2
GRACE, INTERRUPTED
At first, no one could hear the phone ringing.
Small wonder. The decibel level in the duplex was just short of
what it would have taken to have the cops called on them, but loud
enough to have traumatized Grace’s two elderly and mostly deaf
cats. In addition to the saxophone quartet playing “Powerhouse” in
the small back room, the kitchen was crammed with people
talk-shouting over the noise—friends, friends of friends, and a few
strays with way too much beer in them. In the smoke-filled living
room, where four card tables were wedged between all the other
furniture, the long-awaited Tournament of Stupid Games was in full
swing. Grace didn’t recall Mousetrap being such a noisy enterprise,
although heretofore she’d only seen it played by the under-ten set,
and sober.
It was Amber who finally heard the
ringing, perhaps because her current Twister position cocked her
ear in the right direction. “Grace! Your
phone!”
Grace realized she would never be able
to carry on a conversation down here and made a dash for the
stairs, just missing the card table where the Operation round of
the game battle was raging. A few inches to the right might have
upset the outcome of hours of ferocious competition.
By the time she reached her upstairs
bedroom, she was out of breath. She toed the door shut to block out
the noise from below and picked up the phone. “Zoo! How can we help
you?”
“Grace?”
Every trace of high spirits was flushed
out of Grace’s body in a rush of worry. “Steven? What’s
wrong?”
Her oldest brother wouldn’t call her
unless there was an emergency. Frankly, she was a little surprised
that he had called her for any reason. She usually communicated
with him now through his wife, Denise, who was also a partner in
his medical practice.
“The thing is . . .” He faltered, and
she held her breath in dread. “Dad’s had an accident.”
“Oh, God.” She collapsed forward. She’d
been braced for bad, but now that the bad had arrived, she still
felt like Jell-O inside. “What happened? Is he okay?”
“It was a car accident. That is, a
Chevy Tahoe hit him as he was walking across Guadalupe near
campus.”
“On, the drag? But is
he—?”
“His leg’s broken.”
“Oh, no.” Even as she said it, though,
she felt relief. It could have been so much worse.
On the other hand, a broken bone was no
picnic at any age. And it had to be especially trying for a
seventy-six-year-old man. Especially a peppery seventy-six-year-old
man who was used to being independent.
“Poor Dad!” she exclaimed.
“No kidding,” Steven muttered. “Felled
by a Chevy! I can’t imagine what he was doing on the drag. It’s not
like he has a reason to be anywhere near campus
anymore.”
Pondering why the victim of an auto
accident had positioned himself in front of a car and gotten
himself run over was typical of Steven. It wasn’t a case of blaming
the victim so much as assuming the victim had indecipherable
motives for wanting to be maimed.
“When did the accident happen?” she
asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
The reproach was duly noted. “He was
okay, Grace. He’s just been in the hospital.”
Just been in
the hospital! Spoken like a surgeon. A hospital was a second office
to Steven—a humdrum bone repair shop.
So for a day her father had been laid
up in a hospital bed with serious injuries. During that same day
she had been blithely absorbed in planning for this party, a
housewarming of sorts. Ben had just moved in to her duplex on
Friday.
“I’ll call Dad right away,” she told
Steven.
“Good . . .” He hitched his
throat.
A throat hitch from Steven meant that
he wasn’t quite finished. Grace waited for it.
“Actually, I was wondering . . .” The
hitch again. “The thing is, I’m worried about when Dad gets
discharged. He’s not going to be a hundred percent. He’ll need home
care. I was thinking about hiring someone . . .”
Hired home help. Lou Oliver would never
go for that.
“It would be a different matter if
things were normal here,” Steven continued. “But I’ve got this
blasted conference in St. Louis coming up this week, and Denise . .
.” He paused a moment and began again. “Denise . . .”
Grace leaned forward. “Steven? What’s
happened?”
He coughed. “The thing is, Denise . .
.”
During their recent phone
conversations, her father had been muttering about Steven and
Denise having problems. The bust-up must have come, which would
explain the reason Steven’s brain was short-circuiting every time
he said her name. Highly charged emotional situations often
affected him that way.
“Oh, Steven. Have you two split
up?”
“Yes.”
“When did it happen?”
“Friday.”
And Denise seemed so perfect for him.
In fact, she was exactly like his first wife, Sara. The two women
both had bulldozer personalities, which seemed to be what Steven
gravitated toward.
Poor Steven. “I’m so
sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Steven said. “I’ll have to
leave Orthopedic Partners and start my own practice, though. I
don’t know what I’ll call it. Orthopedic Loner or
something.”
“Why should you have to leave?” she
asked.
“Because Denise and Jack—Dr. Gunther,
the other partner . . . He and Denise . . .”
Oh, God.
He coughed again. “Anyway, I’m speaking
at a conference this week. And since there’s no question of Sam
helping out . . .”
Sam, a journalist, was stationed in
Beirut.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, Grace. . .
.”
“I’ll come down right
away.”
Now that she had agreed, Steven seemed
doubtful. “But you’ve got your thing there. Your CD thing . .
.”
Her “CD thing” was her life. Music
stores were a sputtering business model, but so far Rigoletto’s was
still clawing at the ledge of profitability by its fingertips. It
helped that she had specialized. The store had practically no other
brick and mortar competition in town for the dollars of classical
music obsessives. It also didn’t hurt that she’d cleared a room in
back where she brewed good coffee and had live music on
weekends.
“Ben can baby-sit Rigoletto’s for a
while,” she said.
“Ben? Really?” He sounded
surprised.
“Really,” she assured him. “I can leave
tomorrow.”
“No, I meant, you’re really still with
that guy?”
The one time Ben had met her Austin
family, he hadn’t exactly made a big hit.
That was another reason it had taken
them so long to move in together—although not the biggest. Mild
family opposition had added to Grace’s hunch that they weren’t
fated to be. A fate deficit was a goofy reason to put off doing the
couple thing—she knew that—but she couldn’t help it. Beneath the
realist face she showed the world, there lurked a mushy center of
romanticism. She blamed this on an early addiction to the Brontës,
which gave her the unrealistic expectation that there was a man
wandering the world who would become attached to her with a
fervent, though preferably not doomed, devotion. All her life she’d
kept an eye out for her Heathcliff, her Rochester, a man who would
be able to hear her heart’s desire if she opened the window and
called his name on a stormy night.
Instead, she’d been sent Ben, who a lot
of the time didn’t hear her when she said something from across the
living room. But they had been together for two years. Maybe it
wasn’t devotion, but even dogged inertia had to count for
something. In five months she would be thirty. Most of her friends
were married, with kids. She didn’t want to look back at fifty and
realize she’d wasted her life waiting for Brontë man.
“I’m still with him,” she told her
brother. “And thanks to that guy, I can
swing a short trip without having to shutter the
doors.”
“Well, that’s useful, I guess,” Steven
said. “This is a load off my mind, Grace. The family owes you one
for this. Big time.”
She shouldn’t have felt pleased by the
pat on the head, but she did. Most of her life she’d been an Oliver
in name only, a sort of satellite Oliver in her own orbit ever
since her mother had hauled her halfway across the country, married
again, and started a second, happier marriage. And a second family
that Grace had never felt completely a part of, either. Her Oregon
half siblings were a decade younger and looked on her almost as a
different generation. And while she loved her mother and
stepfather, they had a habit of chalking up anything she did that
they didn’t approve of to the Oliver in her, as if her blood were
tainted.
Grace’s too-brief visits to her dad had
been the highlights of her adolescence. She loved hanging out in
the old house in her dad’s neighborhood, which was so different
than the various suburbs her mother had dragged her to. And she
loved her dad, with his starched shirts, sharp tongue, and brittle
exterior, all of which would melt away as he discussed a book he
loved. They filled their holidays together with chess games, which
she always lost, and rambles across central Texas in a never-ending
quest to find the ultimate barbecue joint. All to a soundtrack of
their mutual favorites: Telemann, Mozart, and Chopin.
But those visits had been few and far
between, and usually too brief to make her feel that she actually
belonged there. She always clicked with her brother Sam, but he had
moved away early, and the difference in her and Steven’s ages meant
she really hadn’t had a chance to get to know him all that well.
When the time had come to decide where to settle, she had decided
to stay in Oregon, which over the years had become her natural
habitat. But she’d always felt a tug toward her native city, too,
and the old house of her earliest memories. And her
dad.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” she
promised.
“To Austin?” Ben stood amid the party
debris, flabbergasted. “When did this happen?”
She briefed him on Steven’s call and
her travel arrangements as she surveyed the kitchen, which looked
as if all its cabinets and drawers had been turned guts’ side out,
like something from a horror movie. It would take all night to get
the place in order.
Her flight was at ten. Eight hours from
now.
“Why?” Ben asked, bewildered even after
she had explained it to him. “Just because the guy has a broken
leg?”
“He’s not the
guy, he’s my dad. And he’s seventy-six.”
He immediately looked contrite. “Duh—of
course. Sorry.” He focused on a point on the counter, thinking.
“What about the store?”
“Could you handle it for a couple of
weeks?” Ben had been working at Rigoletto’s for two and a half
years. It was how they had met.
“Me? But there
are orders to deal with, and bands, and employee
problems.”
“What employee problems?” she
asked.
“Well . . . for one thing, Amber’s
leaving.”
Now it was Grace’s turn to be shocked.
“What? Who told you that?”
“She did. Just recently. She’s going to
grad school in Washington.”
“When?”
“In the fall.”
“Why didn’t she say anything? To me, I
mean.”
He looked uncomfortable. “Well . . .
you’re the boss. I’m not.”
“I know, but . . .” She swallowed,
trying not to feel hurt. It was ridiculous. They were friends; she
was happy for Amber. Who could blame her for not wanting to spend
the rest of her life as a clerk in a CD shop?
Still . . . People didn’t get accepted
into grad schools overnight. This had to have been in the works for
a while. Months and months.
“And what about the cats?” Ben asked,
continuing to take stock of his own troubles.
“What about them? You just feed them,
and change the water.”
“They’re old and vomity,” he said, “and
they have to eat that special food, and Heathcliff has his
medication, and I really don’t think the little one likes me. She’s
always giving me that glassy stare.”
As if they could help being old. And
surely Ben knew the name of her cats by now?
“Her name is Earnshaw, and she stares
at everyone that way,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “She
has cataracts.” She took a deep breath before she went all angry
mother bear on him. Air in, air
out.
Ben had a point, after all. She was
accustomed to her geriatric cats, but they were a handful. “I’ll
lay up lots of food tomorrow morning,” she promised, “and write out
a schedule for taking care of them, including all the vet
info.”
“This is so nuts.” He reached for her
hand. “We’ve been planning my moving in for years—and now here I am
for less than two days, and you decide to pick up and
go.”
“The timing’s awful,” she agreed.
Although, to be honest, they hadn’t actually planned this for two years. They had put it off for two years and finally caved in to the
inevitable. “But we have years ahead of us, and my dad needs me
now. It’ll just be a week. Maybe two.” For good measure, she added,
“Three, tops.”
Ben nodded. “Well . . . just don’t be
surprised if you come home to find a new jazz section in your
precious store.”
“No jazz.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t like jazz, or
lots of other types of music. But as far as Rigoletto’s was
concerned, a Miles Davis CD was just a gateway drug. Allow that in
and next thing you knew there would be rock and country and—she
shuddered—top forty. Then she would be just another music store.
Just another music store going out of business.
“Promise me—no jazz, no indie rock, no
Top 40,” she said.
“Promise me you won’t leave me stranded
here in a cat nursing home and catering to your lunatic customers
forever.”
Out of the blue, Grace felt a sharp
sudden pang about leaving that had nothing to with Ben or even with
her decrepit old cats. This was a thunderclap of concern for
Rigoletto’s. For years her store had felt like her home, the home
she’d finally managed to make for herself when the real things
didn’t pan out. While her contemporaries had been setting out on
career paths or spending years in graduate school, she had thrown
the best years of her life into Rigoletto’s. She’d regularly worked
eighteen-hour days and scrimped pennies to pay off her bank loan
and become an amateur plumber and carpenter to keep from hiring
expensive labor. She’d survived a recession and the encroaching
gentrification of the store’s once dirt cheap
neighborhood.
Now she worried that if she didn’t
watch over her flock of repeat customers, these nuts she had spent
years ministering to—the students, the Volvo drivers, the
misfits—they would scatter into the retail wind.
“Of course I won’t leave forever,” she
assured him, feeling torn between two geographical points. Between
Texas and Oregon. Between family and family substitute. “I’ll be
back as soon as I can. I just need to make sure Dad can look after
himself.”
“No worries, Grace. I’ll hold down the
fort.” Ben smiled. “Just leave it all in the hands of the Life
champion.”
“Champion? Really?” She’d forgotten all
about the tournament.
Ben shrugged. “Well . . . just at Life.
After that I got Tiddly-Winked down to fifth place and knocked out
of the competition by a disastrous showing in Operation. I guess
there’s a reason surgeons shouldn’t drink three beers before they
cut somebody open.”
She laughed. Still . . . to be Life
champion. Even if it was only temporary, Grace would have settled
for that.