Circle of Grace, page 4
Lovey appeared from the living room, and Tess poked her head in from the back doorway, where the stairs went up to the dormer. They crowded around the small kitchen table, and Grace put a bowl of salad greens and a plate of garlic bread in the center.
“Who was that on the phone?” Lovey asked.
Liz reached for the bread. “Grace’s daddy. You can set your watch by him. We were just having an interesting conversation about her parents’ sex life when y’all came in to dinner.”
Tess speared her with a reprimanding look. “Be nice, Liz.”
“Me?” Liz sprayed crumbs of garlic bread across the table. “I’m nice.”
“Sure you are. Making rude comments about Grace’s parents is just the way you show affection.”
Lovey jumped into the fray. “Tess is right, Liz. Grace cooked this lovely meal for us. I’d think you’d be grateful—at least grateful enough to get off her case for five minutes.”
“I am grateful.” Liz lifted her hands in a show of mock ecstasy. “Hallelujah! I’m really thankful Grace can cook.”
“That’s more than we can say for you.” Tess arched her eyebrows. “When it’s your turn, we get peanut butter sandwiches.”
“I’m telling you, I’m grateful.” Liz folded her hands, closed her eyes, and bowed her head in an exaggerated show of piety. “O great powers of the Universe,” she intoned in a drawling voice like a traveling evangelist, “thank you, thank you, thank you for this won-derful spaghetti, and for the hands that prepared it. And for the salad. And for the bread. And for the garlic and the butter on the bread. And for the dessert—” She peered through her fingers. “Is there dessert?”
Grace suppressed a laugh and nodded. “Lemon meringue pie.”
“Oh, yes, halle-lu-jah for the lemon pie. And for the evolution that has brought us tomato paste and kitchen appliances and opposable thumbs. And—”
“Amen,” Tess interrupted.
“I wasn’t finished,” Liz complained. “There’s a lot more to be thankful for. Evolutionary development took a very long time, you know.”
“Right,” Lovey said. “But the spaghetti’s getting cold.”
-4-
THE STORM
The storm gained force. By eight o’clock four inches of snow had piled up on the front steps, and huge flakes still drifted down in the light of the streetlamps. Traffic ceased to pass by on the main street down the hill. The whole city grew white and silent.
Lovey shut the front door and came into the living room stomping off her shoes, her hair plastered with wet snow and her cheeks red with cold. “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she said. “Let’s go play in the snow.”
They all layered up, put on boots and coats, and retrieved empty packing boxes from the basement crawlspace. The hill in front of the house made for perfect sliding, and the flattened cardboard served as a pretty good makeshift sled. They careened down the street and trudged back up, over and over again, laughing and shouting and skidding into one another. When the cardboard got soggy and began to fall apart, Tess initiated a snowball fight, and they pummeled each other until they were all panting, exhausted, and soaked through.
Grace had never had so much fun. She whooped and hollered louder than any of them, wrestled them to the ground and pushed snow down their necks. And when they all trooped into the house, changed into flannel pajamas, and sat around drinking hot chocolate and telling stories, Grace suspected the warmth that filled her veins wasn’t entirely from the flannels or the cocoa or the flickering fire.
A little after ten, the power went out and the phone lines went dead. The loss was barely an inconvenience, since the little house had a gas log fireplace in the living room and a gas stove in the kitchen. They lit candles, dragged blankets and pillows into the living room, and sat on the floor around the coffee table.
Tess leaned against the sofa and pulled a blanket around her. “This is like the sleepovers we used to have when we were kids.” She sipped at her cocoa. “Who made this? It’s great.”
“I did.” Liz raised a hand. “See, I can cook.”
“If you want to live on hot chocolate and peanut butter.”
Lovey laughed. “So, shall we stay up all night talking?”
Liz lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Sounds good to me. Tell us about small-town life, Grace. Come on.”
Grace stared into the shifting blue haze from Liz’s cigarette. “Well, there’s not much to tell. We live in a farmhouse out in the country between Greenville and Spartanburg. My dad owns a hardware store—not a chain store, but one of the old-fashioned kind with big aluminum bins of nails and nuts and bolts. People come from all over the county to do business with him. Well, you’ve met him; you know. With his personality he could sell ice cube trays to a polar bear. When I was little I used to sit on the floor between the aisles and play with the bolts, pretending I was a princess and this was my treasure.”
Liz chuckled. “You were a princess, honey. At least in your daddy’s eyes. That’s why your mother—”
Grace threw up her hands. “Do not—I repeat, do not—start psychoanalyzing my family again.”
“Ignore her,” Lovey said. “I want to hear about your mother.”
“Mama stayed home and took care of me and Daddy. I guess you’d call her a housewife, except that she never quite fit the stereotype. She didn’t like housework much—I learned to cook out of self-defense—and she always had her nose in a book. Until recently, I hadn’t thought much about it, but I get the impression she would rather have been doing something else.”
“What kind of something else?” Tess asked.
Grace hesitated. She had little experience talking about herself, and even less speculating about her mother’s unfulfilled dreams.
“I’m not sure,” she said at last. “She reads a lot of fiction—not pot-boilers or romances, but real fiction—classics like Tolstoy and Dickens and Victor Hugo, and modern writers like Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. She keeps all these notes on what she reads—pages and pages, whole notebooks full. She’s never said so, but I think she might have wanted to be a literature professor.”
“But never got the chance,” Liz said. “She got married and had you instead.”
“Yes. She passed on her love of reading to me, but not much else. On the inside, at least, I’m more like my father. Or maybe I just want to be like him. Everybody adores him. He’s so funny.”
“So are you,” said Lovey. “You just never had Liz for a comic partner before.”
Liz stubbed out her cigarette and wrapped her hands around her mug of chocolate. “Yeah, that’s us. Abbott and Costello. George and Gracie. Rowan and Martin.”
Grace cut her a glance. “Jekyll and Hyde.”
“Which one am I?” Liz asked, then held up a hand to put a halt to Grace’s response. “Never mind. Don’t answer that.”
“You were telling us about your father,” Lovey prodded. “How everybody adores him.”
“Including you, right?” Liz nodded in Grace’s direction. “And you’re still his little girl, even now, when you’re all grown up.”
“Is that so bad?”
Liz shrugged. “I don’t know. People can let you down. When you put them on a pedestal, and they fall off, you can get beat up pretty bad from the flying debris.”
No one responded right away, but everyone was listening. At last Tess said, “You’re not talking about Grace’s family anymore, are you, Liz?”
“I guess not.” She grew pensive, chewing at her lower lip. “My folks split when I was just a kid. My mother left, ran off with—with someone else. Took us to school one morning, waved good-bye, and disappeared. I never saw her again, except once, a year later, when we had to go to court for the custody hearing. My dad got me and my brother and sister, and did OK raising us, too. But it broke him. He wasn’t the same afterward. He loved us, I suppose, but he never really got over it. He was physically there but emotionally absent.”
No one was laughing now.
“How does anybody get over being abandoned like that?” Tess said.
“You go on,” Liz answered, her voice low and fierce. “You find strength inside. You learn not to base your self-image on what other people say or do.” She blew out a pent-up breath. “You guard yourself.”
Tess leaned forward. “But if you guard yourself too much, you never let anybody close enough to love you.”
“Could be.” Liz stared into the fire. “But love is pretty much overrated in my book. Love is just a chink in the armor, a place for the knife to slip in.” She ducked her head. “Let’s talk about somebody else for a while.”
Lovey came to the rescue. “My parents are divorced, too. My daddy is a farmer, and apparently it wasn’t the life my mother wanted. They broke up when I was in high school—couldn’t live with each other, but couldn’t quite live without each other, either. They both married other people, and somehow managed to stay friends through it all. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, it’s kind of like an extended family reunion, with four parents and half a dozen grandparents and all the kids and stepkids. Even a couple of step-grandkids, since my stepfather has a daughter in her late twenties.”
“Leave It to Beaver—only with a lot more people in the house,” Grace quipped. She glanced in Liz’s direction to see if she was OK. To her relief, Liz nodded and winked in her direction, then lit another cigarette and blew a perfect smoke ring toward the ceiling.
“What about you, Tess?” Lovey asked. “What’s your family like?”
Tess swirled the chocolate in her cup and drained it. “The last functional family in North America,” she chuckled. “Boringly normal. My father is an Episcopal priest.”
“A priest?”
“Yep. A bishop, actually.”
Grace gaped at her. “Your father is a bishop, and you never told us?”
“It’s no big deal. He runs the diocese, just like your father runs his hardware store.”
“Not exactly the same thing,” Grace said.
“Isn’t it? Everybody has a job to do. When you grow up seeing the church from the inside out, you don’t get caught up in the pomp and grandeur of the purple robes. A bishop isn’t some untouchable holy person. He’s a troubleshooter, a manager. A referee sometimes. Do you know what my father does mostly? He goes around to the churches in his diocese trying to settle petty squabbles between priests and parishioners. I think he was happier when he was just a parish priest, before they made him a bishop. He really likes being a pastor. And he doesn’t get to do that much any more.”
“What about your mother?” Lovey asked.
“Mom is—well, she’s a bishop’s wife. That’s a whole job in itself. Now that my sister and I are grown and gone, she does a lot of work with the church women—”
“You mean hosting teas and needlepointing pew pads?” Liz’s voice carried a sarcastic edge, and Grace flinched inwardly at the insult.
Tess, however, seemed unruffled. “Not exactly. She went to seminary, too—that’s where she and Dad met. She has an M.Div. and a Master’s Degree in psychology. You’d like her, Liz. The two of you would have a lot in common. She spends a good deal of her time counseling women—mostly the wives of priests. She conducts seminars on family dynamics and spirituality. To tell the truth, she’s more of a pastor these days than my dad is.”
“So,” Grace ventured, “you sound like you love both of your parents, and respect them. But you—”
“Avoid church like the plague?” Tess gave a wry grin. “You could say I’m on sabbatical. I’ve spent my life in the church, was practically born in the nave and weaned on communion wafers. I could recite most of the Eucharist service by the time I learned to read ‘See Jane run.’ And in many ways I love the church. But I need to take some time off to do a little evaluating of my own faith, figure out my place in the church—if there is a place for me.”
“And your dad’s OK with that?”
“He’d be happier if I still went to church while I was doing my evaluating,” Tess admitted. “But it’s a matter of conscience.”
“Wait a minute,” Liz interrupted. “Are you saying your conscience is keeping you from going to church? Damn. That’s a first.”
Tess fell silent for a minute. At last she said, “I can’t support a church that refuses to ordain women.”
Grace stared at Tess. “Where I grew up no one would even raise the question of whether women could be ordained. That would be heresy. Men are the preachers and women are their wives. Period.”
Liz made a face but said nothing.
“Well, at least men would say that.” Grace went on. “Preachers in particular. Men have the power. Women care for the children and make coffee and organize Vacation Bible School and coordinate potluck dinners. Nobody questions it. That’s just the way things are done.”
“Maybe it’s high time somebody ought to question it,” said Lovey.
“Tess,” Grace asked after a momentary lapse, “is this because—because you want to be a priest?”
Tess stared at her for a full minute, then began to laugh. “Lord help us, Grace, me? I’m a writer. I might be able to concoct a decent sermon or two. But I don’t have the heart for it, don’t have the gifts and calling. I’m too impatient; I live too much in my own head. Me, a priest? Not likely.”
“Then why is it so important to you?”
Tess didn’t answer. Lovey reached out a hand and laid it on Tess’s arm. When she spoke, her voice was low and quiet. “Because her mother had the gifts and the calling,” Lovey said. “Because her mother should have been a priest.”
“For an agnostic blonde cheerleader, you’re pretty insightful,” Tess said, her voice almost a whisper. “Yes, my mother should have been a priest. And my father, for all his intelligence and all his love, can’t see it.”
It was nearly two-thirty when Grace and Tess climbed the stairs to the dormer bedroom. The living room had been warm and cozy with the gas logs blazing, but upstairs it was so cold, Grace could see her own breath. She hoped the power would come on before morning.
She got into bed, pulled up the quilts, and lay on her side staring out the window. The storm was over. The snow had stopped, and as the clouds parted, a bright half-moon shone down, glittering the landscape with pale blue sparkles.
Late as it was, Grace couldn’t sleep. She kept rehashing Liz’s insistent questions about her family. Did her parents love each other? Was her mother really a black hole of depression? Questions she had never dared to ask, challenges that mauled and twisted her image of family like a string of paper dolls in a hurricane.
Nobody understands what goes on inside a marriage except the two people involved, Liz had said. And sometimes they don’t even get it.
But what did Liz know? She wasn’t a psychiatrist. She wasn’t married. She hadn’t even lived in a two-parent household for most of her life. She was just blowing smoke, regurgitating stuff she’d learned in her psych class.
Nevertheless, Grace tossed in her bed for more than an hour before succumbing to a restless and fitful sleep. In her dreams she heard her father’s easy laugh, recalled her mother’s tight-lipped silence. She could see their faces, far away, blurred by rain and mist.
And in the dream she was a child again, frantically trying to tread water, to keep her head above the crest of a wave. Forked streaks of lightning split a sky crowded with menacing clouds.
She gasped for air as the billows rolled and pitched around her. For a second or two she could feel the ocean floor beneath her feet—could reach it, just barely, if she stretched and stood on tiptoe. And then the current sucked the sand away and pulled her out into the darkness, alone, adrift on a bottomless sea.
-5-
THE MORNING AFTER
Even thirty years later, Grace could still recall the vivid details of that dream. The veiled faces of her parents, receding in the mist. The panic of reaching for a place to stand and finding nothing solid beneath her.
She ought to remember it. She had experienced it often enough.
Some dreams, she mused, seem so clear, so significant—until you wake up, and then they slip like water through your fingers and vanish into the pool of irretrievable memory. But others are as real as yesterday’s heartburn, returning again and again until they become familiar, if unwelcome, companions.
Such was this dream, a nightmare that had followed her for years, haunting her sleep and prophesying of things to come.
Now, with the diagnosis of cancer, Grace found herself dragged into the ultimate undertow, the one that would, once and for all, end not with drifting but with drowning.
And the downward spiral had begun during the second semester of her freshman year, the morning after that terrible snowstorm.
Grace awoke to the noise of banging and shouting drifting up toward the dormer bedroom. She pried her eyes open to peer at the clock on her bedside table. A little after eight-thirty. The sun was shining, but the room was still frigid. She pulled on a chenille bathrobe over her flannel pajamas and dragged herself down the stairs.
The living room was warm—apparently Liz and Lovey had slept on the floor in there and kept the gas logs burning all night. Liz, still wrapped in blankets, sat upright with her back to the sofa, looking groggy. Lovey was standing with the front door open, talking to someone.
Grace took a couple of steps toward the door and peered over Lovey’s shoulder. It was a man wearing a dark blue down jacket and a disturbed expression.
“Yes, officer,” Lovey was saying, “she lives here. Yes, we’re just fine. As you can see, we’ve got gas, and I’m sure the power will be back on soon.”
Officer. Grace blinked against the brightness of sunlight on snow and finally registered the patch on the man’s shoulder, the badge on his chest. Beyond him, at the curb, she could see a white pickup truck with a Buncombe County sheriff’s logo on the side.
“What’s going on?”
Lovey turned. “Grace, hey. Sorry about the noise. This officer was just checking on folks in the neighborhood, I guess.” She turned back to the deputy. “We all stayed up pretty late last night—no classes today, you know.”
“Who was that on the phone?” Lovey asked.
Liz reached for the bread. “Grace’s daddy. You can set your watch by him. We were just having an interesting conversation about her parents’ sex life when y’all came in to dinner.”
Tess speared her with a reprimanding look. “Be nice, Liz.”
“Me?” Liz sprayed crumbs of garlic bread across the table. “I’m nice.”
“Sure you are. Making rude comments about Grace’s parents is just the way you show affection.”
Lovey jumped into the fray. “Tess is right, Liz. Grace cooked this lovely meal for us. I’d think you’d be grateful—at least grateful enough to get off her case for five minutes.”
“I am grateful.” Liz lifted her hands in a show of mock ecstasy. “Hallelujah! I’m really thankful Grace can cook.”
“That’s more than we can say for you.” Tess arched her eyebrows. “When it’s your turn, we get peanut butter sandwiches.”
“I’m telling you, I’m grateful.” Liz folded her hands, closed her eyes, and bowed her head in an exaggerated show of piety. “O great powers of the Universe,” she intoned in a drawling voice like a traveling evangelist, “thank you, thank you, thank you for this won-derful spaghetti, and for the hands that prepared it. And for the salad. And for the bread. And for the garlic and the butter on the bread. And for the dessert—” She peered through her fingers. “Is there dessert?”
Grace suppressed a laugh and nodded. “Lemon meringue pie.”
“Oh, yes, halle-lu-jah for the lemon pie. And for the evolution that has brought us tomato paste and kitchen appliances and opposable thumbs. And—”
“Amen,” Tess interrupted.
“I wasn’t finished,” Liz complained. “There’s a lot more to be thankful for. Evolutionary development took a very long time, you know.”
“Right,” Lovey said. “But the spaghetti’s getting cold.”
-4-
THE STORM
The storm gained force. By eight o’clock four inches of snow had piled up on the front steps, and huge flakes still drifted down in the light of the streetlamps. Traffic ceased to pass by on the main street down the hill. The whole city grew white and silent.
Lovey shut the front door and came into the living room stomping off her shoes, her hair plastered with wet snow and her cheeks red with cold. “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she said. “Let’s go play in the snow.”
They all layered up, put on boots and coats, and retrieved empty packing boxes from the basement crawlspace. The hill in front of the house made for perfect sliding, and the flattened cardboard served as a pretty good makeshift sled. They careened down the street and trudged back up, over and over again, laughing and shouting and skidding into one another. When the cardboard got soggy and began to fall apart, Tess initiated a snowball fight, and they pummeled each other until they were all panting, exhausted, and soaked through.
Grace had never had so much fun. She whooped and hollered louder than any of them, wrestled them to the ground and pushed snow down their necks. And when they all trooped into the house, changed into flannel pajamas, and sat around drinking hot chocolate and telling stories, Grace suspected the warmth that filled her veins wasn’t entirely from the flannels or the cocoa or the flickering fire.
A little after ten, the power went out and the phone lines went dead. The loss was barely an inconvenience, since the little house had a gas log fireplace in the living room and a gas stove in the kitchen. They lit candles, dragged blankets and pillows into the living room, and sat on the floor around the coffee table.
Tess leaned against the sofa and pulled a blanket around her. “This is like the sleepovers we used to have when we were kids.” She sipped at her cocoa. “Who made this? It’s great.”
“I did.” Liz raised a hand. “See, I can cook.”
“If you want to live on hot chocolate and peanut butter.”
Lovey laughed. “So, shall we stay up all night talking?”
Liz lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Sounds good to me. Tell us about small-town life, Grace. Come on.”
Grace stared into the shifting blue haze from Liz’s cigarette. “Well, there’s not much to tell. We live in a farmhouse out in the country between Greenville and Spartanburg. My dad owns a hardware store—not a chain store, but one of the old-fashioned kind with big aluminum bins of nails and nuts and bolts. People come from all over the county to do business with him. Well, you’ve met him; you know. With his personality he could sell ice cube trays to a polar bear. When I was little I used to sit on the floor between the aisles and play with the bolts, pretending I was a princess and this was my treasure.”
Liz chuckled. “You were a princess, honey. At least in your daddy’s eyes. That’s why your mother—”
Grace threw up her hands. “Do not—I repeat, do not—start psychoanalyzing my family again.”
“Ignore her,” Lovey said. “I want to hear about your mother.”
“Mama stayed home and took care of me and Daddy. I guess you’d call her a housewife, except that she never quite fit the stereotype. She didn’t like housework much—I learned to cook out of self-defense—and she always had her nose in a book. Until recently, I hadn’t thought much about it, but I get the impression she would rather have been doing something else.”
“What kind of something else?” Tess asked.
Grace hesitated. She had little experience talking about herself, and even less speculating about her mother’s unfulfilled dreams.
“I’m not sure,” she said at last. “She reads a lot of fiction—not pot-boilers or romances, but real fiction—classics like Tolstoy and Dickens and Victor Hugo, and modern writers like Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. She keeps all these notes on what she reads—pages and pages, whole notebooks full. She’s never said so, but I think she might have wanted to be a literature professor.”
“But never got the chance,” Liz said. “She got married and had you instead.”
“Yes. She passed on her love of reading to me, but not much else. On the inside, at least, I’m more like my father. Or maybe I just want to be like him. Everybody adores him. He’s so funny.”
“So are you,” said Lovey. “You just never had Liz for a comic partner before.”
Liz stubbed out her cigarette and wrapped her hands around her mug of chocolate. “Yeah, that’s us. Abbott and Costello. George and Gracie. Rowan and Martin.”
Grace cut her a glance. “Jekyll and Hyde.”
“Which one am I?” Liz asked, then held up a hand to put a halt to Grace’s response. “Never mind. Don’t answer that.”
“You were telling us about your father,” Lovey prodded. “How everybody adores him.”
“Including you, right?” Liz nodded in Grace’s direction. “And you’re still his little girl, even now, when you’re all grown up.”
“Is that so bad?”
Liz shrugged. “I don’t know. People can let you down. When you put them on a pedestal, and they fall off, you can get beat up pretty bad from the flying debris.”
No one responded right away, but everyone was listening. At last Tess said, “You’re not talking about Grace’s family anymore, are you, Liz?”
“I guess not.” She grew pensive, chewing at her lower lip. “My folks split when I was just a kid. My mother left, ran off with—with someone else. Took us to school one morning, waved good-bye, and disappeared. I never saw her again, except once, a year later, when we had to go to court for the custody hearing. My dad got me and my brother and sister, and did OK raising us, too. But it broke him. He wasn’t the same afterward. He loved us, I suppose, but he never really got over it. He was physically there but emotionally absent.”
No one was laughing now.
“How does anybody get over being abandoned like that?” Tess said.
“You go on,” Liz answered, her voice low and fierce. “You find strength inside. You learn not to base your self-image on what other people say or do.” She blew out a pent-up breath. “You guard yourself.”
Tess leaned forward. “But if you guard yourself too much, you never let anybody close enough to love you.”
“Could be.” Liz stared into the fire. “But love is pretty much overrated in my book. Love is just a chink in the armor, a place for the knife to slip in.” She ducked her head. “Let’s talk about somebody else for a while.”
Lovey came to the rescue. “My parents are divorced, too. My daddy is a farmer, and apparently it wasn’t the life my mother wanted. They broke up when I was in high school—couldn’t live with each other, but couldn’t quite live without each other, either. They both married other people, and somehow managed to stay friends through it all. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, it’s kind of like an extended family reunion, with four parents and half a dozen grandparents and all the kids and stepkids. Even a couple of step-grandkids, since my stepfather has a daughter in her late twenties.”
“Leave It to Beaver—only with a lot more people in the house,” Grace quipped. She glanced in Liz’s direction to see if she was OK. To her relief, Liz nodded and winked in her direction, then lit another cigarette and blew a perfect smoke ring toward the ceiling.
“What about you, Tess?” Lovey asked. “What’s your family like?”
Tess swirled the chocolate in her cup and drained it. “The last functional family in North America,” she chuckled. “Boringly normal. My father is an Episcopal priest.”
“A priest?”
“Yep. A bishop, actually.”
Grace gaped at her. “Your father is a bishop, and you never told us?”
“It’s no big deal. He runs the diocese, just like your father runs his hardware store.”
“Not exactly the same thing,” Grace said.
“Isn’t it? Everybody has a job to do. When you grow up seeing the church from the inside out, you don’t get caught up in the pomp and grandeur of the purple robes. A bishop isn’t some untouchable holy person. He’s a troubleshooter, a manager. A referee sometimes. Do you know what my father does mostly? He goes around to the churches in his diocese trying to settle petty squabbles between priests and parishioners. I think he was happier when he was just a parish priest, before they made him a bishop. He really likes being a pastor. And he doesn’t get to do that much any more.”
“What about your mother?” Lovey asked.
“Mom is—well, she’s a bishop’s wife. That’s a whole job in itself. Now that my sister and I are grown and gone, she does a lot of work with the church women—”
“You mean hosting teas and needlepointing pew pads?” Liz’s voice carried a sarcastic edge, and Grace flinched inwardly at the insult.
Tess, however, seemed unruffled. “Not exactly. She went to seminary, too—that’s where she and Dad met. She has an M.Div. and a Master’s Degree in psychology. You’d like her, Liz. The two of you would have a lot in common. She spends a good deal of her time counseling women—mostly the wives of priests. She conducts seminars on family dynamics and spirituality. To tell the truth, she’s more of a pastor these days than my dad is.”
“So,” Grace ventured, “you sound like you love both of your parents, and respect them. But you—”
“Avoid church like the plague?” Tess gave a wry grin. “You could say I’m on sabbatical. I’ve spent my life in the church, was practically born in the nave and weaned on communion wafers. I could recite most of the Eucharist service by the time I learned to read ‘See Jane run.’ And in many ways I love the church. But I need to take some time off to do a little evaluating of my own faith, figure out my place in the church—if there is a place for me.”
“And your dad’s OK with that?”
“He’d be happier if I still went to church while I was doing my evaluating,” Tess admitted. “But it’s a matter of conscience.”
“Wait a minute,” Liz interrupted. “Are you saying your conscience is keeping you from going to church? Damn. That’s a first.”
Tess fell silent for a minute. At last she said, “I can’t support a church that refuses to ordain women.”
Grace stared at Tess. “Where I grew up no one would even raise the question of whether women could be ordained. That would be heresy. Men are the preachers and women are their wives. Period.”
Liz made a face but said nothing.
“Well, at least men would say that.” Grace went on. “Preachers in particular. Men have the power. Women care for the children and make coffee and organize Vacation Bible School and coordinate potluck dinners. Nobody questions it. That’s just the way things are done.”
“Maybe it’s high time somebody ought to question it,” said Lovey.
“Tess,” Grace asked after a momentary lapse, “is this because—because you want to be a priest?”
Tess stared at her for a full minute, then began to laugh. “Lord help us, Grace, me? I’m a writer. I might be able to concoct a decent sermon or two. But I don’t have the heart for it, don’t have the gifts and calling. I’m too impatient; I live too much in my own head. Me, a priest? Not likely.”
“Then why is it so important to you?”
Tess didn’t answer. Lovey reached out a hand and laid it on Tess’s arm. When she spoke, her voice was low and quiet. “Because her mother had the gifts and the calling,” Lovey said. “Because her mother should have been a priest.”
“For an agnostic blonde cheerleader, you’re pretty insightful,” Tess said, her voice almost a whisper. “Yes, my mother should have been a priest. And my father, for all his intelligence and all his love, can’t see it.”
It was nearly two-thirty when Grace and Tess climbed the stairs to the dormer bedroom. The living room had been warm and cozy with the gas logs blazing, but upstairs it was so cold, Grace could see her own breath. She hoped the power would come on before morning.
She got into bed, pulled up the quilts, and lay on her side staring out the window. The storm was over. The snow had stopped, and as the clouds parted, a bright half-moon shone down, glittering the landscape with pale blue sparkles.
Late as it was, Grace couldn’t sleep. She kept rehashing Liz’s insistent questions about her family. Did her parents love each other? Was her mother really a black hole of depression? Questions she had never dared to ask, challenges that mauled and twisted her image of family like a string of paper dolls in a hurricane.
Nobody understands what goes on inside a marriage except the two people involved, Liz had said. And sometimes they don’t even get it.
But what did Liz know? She wasn’t a psychiatrist. She wasn’t married. She hadn’t even lived in a two-parent household for most of her life. She was just blowing smoke, regurgitating stuff she’d learned in her psych class.
Nevertheless, Grace tossed in her bed for more than an hour before succumbing to a restless and fitful sleep. In her dreams she heard her father’s easy laugh, recalled her mother’s tight-lipped silence. She could see their faces, far away, blurred by rain and mist.
And in the dream she was a child again, frantically trying to tread water, to keep her head above the crest of a wave. Forked streaks of lightning split a sky crowded with menacing clouds.
She gasped for air as the billows rolled and pitched around her. For a second or two she could feel the ocean floor beneath her feet—could reach it, just barely, if she stretched and stood on tiptoe. And then the current sucked the sand away and pulled her out into the darkness, alone, adrift on a bottomless sea.
-5-
THE MORNING AFTER
Even thirty years later, Grace could still recall the vivid details of that dream. The veiled faces of her parents, receding in the mist. The panic of reaching for a place to stand and finding nothing solid beneath her.
She ought to remember it. She had experienced it often enough.
Some dreams, she mused, seem so clear, so significant—until you wake up, and then they slip like water through your fingers and vanish into the pool of irretrievable memory. But others are as real as yesterday’s heartburn, returning again and again until they become familiar, if unwelcome, companions.
Such was this dream, a nightmare that had followed her for years, haunting her sleep and prophesying of things to come.
Now, with the diagnosis of cancer, Grace found herself dragged into the ultimate undertow, the one that would, once and for all, end not with drifting but with drowning.
And the downward spiral had begun during the second semester of her freshman year, the morning after that terrible snowstorm.
Grace awoke to the noise of banging and shouting drifting up toward the dormer bedroom. She pried her eyes open to peer at the clock on her bedside table. A little after eight-thirty. The sun was shining, but the room was still frigid. She pulled on a chenille bathrobe over her flannel pajamas and dragged herself down the stairs.
The living room was warm—apparently Liz and Lovey had slept on the floor in there and kept the gas logs burning all night. Liz, still wrapped in blankets, sat upright with her back to the sofa, looking groggy. Lovey was standing with the front door open, talking to someone.
Grace took a couple of steps toward the door and peered over Lovey’s shoulder. It was a man wearing a dark blue down jacket and a disturbed expression.
“Yes, officer,” Lovey was saying, “she lives here. Yes, we’re just fine. As you can see, we’ve got gas, and I’m sure the power will be back on soon.”
Officer. Grace blinked against the brightness of sunlight on snow and finally registered the patch on the man’s shoulder, the badge on his chest. Beyond him, at the curb, she could see a white pickup truck with a Buncombe County sheriff’s logo on the side.
“What’s going on?”
Lovey turned. “Grace, hey. Sorry about the noise. This officer was just checking on folks in the neighborhood, I guess.” She turned back to the deputy. “We all stayed up pretty late last night—no classes today, you know.”
