Wherever Grace Is Needed (20 page)

Read Wherever Grace Is Needed Online

Authors: Elizabeth Bass

BOOK: Wherever Grace Is Needed
13.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Something between them—a tentative connection—had ruptured.
“Thank you,” she said, sadly.
After Ray had gone, the rest of their audience filtered away. Except for Muriel. She hovered at Grace’s side. “You sure are moving in fast.”
Grace closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Nothing happened. It was just like he said—I was showing him my old tattoo.”
“Wow. There’s a tactic I never tried.”
“It wasn’t a tactic!” With a growl of frustration, Grace said, “I’m going for a walk.”
“Good idea. Try to get him out of your system.”
As Grace turned to shut the gate to the side yard behind her, she saw that Crawford was gaining on her.
“I thought I’d go next door and check on Jordan,” he said, a flush creeping up his neck. “She seemed sort of upset.”
“That’s nice of you.”
She attempted to sound neutral, although the idea of Crawford chasing after Jordan gave her a chill. Like watching a bunny chasing a fox.
He shrugged and peeled off to the left, to the West house. A few seconds later, she heard someone calling Crawford’s name. It was Lily, standing on Lou’s porch, facing the Carter house. She obviously didn’t know where he’d gone.
Or who he’d gone after.
Grace took in a deep breath and then breathed it out slowly. This was life. It went on. There were always more tattoo scars in the making.
25
G
RACE
, R
EADJUSTING
“T
his is going to take a while.”
Crawford’s straight-up, matter-of-fact observation was obviously not intended to have the demoralizing effect on Grace that it did.
Not that it took Crawford to tell her that she was going to be tied up in this current project for . . . well, maybe forever. All she had to do was look around her. The bedroom that had once been Steven’s now served as command central for Rigoletto’s on-line. Grace’s computer sat on Steven’s old student desk, next to a three-drawer file cabinet containing the store’s paper records going back to 2006, which she still needed to sort through.
In Portland, over Christmas, she had been too distraught to do much more than toss everything in boxes and load it onto the U-Haul. Now she was paying for her disorganization. New and used CDs lay everywhere, piling up on tabletops and windowsills. And these were just from the boxes she had opened. The unopened ones were stacked in the closet alongside Steven’s abandoned early eighties wardrobe items. Milk crates dotted the floor, filled with LPs and even some 78s that in moments of madness she had accepted as trades.
Also scattered about the room was her push puppet collection. She’d opened that box by mistake and then had been unable to resist taking them all out and showing Crawford, who’d seemed underwhelmed. Dominic had been more impressed by the old-fashioned toys. Grace owned about forty of them, most given to her by her dad when she was little, or more recently sent to her by Sam on his travels.
She absently fiddled with one now—a milkmaid her father had sent her when she was a girl, from a trip to Switzerland. Push the plunger under the pedestal that the little segmented figure stood on and she collapsed in a heap. Release it, she popped back up again. The action seemed to soothe her, like those Chinese worry balls some people used. There was so much work ahead. She wished she could make herself rebound as quickly as a push puppet.
Transferring the inventory of Rigoletto’s to its new on-line home was taking longer than she’d thought it would. And that was even with many of the used CDs going into batches for immediate eBay auction. Crawford was tackling that task now—sorting through several hundred used CDs and making sure the batches of twenty-five to be auctioned didn’t have duplicates. Meanwhile Grace cataloged, photographed, and priced the better selections.
“I should have done this years ago,” she said, putting the milkmaid aside.
“Why didn’t you?” Crawford asked.
“Because I had my store. It kept me busy enough.”
“Why don’t you open a store here?”
She shook her head. She didn’t have time now for a brick-and-mortar store. She could take care of her on-line business from home and keep an eye on her dad at the same time.
So maybe everything had all turned out for the best.
Sure. Time to write Ben a thank-you note.
“Grace?”
She turned abruptly.
“You know how you told me to tell you if you started to space out?” Crawford asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’re spacing out.”
She laughed. “Thanks.”
Lou came down the hall and poked his head in. “You’re not putting any of my records on the Internet, are you?”
This was a running concern with him. He eyed the records with suspicion.
“No, Dad. This is all Rigoletto’s stock.”
He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done it.”
“What?”
“Gotten rid of your store.”
“I haven’t, Dad. I’ll still have it—it’s just in cyberspace now.”
“It’s not the same, though, is it?”
“It’s better,” she said. “I don’t have to pay rent on a building.”
She kept her voice cheerful, but it was a lie. Even if sometimes she had felt like a slave to it, she had loved going to the store every day. When she went back to Portland in December, staying at her Mom’s while she cleared out the duplex, closed up shop, and packed all her inventory away, it had been hard sometimes to get work done at the store for all the knocking on the door. Old customers came by to lament the closing, and several of her musician friends who had played at Rigoletto’s talked her into having one last big New Year’s bash. When Sasha, her friend who was a cellist with the Oregon Symphony, had started playing “Auld Lang Syne,” she’d feared she just might lose it.
What am I doing?
she’d wondered. Suddenly it had all felt like a mistake, as if she’d fishtailed on the highway and discovered herself going in the wrong direction. And her doubts were compounded by the subtle yet constant echo of doom her mother kept up as she was staying at her house.
“I hope you’re not making a mistake,” she’d kept repeating, with the underlying meaning that there was very little doubt that Grace
was
making a grave error. “It’s selfish of Lou and the boys to pressure you to move down there.”
“The
boys
are both in their thirties, and no one’s pressured me to do anything.”
“Well of course they wouldn’t come right out and say it . . . But look what you’ve already given up—your store, and Ben.”
“I didn’t give up Ben. He left.”
“But if you had been here . . .”
The very idea had made Grace huff in frustration. “You didn’t even like Ben!” she reminded her mom. “But now when he’s gone, you act like losing him is the tragedy of my life.”
“I just don’t want you to end up alone.”
“I won’t.” She smiled. “I’ll have Dad.”
Her mother had looked on her pityingly and shook her head.
Her stepfather had no opinion about her moving, and Natalie and Jake reacted to the news as if it wasn’t that big a deal anyway. And it probably wasn’t, to them. They were both so wrapped up in their teenage lives, her problems could only seem dull and remote. Strange, Grace thought, that she missed Dominic and Lily over Christmas more than she’d ever missed her own stepbrother and stepsister in Oregon.
Someone was at the front door. When Lou left the room to get it, Crawford asked, “It’s on account of him that you came back, isn’t it?”
She opened her mouth to deny it but admitted, “Mostly.”
“I wouldn’t move across the country to take care of my dad,” he grumbled.
“Maybe in twenty or thirty years things will look different.”
“Or maybe Dad’ll still be married and I won’t have to worry about it.”
“
Still
married?” Had Wyatt gotten married while no one was looking?
“Dad’s engaged,” Crawford said. “To Pippa.”
“Who?”
“Pippa—his girlfriend.” He scowled and added, “One of his girlfriends. He said he thought we needed stability. I think he just means he wants somebody in the house to stay with me while he’s away. But I’m sixteen.”
“I’m amazed.”
“Amazed by what?” Lily asked from the doorway. She leaned against the frame, hugging her book to her chest. Grace recognized it as her journal—the Lily West equivalent of Linus’s blue blanket.
Grace didn’t feel at liberty to discuss Wyatt’s impending marriage with the neighbors, since she’d just heard about it herself, so there was a short, awkward pause before Crawford told Lily the news. “Dad’s engaged to Pippa.”
“I thought he liked the other one better,” Lily said.
“I think he did, but turned out she had a husband.”
So it was Pippa by default, evidently.
“Wow.” Lily sat in the folding chair next to the desk and looked at Grace. “Can I borrow a pen?”
Grace obligingly slid a ballpoint across the desktop. “You’re going to have that book filled up before long.”
“I know.” Lily lamented, nibbling her lip as she started making notes.
“I’m surprised you don’t blog,” Grace said, “or use Twitter.”
Lily gaped at her for a moment. “I’m not an exhibitionist! I’m writing
private
thoughts. That way, if I ever decide to become a writer, I’ll have lots of material. I mean, it’ll all be here, right?”
“That might depend on what kind of book you’ll want to write.”
“Coming-of-age books are
perennially
popular,” Lily said. “And I’m coming of age right now, so it’s important to get it all down, and experience everything.” She paused to write for a moment before adding casually, “Like the spring dance, for instance.”
Crawford didn’t pick up on her cue, so she continued, “Last year I didn’t want to go, but I really need to go to the spring dance this year to see what it’s like. Maybe I should be helping you all out so I could splurge on a new dress.”
At last she’d caught Crawford’s attention. “A dress!” he exclaimed in disgust. “Why would you waste your money on that? Money should be saved for important things.”
Lily sat up straighter. Grace, too. It wasn’t often Crawford got riled up.
“Important things like cars?” Lily guessed, a hint of disdain creeping into her voice despite what was probably a mighty effort to keep it out.
“Well . . . yeah,” he said. “Anyhow, you could get a dress for next to nothing at Goodwill.”
Lily tapped the pen on the desk, evidently visualizing herself at the big dance in a thrift store prom dress. “That sounds a little Jordany.”
There was a pause before Crawford ventured to ask, “I guess Jordan always has plenty of dates to the dance?”
“She hates dances!” Lily said. “Who’d want to take her anyway?”
Grace was torn between wanting to get involved in their conversation and an even sharper desire to shut it out. Being a teenager had been stressful. Watching other people going through it felt a little like rubbernecking at a traffic accident.
She concentrated on inputting an out-of-print Beethoven CD of violin concertos that she’d had for a while. The Internet was actually the best place to sell something like this, since random customers browsing in a store wouldn’t know why a certain recording, and a used one at that, could cost twice as much as most other CDs. It took a specific buyer.
Lou came back in, an album tucked under his arm. “I thought I’d give you this one to sell.”
It was an old CBS edition of
Pictures at an Exhibition.
Very common. “You should hold on to that,” she said, continuing typing. “It’s not worth anything.”
Too late, she realized her words had lacked tact.
“It’s a great record!” he said, nearly shouting.
The two kids stopped their discussion of the spring dance to look up at them.
“It
is
a great recording, but it’s Leonard Bernstein, Dad. It’s been reissued a bijillion times. That’s why it’s not worth anything.”
Her words did little to smooth his ruffled feathers. “It’s worth something to me.”
“All the more reason you should keep it for yourself,” she said.
He glowered at the piles of records and CDs and stalked away.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Lily said to Grace. “Why would you tell him his record was worthless?”
“Because it is. Just because something’s good doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot.”
Lily pursed her lips. “That’s a mercenary viewpoint.”
Crawford snorted.
“What?” Lily asked.
“She’s running a business here. Money’s the whole point, idiot.”
Lily sprang to her feet. “I’m not an idiot! I just don’t happen to believe scraping money together is the most important thing in the whole world!”
“Well, what is, then?” Crawford asked.
Her face was mottled red. “Learning—and being smart enough to know not to insult people. Especially people who . . .”
“Who what?” Crawford asked.
“Oh, never mind!” Lily wheeled on the balls of her feet and stormed out the door.
“Lily!” Crawford called after her. He glanced over to Grace and rolled his eyes. “Am I supposed to run after her and apologize?”
“Only if you want to make peace.”
He released a long-suffering sigh. “What was she doing over here anyway?”
“Can’t imagine,” Grace replied.
“She’s always over here and she never does anything.”
“Maybe she enjoys our company.”
His expression darkened and he turned back to his pile of CDs. “Is a prelude different than an impromptu?” He held up two Chopins for her to inspect.
“No, those can go in the same batch,” she told him.
He nodded and seemed absorbed in the task, but a few minutes later he blew out a breath. “I guess I
should
go over and apologize, but it seems a little stupid, doesn’t it? I mean, she’s obviously not an idiot. She’d have to be a moron to think I really meant it.”

Other books

King's Blood by Judith Tarr
Changing the Past by Thomas Berger
20 x 3 by Steve Boutcher
Reparation by Sawyer Bennett
Great Bitten: Outbreak by Fielding, Warren
Echoes in the Dark by Robin D. Owens
Eldorado by Storey, Jay Allan