Grace's Redemption, page 3
Not that I thought of her that way. Not really. Yes, Faith farted sugar and unicorns as far as our father was concerned. He’d always favored her over me and Hope. She was born blond and blue-eyed and angelic. Like something out of a storybook. His heart had grown three sizes that day. Hope and I, however, looked just like our mama—dark hair with pale olive complexions that tanned easily in the summer and looked like porcelain in the winter. Dark, mysterious eyes against Faith’s crystal-clear ones.
His reasons for not loving us the way he did her were always made clear. She was planned and expected and his cherished creation. Whereas I was the first to change his life. A moment of carelessness. The mistake that tied a new, young, charismatic preacher down to marriage to save face with his precious parishioners. Hope came right after, another accidental result of a long night of drowning his sorrows in a bottle.
Why Momma agreed to plan for another child I’ll never know, but our family changed for a bit when Faith came. He softened around her. We all adored the beautiful little angel we’d been blessed with. Maybe it was because she was always small and prone to allergies and asthma, and always needing extra love and protection. Whatever it was, it was the craziest of ironies that she was probably the fiercest of us all.
My baby dynamo of a sister could kick anyone’s ass in a heartbeat, had her finger on the pulse of the town and could tell you everything that was going on in almost real time, and yet along with most of the townspeople . . . had complete blinders on when it came to our father.
I pulled into the parking lot of Redemption Road, the nondenominational Christian church my dad had ruled over like God himself since before I was born. Only a block from the preschool I taught at, and yet—so, so far away. My heart pounded in my ears as I sat in front of the large wooden building with its thick beams and almost inhuman ruggedness. I’d grown up thinking of it as a physical extension of him. Big and bold and . . . crushing.
I got out and palmed my keys, forcing my feet across the pavement before my mind could get too involved in the decision. Faith needed me, and that was what I was there for. Faith rarely needed anything, and she’d called me. Rattled. So, it didn’t matter that I hadn’t been inside the church—not even the office annex where she worked as the manager now—in at least ten years. Not since Mama’s funeral. Not even when Nanny Rae died. When Hope left town, hopping a bus for anywhere after Mama’s service, I did too. I just didn’t go as far. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for either one of my sisters. Nothing. Even if it meant facing the devil himself.
“Hey there, Gracie,” said an elderly woman through a lowered window as she slow-crawled her Cadillac through the parking lot. “You going in?”
It was Esther Brownley, who was older than the Earth and refused to give up driving or dying her hair a perpetual blue-black.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you grab this bag of clothes from my back seat, dear?” she said, jerking to a stop. “They’re for the church garage sale. I was going to go see if the Reverend could come help me, but here you are.”
“Glad to help, Mrs. Brownley,” I said, pulling my hand back as she rolled a few more inches. “Go ahead and brake and put it in Park.”
“Haven’t seen you around here in a long time, sweetheart,” she said. “But I go to the Sunday afternoon service now that he added that. You probably still go in the morning.”
“Yes, that’s it,” I pushed out.
“You girls have the best father,” she gushed. “The way he can take us on a glorious, emotional ride straight to heaven every Sunday . . . he is such a blessing.”
I grabbed the black garbage bag from her back seat and shut the door. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “We’re blessed. Thank you, Mrs. Brownley, I’ll get these to Faith.”
She waved and yanked the car back into gear and crawled away, leaving me with sweaty hands and a bag of old clothes.
I took a deep breath as my fingers landed on the thick, carved wooden door, breathing in all the free air as if I could bank it for later. Because nothing on the other side was ever free.
“Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt, and—”
Hope snickered next to me, bumping me sideways with her knee before giggling again.
“Shhh,” I said under my breath.
“She said ass,” Hope whispered.
The giggle bubbled up in spite of my trying to keep it down. And mine spurred Faith’s, who was too little to even know what she was laughing at, which drove Hope even further.
The Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Harrison, gave us a side-eyed glance and raised an eyebrow, but I saw her wink at Hope as Daddy walked up behind her.
He wasn’t winking.
“Girls, get in the pew,” Mama said under her breath after the class, pinching my arm as she pulled me up the aisle of the empty church to the front row. “Now. Before your—”
“Grace.”
I sucked in a whole lungful of air. When Daddy said my name like that, it sounded like God was booming it from everywhere. It echoed off the walls, and the floor vibrated.
“Hope,” he added. “Come up here.”
“Noel,” Mama said with that thing in her voice she had when she was alarmed. It kind of made the little hairs on my arms stand on end. “Honey, they were just being kids. Your service starts in thirty minutes, let’s not—”
“If my own children can’t conduct themselves with dignity,” he said, his voice thick with disdain, “how is the rest of my flock supposed to follow me, Patricia?”
“Teacher said ass,” little Faith said, looking up at him with huge blue eyes.
He widened his, and I somehow knew it was our undoing. “Look what they’ve tainted her with,” he breathed. “Sinful disgraces. Hope. Grace. Get up here.”
“Daddy, we’re sorry,” I said, as usual doing the speaking up since I was older by a year and two months. Hope couldn’t help herself. She just liked all the tempting things. “We’ll do better paying attention next time.”
“You’ll pay attention this time,” he said, his thunderous tone ominous even as he lowered it. Walking behind the large pulpit he’d built himself with a small cabinet inside for water and papers and such, he opened the little doors. “Get in.”
I frowned and looked up at him, pushing my glasses up where they’d slid down my nose. “Sir?”
“Noel!”
I turned to see Mama’s eyes go wide in shock, but he ignored her.
“I won’t say it again,” he said. “If you two can’t listen in class like civilized people, then you’ll listen silently inside my very pulpit to absorb every single word.”
I looked at Hope’s terrified face. “We can’t fit in there,” I breathed.
“No? I suggest you make sure you do.”
I gasped as the memory of the doors clicking closed, shutting us into the tiny dark space shot me out of my memory and back to where I stood in the entryway of the sanctuary. The pulpit was still there, mocking me.
“Grace!” My sister’s voice brought my head around, and I took in the very grown-up version of the one McMasters daughter that didn’t remember that day. Her blond locks were twisted up in a messy bun with soft tendrils framing her face. She wore a “Jesus is my guy” t-shirt with a skirt and cowboy boots, a look that would be silly on most people but was dreamy on her. “Come on, he’s in his office.”
I forced my feet to follow her down a side hallway, flexing my fingers to pull the blood back into them, counting my breaths . . .
“What’s this?” She gestured toward the bag.
“Oh!” I handed it to her. “Mrs. Brownley dropped off some clothes for the garage sale.”
“Ah,” she said, giving me a double take. “You okay?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, adjusting my glasses on my face and ignoring the question.
Faith blew out a breath. “I don’t know. I was updating the donation records and he came in wanting—no, demanding to know where Mama was.”
My steps faltered. “What?”
“I know,” she said. “I was thrown, too. I thought he just misspoke, or I misheard him, so I tried to joke with him about it.”
She shook her head and I saw the tears well in her eyes. There was no joking, and I knew her heart was broken. Faith was Daddy’s baby girl. She worked in the church beside him every day, had all the inside jokes and sweet affection with him. She wasn’t used to receiving his dark side in any way.
But asking where Mama was . . .
He was pacing his office with a book in his hand when Faith opened his door. He spun in place, and my heart sped up so fast it hurt. His gray hair stuck up in spikes and his eyes were frustrated and wild. I hadn’t spent much time with him one-on-one in the past few months. I’d been busy, but we crossed paths. I saw him most weekends for a few minutes when I met up with Faith for coffee after she made him breakfast, and we’d exchange a quick good morning and move on. The man before me now looked like he’d just been awakened from a deep sleep at three in the morning after an eight-hour bender.
And he didn’t drink. Not anymore.
“Why did you close that door?” he asked. “You know I like all the doors open.”
“Because you’re acting like a fool,” she said unabashedly, with the confidence of someone who’d never paid the price for words like that. “What if someone comes by and sees you like this?”
“There you are,” he said, his voice dropping as his eyes landed on me.
My breath caught in my chest, my heart instantly knowing that I didn’t want any part of this. “Me?”
He rounded his desk, knocking a few papers to the ground but not looking back. Crossing the small room in seconds, he all but shoved Faith aside to get to me. I took a step back, but his fingers circled my wrist. “Patricia—”
“What?”
His eyes were wild and full of contempt, and my very locked-up defenses wanted to duck. To look away. To run. All the things I’d grown up doing. But him using my mother’s name threw me. Kept my gaze locked on his.
“Why were you hiding from me?” he asked, his jaw tight.
“Daddy!”
Faith’s firm, somewhat pissed-off tone made him jump and he dropped my wrist as he spun to face her.
I backed up two steps while I had the chance, my heart slamming in triple time against my ribs. The familiar need to bolt seized me, and I gripped the edge of a cabinet to still my feet.
“That’s Grace, Daddy,” she said. “Not Mama.”
He looked at her like she was speaking in tongues. “Grace,” he said, glancing back at me. “Of course, it’s Grace,” he said, walking back around his desk as if nothing odd had happened. There was a crease over his nose though that told me he was confused. “What brought you over here?” he asked then, looking directly at me. “Someone die?”
“She brought in Mrs. Brownley’s garage sale donation,” Faith said, looking at him warily, lifting the bag.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, there’s your good deed for today, Grace,” he said, sitting down and opening a notebook like we’d interrupted some great project and he needed to get back to it. “Go shape some young minds now.”
We’d been dismissed.
I followed Faith out and down the hall toward her office, glancing back over my shoulder at my father. “Has he been doing this?” I asked.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said, her voice low until we rounded into her space. “This is new. He’s—well, you know he can be moody.”
“Moody,” I echoed.
Her eyebrows lifted. It was an old conversation. “You know what I’m saying,” she said.
“I do,” I said. “Do you?”
“I don’t have time for this argument right now,” she said, pasting a smile on her face that I knew was genuine, even though she was impatient with me. “You and he have a complicated relationship, I get that,” she said. “But life is short, Grace. Mama’s gone and he’s getting old. How long are you and Hope going to hold grudges against him for being strict?”
“Strict?” I said on a bitter laugh. “You know what, I gotta go. Keep an eye on—that,” I added, pointing down the hall.
“Oh, come on,” she said, linking arms with me and leading me out the back way. “Don’t leave mad. Tell me about Dixie and Gabe’s wedding. I need some happy news to balance out all the crap that’s been going on around here.”
“With Dad?”
“No, the creepy shit,” she said. “Reese’s dad, Chief LaVeaux, disappearing—I mean, how does a retired police chief just vanish off the planet, Grace? He never struck me as the type to go AWOL. Then Chief Bollinger going to jail and that kid at the high school getting caught with drugs in his backpack—like felony level amounts! He was gonna sell that shit and we have no police leadership around to stop it!”
I shook my head and had to chuckle at the same time. Not because any of it was funny, but because Faith was so passionate about—everything.
“Redemption isn’t what it used to be,” I said. “Or even what people think it used to be.”
“All the crap and crime,” she said on a huff, the muggy air hitting us as we made it outdoors. “But I heard we’re getting a new chief. Tobias told me.”
“Tobias?”
Faith cut me a look, but I cut her one right back.
“Don’t start,” she said. “He was my friend, too. Just because Hope dumped him doesn’t mean I have to cut off a friend.”
“Or lose track of his brother in prison?”
“Stop.”
“Speaking of felonies—”
“So, back to the wedding?”
I shook my head. “Nothing much to report.”
I was one hundred percent sure that I would not be telling Faith about the wedding. At least not my part in it. The standing and the walking and the smiling—that part was fine. It was the “after” that I couldn’t tell my baby sister. It didn’t matter that said sister was in her mid-twenties and no virginal maiden herself. There was just a line there that I couldn’t cross.
“I’m sure you’ll get the goods from Presley when she gets back. Isn’t she the one in your Jiu Jitsu class?”
There. Diversion.
She frowned. “She isn’t back? Didn’t you all come home together?”
Crap.
“I kind of came back a day early,” I said. “Or two.”
“Grace.”
My phone buzzed, and I held it up as I started walking backwards. “Speaking of crap and crime, Hope’s calling,” I said. “And I gotta get to work. I think I’ll just leave my car here and walk. And keep me in the loop on him,” I added, pointing at the building behind her.
She stood with hands on her hips like a tiny little blond bullet, and I knew that she knew damn good and well that I’d be spilling all to Hope.
And I would. I couldn’t justify that. I didn’t know why I could talk to one little sister and not the other about sensitive things like banging strange men in hotels and marrying them. Maybe because Hope and I were closer in age. Maybe because we’d faced the same demons and gone to battle together. Maybe because she was a lawyer.
Whatever the reason, by the time I’d walked the block to my school, Hope knew the whole story. And was laughing her ass off.
“Holy shit, Gracie,” she said. “They say what happens in Vegas, and all that, but who are you?”
“I don’t know,” I half whimpered into the phone, smiling at parents as they pulled little ones out of car seats. I lowered my voice. “I’m really wishing I could forget about it and chalk it up to a crazy moment of lemon drop martinis, but . . .”
“But you had to go and drunk marry a guy with a moral compass and then go bareback,” she said, blowing out a chuckle. “Did you feel like I needed some pro bono hours or something?”
“I love you,” I whispered as I entered my building, giving high fives to two little boys who found it hilarious to burp at me every morning. “How’s Atlanta?”
Hope’s journey after Redemption hadn’t been an easy one, landing in Atlanta, Georgia at eighteen with nothing but the burning need to not be here. She was a survivor, though, and after ten years of not telling me everything she had to do to get there, she was a kick-ass family law attorney.
“Still hot. Still sticky. Not so different from there.” She cleared her throat. “So I pretty much already know the answer,” Hope said, a wry tone to her voice, “but have you thought about your options? If the little stick has an attitude?”
I sighed into the phone. “My options?”
“Yes, dear,” she mocked. “Just because you live in Nanny Rae’s house doesn’t mean you’re living in the fifties. Women have rights now.”
“Yes, counselor,” I mocked back. “And you might have those options, but I—I can’t.”
I refused to voice why, and I didn’t have to. She got it. She got me. As usual.
“Let me see what I can find out about annulments in Nevada,” she said. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Thank you.”
“Are there any photos?”
I thought of all the ones on his phone. “He has a bunch,” I said. “He showed them to me. I evidently didn’t take any, thank God.”
“No, fool, I meant to show me who you put a ring on!” she said. “Is he cute?”
I stopped short in the hallway, causing a little girl to nearly run into me. “I’m sorry,” I mouthed, moving to the side. “Are you crazy?” I hissed into the phone.
“Are you dead?”
I blew out a breath and pushed my glasses up on my nose. “Yes, he’s cute,” I admitted, continuing forward slowly. “But that’s irrelevant,” I added.
Principal Briggs caught my attention from her office window and waved me over.
“That’s never irrelevant,” she said. “What’s his name?”
“Mateo.”
I strolled toward the principal’s office, slowing my steps so I could end the call. As I got closer, I noticed that there looked to be a parent in there with a little girl on his lap. All I could see from where they were sitting were the backs of their heads, his hair professionally cut and gelled into place, hers long and dark, almost black. As the dad rose, he lifted the little girl with him, and she grinned over his shoulder at me, her big brown eyes lighting up.
