Grace Grows (7 page)

“Yeah, I got an eleven-point buck, one time.”

“A deer?”

He smiled. “Yeah. We ate it.”

It was just too awful for further comment. “Well. Keep reading and let me know what you think.”

“Okay. This is so pretty, Grace. Thank you.” He folded the scarf up more carefully than he’d extracted it and put it back in the bag. “What are you doing for Christmas?”

“We’ll be at my mom’s in New Jersey. What about you?”

“Me and Bogue are driving home. ’Scuse me. Bogue and I.”

I smiled appreciatively. “You have a car here?”

“Bogue does. He’s only got about ten parking tickets, so far.”

A burst of loud, raucous laughter erupted nearby, so he leaned in close. “I’m gonna go play for you now. I hope I get it right.”

“Okay, Ty.” I patted his arm. “No pressure.”

“Merry Christmas, Grace.” He was so serious. “Thanks for helping me so much, when you didn’t even know me. I wish I had some mistletoe right now.”

I laughed and pushed him toward the stage.

I wonder if Eric Clapton knows it’s possible to play a rolling, hypnotic version of “Bell Bottom Blues” on the piano and mesmerize a hundred people. Ty started with the words “this is for Grace” and to my embarrassment and, okay, acute pleasure, he sang the song to me. Looking so tragic and intense with all the words about making him cry, and crawling across the floor to me, and begging me to take him back. Not to mention the part about dying in my arms. I’d bet anything he did some acting in high school. Peg’s theatrical friends certainly ate it up.

“Are you his girlfriend?” Doris, who was Antonio Banderas’s dresser, asked.

“No!” I laughed. “He’s just being dramatic.”

“He’s really good,” Doris said. “I’m going to bring some people to see him.”

I should have gone home about then, but I stayed and drank two more glasses of wine. Which means, since I’m not a large person, that I sloshed as I serpentined back to the bar to order another.

After 3.5 glasses, I felt a little sick to my stomach. That happens when you are pre-ulcerous and you drink alcohol. Doris got me a glass of water.

Ty, having finished playing, offered to take me outside for some fresh air.

“Good idea,” Peg said, bundling me into my coat before turning back to her show friends.

We walked a couple of blocks. Ty reeled me back in with a firm hand on my elbow whenever I veered off-course.

I was shivering. “I don’t usually drink that much.”

“I didn’t think so,” Ty said. “Hold on.” He tugged my knitted hat down firmly. “You have to keep your ears covered.” He unwound the scarf I had given him from around his neck and wrapped it around mine. He tied it under my chin and tucked the ends into my coat. He had the nicest face. I liked watching it while he did all that tucking and tying.

“Ty. Do you want to know what I’m thinking about?” I asked.

“More than just about anything, Grace.”

“Those girls who sit by the stage when you play.”

He hooked my arm through his and we started walking again.

“Oh, yeah. My street team.”

“They want to kiss you.”

“Do they?”

I snuck a peek at him. “Stop smiling.”

“They’re just girls who like my music.”

“They’re groupies. You have groupies, Ty! They want to shag you!” I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and leaned over with my hands on my knees.

He touched my back. “Are you gonna throw up?”

“Maybe. Give me a minute.”

He rubbed my back in small, warm circles.

I peered up at him. “Why aren’t you drunk? I saw you drinking at least as many drinks as me.”

“I have a pretty high tolerance. And you’re only slightly larger than Mini-Me.”

“Well, anyway,” I muttered to the sidewalk. “I am a terrible person.”

“Why?”

Where to begin? “I said
shag
. That’s a bad word in England.”

“Grace, you’re a beautiful person. One of the most beautiful, ever.”

“Completely unfair, Ty. Singing that song to me. When I’ve been drinking! Stop laughing.”

“Sorry.”

Peg came toward us on the sidewalk, carrying Big Green. Thank God! I straightened slowly, clutching my stomach. Holding myself together.

“I have to go now,” I said to Ty. I started unwinding his scarf to give back to him.

“Don’t worry, babe. I’ll get it later.”

“But . . . I’m afraid you’ll be cold!”

He laughed, a little. “I’ll be okay.”

I woke to knives in the eyeballs.

A tankard of coffee helped with the head pain. Unfortunately, it also sharpened my ability to recall. If only I’d drunk that last half-glass of wine and blacked out.

Cringing self-loathing.

What the hell was wrong with me? I had been completely inappropriate. I had never done anything this ridiculous. Clearly, I did not function rationally in the world of bars, drinking, music, and groupies. Ty and I—well, I liked him and all, but we really had very little to base our friendship on. It was like we were not even of the same species. In the animal kingdom, he’d be a lion and I’d be—I don’t know—a duck.

While Steven drove that afternoon—thanks, Zipcar!—I tried to nap but spent most of the time obsessing about how I might quietly, gently segue out of this troubling friendship. But as we got deeper into New Jersey and closer to my mom’s, I was able to put last night, and Ty, away.

In spite of all the ways she makes me crazy, my spirits always lift in anticipation of Christmas with Julia. She lives near Princeton, in a five-bedroom house that has a sunken living room with a stone fireplace and a huge, flat-screen TV. A granite-countered epicurean kitchen with stainless-steel appliances. A master bedroom suite with a sitting room, fireplace, and jetted bathtub. A swimming pool. She is so clearly overcompensating for our days in the bug-infested studio in Astoria.

Julia has four Christmas trees in the house. A white tree with all-blue lights and ornaments, which is actually kind of nice. Then there is the Santa ornament tree: total multicultural Santa overload. Saint Nick. Sinter Klaas. Pere Noel. Babbo Natale. Hoteiosho and Kaledu Senelis. Black Peter. Then there is the plastic fruit tree, which appeared circa 1989. It’s just a lot of fake bananas and pineapples stuck to the branches, and a Carmen Miranda winged angel at the top. I think she was depressed the year she came up with it. The best tree every year is a real Douglas fir that she festoons with glass icicles and snowflakes, and then she perches about fifty species of fake birds all over it. The birds are pretty; they have real feathers.

My point is, for all that she constantly tries to direct me away from various doom scenarios, my mom is actually a closet optimist, and I know this because of how much she enjoys Christmas. Would someone in an Edvard Munch mental state, who has no small children, grandchildren, or even a boy child, have a working toy railroad set up in the foyer of her McMansion?

She met us at the door with hugs and eggnog.

“No whiskey in yours!” she said to Steven. She had clearly been imbibing for a while.

“Thanks, Julia.” He winked at me over her shoulder.

A big, muscular guy stood up when we came into the living room. He was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a holstered gun.

“José, this is my daughter Grace and her boyfriend Steven.”

We shook hands. José was gorgeous, in that intentionally bald way. I looked at my mom and smiled.

“José is having dinner with us tonight.”

“But first I have to go back to work for a while,” he said. He had a very deep voice.

“José is a detective in Arson,” Julia explained.

“Hey, that sounds interesting,” Steven said.

José smiled. “I have a few stories.”

While my mom and I were in the kitchen slicing cheese, defrosting the shrimp ring, and chopping spinach and water chestnuts for dip, we could hear Steven and José in the TV room talking about burn patterns, gas chromatography, accelerants, and insurance fraud.

“It’s completely inappropriate. We work together on cases,” Julia said.

“Yeah, but look at him.”

She grinned. “He’s thirty-five. Is that shocking?”

“I think it’s great.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “I’m just having fun.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

She came to me and tucked my hair over my shoulders and held my face in her hands. I liked my mom when she was a little drunk. She could be unusually sweet.

“Are you happy, my darling?”

“Yes, Julia.”

“Sometimes you look so serious. Don’t be all work and no fun.”

“I do fun things.”

“I’m not talking about reading books. Does Steven take you out sometimes?”

“Sure, we go to dinner, and movies. And I go out with Peg and Edward.”

I wanted to tell her about my interesting new friend, Tyler Wilkie, but something stopped me.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No! Why?”

“I know that sad look in your eyes. You used to get it about your father. Has he done something to hurt you?”

I took her hands in mine to release her viselike grip on my shoulders. “Julia, he doesn’t hurt me. I hardly ever see him. And when I do, he’s nice.”

“Hm,” she grumbled.

My mom makes chili on Christmas Eve, and we stay up late to watch the midnight mass at the Vatican. Not that we’re Catholic. Julia just likes it. And José is Catholic, so now she has even more reason. I made it through the first fifteen minutes of the mass and told them good night.

Steven was still awake when I got into bed.

“Hey, what do you think of José?” I asked.

“I think he could kick my ass.”

“Yeah, he seems kind of tough.”

Steven grinned. “I bet your mom really likes that about him.”

“Ew. Shut up.”

Steven laughed and turned on his bedside light. He handed me a flat, square turquoise box. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”

“Oh.” I smiled. “You don’t want to give me this tomorrow?”

“No, it’s officially Christmas.”

It was a bracelet, from Tiffany. Three bangles, bound by a single link attached to a silver heart.

“Steven. It’s so pretty. I love it.”

He smiled, pleased with my response. I slid it onto my wrist and admired it. He turned out the light and I sank down under the covers with him.

He pulled up my nightgown and I tried to relax, but I kept thinking about my mother and José downstairs, watching the pope.

Atticus

On New Year’s Eve my dad cooks. A few early-evening hours of visiting and playing catch-up, and then we go our separate ways.

Oh, he takes me somewhere for dinner around my birthday in September. He e-mails me almost daily and every few weeks or so invites me to do something with him. Usually I decline, though, because it starts to feel like too much. Something like love for him starts to creep in, and then I remember not being his priority when I was a kid. And my chest starts to hurt. So I have found that I have to measure how much time I spend with him. Keep it light.

When I was younger I was careful never to let Dan see that I thought anything about him or his life was cool. On top of the normal teenage disenchantment with my parents, I had an extra, thorny layer of pain. I was carrying around my own anger and some of my mom’s, too. For most of my teen years I barely spoke to him, even when we were in the same room.

To his credit, he kept trying with me. He still tries.

Now I try, too.

Dan lives on the top two floors of an old garment factory he owns in SoHo. You use a key in the elevator and it takes you up to his lower floor and then you walk right out into his gigantic living space. It’s furnished with weathered leather couches and his paintings, and it has big windows with an incredible view of New Jersey. One time I came off the elevator as David Bowie was getting on. He owns some of my dad’s paintings.

“You’re Grace, I believe,” Mr. Bowie said.

I eventually closed my mouth. And then opened it again to say yes.

“Your father showed me your photograph.”

“Oh,” I said. Intelligent, reasonably verbal girl becomes idiot.

Tonight it was just the two of us.

I stepped inside the apartment and found twinkling white lights strung all across the ceiling. Maybe he was having a party later.

“Dan?” I called.

“Grace?” There was an alarming, glassy crash overhead. I ran up the iron spiral staircase in the middle of the room.

Dan was standing in the middle of the paint-splattered floor of his studio, grinning. My dad is short. Taller than me, but shorter than my mom. He has shaggy, silvery hair, and—for a man circling sixty—a disconcertingly young face.

“Are you all right?” I searched him for injury, surveyed the room for disaster.