Circle of Grace, page 5
“You’re Grace Benedict?” The man peered at Grace.
“Yes.” She ran a hand through her hair and yawned.
“Mind if I come in for a minute?”
“Well, I guess so—” Lovey stood back and opened the door a little wider. The deputy stomped the snow off his boots and stepped inside the house. And moved in Grace’s direction.
“Miss Benedict, could I speak to you—ah, in private?”
Grace frowned. “There’s no need for that, officer. Have a seat, and we’ll get you some coffee.”
“No coffee, thanks, I—uh—” His eyes darted around the room. “OK, well, here’s the thing. We got a call from your mother—”
“My mother?”
“Yes ma’am.”
Liz came alive. “Jeez-o-Pete, Grace! The phone lines go down and your parents send out the National Guard? This is too much.”
The officer ignored Liz and kept his eyes focused on Grace. “You might want to sit down.” When she sank onto the sofa, he removed his hat and perched on the edge of the coffee table.
Grace was fully awake now. She accepted a cup of coffee from Lovey, but her eyes never left the deputy’s face, taking in every detail—the circular orbit around his head where his hat had pressed his hair down, the ruddy complexion sprinkled with freckles, the way he twisted the hat in his beefy hands. He was young—younger than she would have expected. Twenties, maybe early thirties. He wore no wedding ring. His lips were chapped, and he kept licking them.
“Officer, is something wrong?”
“Yes ma’am, I’m afraid so.”
Grace almost laughed out loud at the incongruity of being called “ma’am” by this fresh-faced deputy, but the inclination came from nerves, not humor.
“Like I said, we got a call from your mother. After the storm hit last night, she tried to telephone you.”
“But the phone lines weren’t working,” Grace said.
“Yes ma’am. That’s what we told her.”
“Well, as you can see, we’re all just fine,” Lovey said brightly. “Now, how about that coffee, officer?”
The deputy didn’t reply. He just kept staring at Grace.
Grace thought of something, and frowned. “If the lines were down, how did she get through to you?”
“Oh. Well, the storm brought down some pretty big tree limbs,” the officer said. “Took out phone lines up on Merrimon and a couple of transformers in this area. Crew’s working on it right now; don’t know how long it’ll take. We still got power and phones downtown.”
“So you could call her back, tell her you’ve seen us, assure her we’re OK?”
“I could, ma’am. But—” He scratched his head and looked away.
“But what?”
“Well, ma’am, your mama was calling because—” He sighed heavily. “This ain’t easy.”
“Come on, spit it out,” Liz demanded.
The officer gazed up at her mildly. “Just gimme a minute, OK?” He turned back to Grace. “There was an accident with a semi out on the highway down by Greenville. It jackknifed, and—” He pinched at his lower lip. “Nobody oughtn’t to have been on the road last night. But it seems your father—”
“Daddy?” Grace’s mouth went dry.
“Yes’m. I hate to be the one to tell you like this.”
She grasped at whatever straw of hope her mind could latch onto. “He’s in the hospital?”
“No ma’am, I’m afraid not. Both of ’em died at the scene.”
Grace felt the weight of a hand settle on her shoulder. She reached up and dug her fingers into Tess’s arm. “Wait. What do you mean, both of them? My mother called; she’s all right, isn’t she?” She didn’t wait for the deputy to answer, but rushed on. “The driver of the semi?”
“No ma’am. The truck driver’s not hurt bad. A broken leg is all, I think. He feels real bad about it, even though it weren’t his fault. There was somebody in the car with your daddy. A woman. Maybe a friend of your daddy’s or something.” He pressed the bridge of his nose with a broad thumb. “It was a bad night, and they’d been drinking. I’m so sorry—”
Grace felt the room beginning to spin. “Someone was in the car with Daddy,” she repeated dully. “Someone else, and—”
Suddenly her mind cleared. “Car, you said. They were in a car.”
“Yes ma’am. Some kind of little compact. Didn’t stand no chance against a semi.”
“And they’d been drinking.”
“Seems so.”
“But Daddy doesn’t drink. And he doesn’t drive a car. He drives a pickup, a red pickup with Benedict’s Hardware on the door.” She looked eagerly around at Tess and Liz and Lovey, all of whom wore somber, pained expressions. “There’s been some kind of mistake, don’t you see? It wasn’t my father. It was somebody else. It wasn’t Daddy!” Her eyes roamed frantically around the room. “I’ve got to call home. Got to straighten this out.”
The deputy hung his head and looked everywhere except at Grace’s face. “Listen, tell you what. Why don’t you come with me. We can go back to the station and call from there.”
“We’ll all go,” Liz said. “My bug can get through anything.”
Grace felt Tess’s grip on her shoulder tighten, an anchor in the storm.
“Get dressed and go with the deputy,” she said. “We’ll pack some clothes for you and meet you at the sheriff’s office. Call your mother and tell her we’re on our way.”
The funeral was held two days later at Chapel Ridge Baptist Church, three miles from the Benedict home in rural Spartanburg County. The snow had melted, leaving a muddy slush behind. Grace waited in the back of the church with her mother as the pews filled up and whispered conversations swirled around them. Mama, the unrelenting silent boulder past which the stream of nervous chatter flowed, kept her arms folded and her jaws clamped together. But although Grace felt her mother’s presence, her eyes focused only on the dirty footprints that marred the crimson carpet down the center aisle.
Blood and mud.
Her mind conjured up images of her father, lying dead at the scene of the crash. Even though she knew better, the mental image included a picture of his red pickup truck with Benedict’s Hardware painted on the side, crushed under the wheels of a semi.
But the truck had been found intact in a deserted strip-mall parking lot.
A hundred unanswered questions spiraled through Grace’s mind as she waited for the funeral to begin. There had been no mistake. The body recovered at the scene of the accident was her father. The crushed and mangled Ford compact belonged to a woman Grace had never heard of before. Mama said she was an acquaintance of Daddy’s, a customer.
But why had he gone out in a raging snowstorm to meet her? Why was he driving that woman’s car? Why, despite everything Grace knew about her father, did the coroner insist it had been an “alcohol-related accident”? Wasn’t the storm cause enough for a car wreck? A slippery road, limited visibility, an eighteen-wheeler spinning out of control?
Maybe the woman had called him for help, not knowing where else to turn. Maybe she was in trouble, her car stuck in the snow. Maybe he had gone to her aid. It was like him, to do something risky to help someone in need. Everybody knew it. Everybody loved him. But when Grace offered this eminently rational explanation, Mama just shrugged and turned her blank, empty eyes away.
Grace hadn’t seen the remains of the car, hadn’t viewed her father’s broken body. The big walnut box at the front of the church was closed, covered by an American flag that marked Harlan Benedict’s status as a World War II veteran.
She desperately wanted to open the casket, to touch him, to kiss him, to say good-bye. But Mr. Galbraith, the obsequious owner of the funeral home, didn’t think it was a good idea, given the nature of the injuries. All Grace had to go on was her imagination, which was far worse, she suspected, than reality.
The hushed murmurs of the mourners surged around her like a wave, cresting over her and carrying her mind where it didn’t want to go. She felt Mama stiffen at her side, and turned to look. A slim, well-dressed woman in her thirties had just entered, slipping past Grace and her mother to take a seat in the back row. The woman’s eyes locked with Mama’s for just a second, and something passed between them. A chill. A recognition.
Grace was pretty sure she had never laid eyes on the woman before. Most of the people who crowded into the church were folks she knew by sight if not by name. Customers from the hardware store. Community leaders. Members of the Chamber of Commerce. Daddy’s friends, all of them. He had so many friends.
Only a few of the multitude assembled there were strangers to Grace. The woman who had just come in. A burly man on crutches, with his leg in a cast, whom Grace assumed to be the driver of the semi. Another lady on the right side. A third one down the row on the outside aisle. She didn’t know these people. But then, a grown daughter who had gone away to college couldn’t be expected to recognize all her parents’ acquaintances.
A hand touched Grace’s elbow and ushered her forward, to where Tess, Liz, and Lovey were already seated in the front row. Mr. Galbraith had also said that the girls shouldn’t sit in the family pew with Grace and her mother—it just wasn’t done—but Grace had insisted. She wanted them there. Needed them.
She moved into the pew beside Tess, scooting over to make room for her mother on the aisle. Mama held herself taut and straight, not even allowing her shoulder to touch her daughter’s arm. In her black dress and pearls, Mama looked the part of the grieving widow, but her eyes were dry sockets, devoid of emotion. As usual, she was holding everything inside.
The quiet background music of the organ ceased, and a tall, thin man in a dark blue suit got up and went to the pulpit. The minister. His name was Rogers, Grace thought. Or maybe Roberts. She couldn’t remember.
The minister cleared his throat and announced the first hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Tess squeezed Grace’s hand, helped her to her feet, and held the hymnal out between them.
Grace glanced down the row. Liz, the worst singer on the face of the earth and a self-proclaimed atheist to boot, struggled to follow along. Lovey evidently knew the song by heart—agnostic or not, she was from Georgia, after all. Few others in the congregation seemed to need their hymnals. They sang every verse, loud enough to drown out the organ, but most of the voices sounded choked and strained.
When the final echoes of the hymn rose into the vaulted ceiling and faded away, Pastor Rogers—his name was printed in the program—went to the pulpit again and began to preach the funeral sermon.
He spoke, as Grace had fully expected, of the glory of heaven, where there would be no more pain and no more tears. Of the wonders awaiting the faithful, and how death was swallowed up in victory.
He acknowledged the presence of Jake Jordan, the truck driver from Augusta who had just been released from the hospital, and made it clear that Jake was in no way responsible for Daddy’s death. But he did not mention the woman who had died in the same accident that claimed her father, or the fact that Daddy had been driving her car, or that both of them had supposedly been drinking.
And something else was missing, too. The eulogizing. The personal accolades. The assurance that the dearly departed was being welcomed through the pearly gates even as they mourned him. Pastor Rogers seemed tense. There was a carefulness about him, as if he were weighing every word and holding his breath as he balanced them into place, like stacking eggshells or building a house of spun sugar.
“Harlan Benedict was a man loved by…so many who knew him,” the minister said cautiously. “A man whose death will make an enormous impact on his wife, Ramona, and his daughter, Grace—” Here he paused and nodded toward Grace and her mother.
Mama didn’t look up or acknowledge the condolences. She sat like a statue, her dry eyes fixed on the middle distance between the front pew and the pulpit. Grace followed her mother’s gaze to the matching sprays of white lilies at either end of the coffin, their pristine blossoms mingling with the blood-red stripes of the flag. Her eyes burned and watered, and she blinked hard, forcing her attention back to the blurred, wavery image of the minister.
“Harlan was a businessman, a father, a husband, a friend,” Rogers said. “A generous member of this community who always offered a helping hand to those in need.”
Grace’s mind jerked to the woman in the car with Daddy. But she pushed the thought aside and tried to focus.
The pastor continued, sprinkling platitudes here and there into his funeral address. And then he invited people who had known Grace’s father to speak about what his life had meant to them.
A sound, like the flapping of wings or the rush of fallen leaves, shuddered through the congregation. Someone coughed. A few people shifted. The waiting went on forever, it seemed, until a gray-haired man from the Chamber of Commerce came forward and mumbled a few words that, to Grace’s mind, sounded like jabberwocky. After a while he sat down, and several other people stood in their turn and spoke. No one, of course, mentioned anything about the woman who died in the car with Daddy. It was pretty clear that everyone was trying to dispel the tension that lay like a suffocating blanket over the gathering. But no one succeeded.
Grace’s throat closed up and her breath came in short, shallow gasps, but she couldn’t seem to cry. And through it all Mama sat with her spine straight as a steel reinforcement rod and her lips pressed into a razor-thin line. In the rustling silences that stretched between the testimonials, Grace could hear Mama grinding her teeth, a muffled fingernails-on-chalkboard sound that made her cringe.
Finally, when the last of Daddy’s friends had shuffled awkwardly back to his seat, the minister offered a final prayer, committed Harlan Benedict’s soul into eternity, and motioned for the pallbearers to come forward and remove the casket. Out behind the church, in the muddy cemetery, the coffin was lowered into the rectangular grave and the body was committed to the ground: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.”
All the good-byes had been said. There was nothing left to do but go home and try to eat some of the mountains of food people had brought to the house. At last, it was over.
But for Grace, it was only beginning.
-6-
UNRAVELING
In the wake of her father’s death, Grace began to founder. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t focus. Couldn’t keep the dark waters at bay. Her mind seemed incapable of comprehension, and her grades began to slide. Depression set in, weighing her down until she threatened to capsize and sink altogether. It was all she could do to hang on to the floating debris of a shipwrecked hope.
Daddy was gone, just like that—a snap of the fingers, a blink of an eyelash. She kept saying it over and over again but couldn’t seem to make herself believe it. Whenever she thought of him, she saw him vital and alive, puttering around in the flower beds or waving from the open window of his pickup truck. She heard his laughter inside her head. He wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be.
She ought to go home on weekends and look after her mother, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. As clearly as she saw and heard her father in her mind, she also saw the thin line of her mother’s lips, heard the stony silences. What could Grace possibly have to say to her mother? How could she bear an hour in Mama’s presence, not to mention an entire day or a whole weekend or—God forbid—Spring Break or the Easter holiday?
And so Grace avoided the subject. She didn’t offer to come home, and Mama didn’t ask.
Mama did call—like clockwork, every Friday just before suppertime. But where Grace had once jumped to answer the phone, knowing it would be Daddy, now she dreaded the insistent ringing, the shrill reminder of the voice that would no longer be on the other end. No one would call her Kidlet or tell her the latest joke, or listen to her mundane concerns as if she were the most important person in the world.
Her conversations with Mama were, as they had always been, short and stilted. Dutifully Mama would ask how Grace’s week had been, how her roommates were, how she was getting along. Dutifully Grace would answer. Fine. Fine. Everything was fine. Neither of them spoke about Daddy, both of them resolutely skirting the issue of his death the way you tiptoe around a newly dug grave, scrupulously avoiding stepping on the ground above the coffin.
This particular Friday evening, Liz was in the kitchen charring chicken breasts in the frypan when Grace’s mother called. Grace sat down at the kitchen table with her back to Liz, staring at the clock on the wall next to the window and blinking hard to keep from crying. The longer her mother’s droning monotone went on, the more she wished for her father’s animated voice instead.
The call lasted exactly two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, but it might as well have been two hours. When Grace hung up, Liz cleared her throat.
“Not exactly like the conversations you used to have with your dad.”
Grace turned. Smoke was beginning to emanate from the frying pan, but Liz didn’t seem to notice. “Your breasts are burning.”
Liz looked down at her flat chest. “You think so? They look OK to me.”
Grace began to chuckle, then caught herself and stifled it. It didn’t seem appropriate to laugh when her father was dead and she hadn’t even cried.
“You want to talk?” Liz turned the fire off and scraped at the black crust on the chicken. She didn’t look up.
“About what?”
“About your daddy’s death. About your mother. About all the questions that are weighing you down.”
“Not if you’re going to play shrink, I don’t.”
Liz came to sit at the table. “It might help to get some of it out. When my mother left, I didn’t talk to anyone about it, not for years. But the pain didn’t go away because I kept it inside.”
“That’s different. Your mother abandoned you. My father died in a horrible accident. He didn’t leave voluntarily.” The words were cruel, designed to hurt. Grace could hardly believe she had said such a thing to one of her best friends.
