couldn’t help herself.
“I’m sorry you’re upset,” Mama said at last, drawing her hand back. “I probably should have told you I was making some changes instead of just springing it on you. But—”
“But what, Mama?” Grace interrupted. “The car, the house, the furniture. Go on, explain it to me.”
“All right, I’ll explain it.” She pressed her lips together, and her expression went stony. This was the real Ramona Benedict, the mother Grace recognized, the one she had expected. Not the free-spirited convertible-driving impersonator.
“This is very difficult to talk about,” Mama began, “so please be patient with me.”
“I’m perfectly capable of being patient,” Grace interrupted. “But I want the truth.”
“The truth?” Mama closed her eyes and shook her head. “We always think we want the truth, Grace. But the truth isn’t always pleasant or noble, and it’s certainly not painless.”
Get on with it, Grace thought. Quit beating around the bush.
“When I married your father, I was just as taken with him as everyone else was. He was bright and funny and sensitive, and for a while we were happy.”
“For a while?”
“Yes, for a while. Then things changed.”
“You changed, you mean,” Grace broke in. She couldn’t help herself. “I remember when I was little how you and Daddy played with me, and we laughed a lot, and I felt safe.” The lump in her throat swelled and tightened. “I haven’t felt that way for years.”
“Yes, things changed. And maybe you’re right. Maybe I changed, too. I’m sorry you had to suffer for it, Grace. But at the time I couldn’t do anything about it. You needed your father. You adored him. I thought it would be best simply to try to maintain the status quo. Now I’m not sure I made the right decision.”
“What decision?”
“To stay with your father rather than divorcing him. To keep the family together, for your sake.”
Grace gasped for breath, but all the air had been sucked out of her lungs. “Divorce him?”
Her mother nodded. “I knew I couldn’t keep going on this way forever. Now that you were grown, I thought maybe—” She hesitated. “Perhaps I should have trusted you more, Grace. Maybe I was wrong to keep the truth from you. But then the accident happened, and your father died, and—”
“And what?”
“And suddenly I was free. Free to be myself. Free not to have to pretend.” She cleared her throat. “But I’m still pretending, Grace. And until you understand the full reality of what transpired between your father and myself, I will always be pretending.”
Grace’s insides shuddered. She didn’t want to hear any more. Didn’t want to know.
“You asked for the truth, Grace. Well, here it is, and it’s not pretty.” Mama took a breath. “Your father was unfaithful to me.”
“What?”
“The woman who was with him in the car the night he died—she was his…well, what do I call her? His mistress.”
Grace felt the kitchen spin, and clutched the table top, trying to steady herself. It wasn’t a totally foreign concept; she had asked herself the question hundreds of times since the funeral: Who was that woman? What was Daddy doing with her? And always she had come up with the same answer: She was a customer, a friend, that’s all. He was helping a friend in distress.
It was a rationalization, and deep inside Grace knew it. But it was all she had to hold on to, a flimsy life raft in a troubled sea. If she even considered any other possibility, that would mean that everything—an entire lifetime with her father—had been nothing more than a sham, a lie.
“That’s ridiculous!” she shot back. “Everybody loved Daddy. Everybody depended on him. Maybe he was just helping her out, trying to get her home safely in the storm.”
Grace looked up. Her mother’s eyes, no longer hooded and distant, had gone soft and liquid, filled with pain. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
