18
SETTING THE DATE
Grace put a deadline of mid-September as the time
she was supposed to go home. But then her father fell sick—they
worried it was pneumonia—and she stayed.
The first week of October, one of Lou’s
teeth had an abscess, and Grace stayed with him for a week while
that was taken care of.
Everyone had started to pester her
about the amount of time she was spending in Texas. Ben, of course.
And her mother had phoned her several times, worried that Grace was
being sucked away from her real life.
“This is real life, too,” Grace
reminded her.
“But you’ve never stayed so long
before.”
“Dad’s never needed me before. And it’s
not forever. Just a few more weeks.”
Even Steven expressed worry over her
lingering in Austin.
“Why should you
be dragging Dad to the dentist and things like that?” he asked her
one afternoon as they sat in a coffee shop. They had just dropped
Lou off next door to get a haircut, with instructions for him to
join them when he was done.
As she looked across the table at
Steven, it occurred to her that she had probably socialized with
her brother more in the past months than she had in her whole life.
When they were kids, the nearly ten-year gap in their ages had
seemed an unbridgeable gulf. And after she’d finished school,
Steven was always married to some disagreeable woman or another.
But now, alone, sharing their troubles and their concerns about
their dad, he seemed more human.
“For that matter, why should you be
here at all?” he continued.
“Because he’s my dad.”
“He’s my dad too. Why should we both be
here? Now that my personal life has exploded, I can move back into
the house so you can go home.”
She shook her head. That would never
work. “You’ve got office appointments or surgery every day. You’re
busy, and unreachable most of the time. Emily practically demands a
secret password before she’ll let me through to you.”
Emily, the office
gatekeeper.
He smiled. “Emily’s deciding to come to
the new office seems like the one thing that’s gone right in my
life lately.”
God, how grim. Grace liked Emily, as
much as anyone could like a woman who seemed to thrive on
scheduling appointments and filing insurance claims. One time when
Grace was visiting the office she had asked Emily if she was seeing
anyone. Emily had smiled politely, if a little impatiently, and
informed her that she was much too busy these days for
socializing.
“What are you busy with?” Grace asked
her.
Emily had frowned at her, as if it
should be obvious. “With the new office! There’s tons to
do!”
Grace could remember being that
involved in Rigoletto’s at one time. But that was her own store.
She had a sink-or-swim stake in its success.
After much prying—interrogation,
really—she learned Emily had no family. None. She had spent her
very young years in foster care and her teen years in a group home.
“My job is my life,” she confessed to Grace, almost
bragging.
But even with Emily the office
assistant extraordinaire devoting herself 24/7 to overseeing his
professional life, Steven still didn’t have enough time to take
care of Lou.
“We could hire someone during the day,”
he suggested when she pointed out this problem. “And then at night
I’ll be there. It doesn’t matter to me where I live anyway. Denise
. . .” He swallowed. “Well, we’ll have to sell our house at some
point.”
Poor Steven. Denise had left him
squished like romance road-kill, and he was still carrying a torch
for her. Grace imagined her brother up in his old room, dejected
and alone with his bug collection and his Top Gun
poster.
He took a deep breath. “The point is,
you’ve got your own life to take care of. You can’t martyr yourself
to Dad’s illness.”
She resented that idea, for her dad’s
sake. “I love being around Dad. We have fun. We’ve sort of fallen
into a strange Odd Couple existence. Most
of the time I forget he’s sick at all.”
Steven nodded. “Most of the time he
seems so normal that I wonder if he hasn’t been
misdiagnosed.”
Unfortunately, at this moment the
barber from next door streaked back and forth down the sidewalk.
Grace and Steven craned their heads toward the window and followed
him in time to see their father, with his barbershop poncho
billowing around him in the afternoon breeze, stepping out into the
middle of Duval Road.
“What’s Ben like?”
It was that lull between the end of
school and dinner, and Lily was sitting backward in a chair, elbows
propped on the backrest, watching Grace make granola, which at the
moment was just a sludge of oil and molasses at the bottom of a
mixing bowl. Most of Grace’s mind was focused on how she was going
to whisk that gluey syrup together with oil. She didn’t give Lily’s
question much thought.
“I guess the first thing I’d say about
him is that he’s funny.” She added, “In a cranky guy sort of
way.”
“Funny’s good,” Lily said. “Although it
seems to me that lots of guys think they’re funny when they’re not,
and girls giggle and laugh at them anyway.”
“I’m not a big giggler,” Grace replied,
frowning at the recipe, which said to add water. Water in granola?
Who knew?
Lily persisted with her inquisition.
“Is he cute?”
“He’s not the Old Spice guy, but I
think he’s cute in a shaggy kind of way.”
Lily’s brows knit together. “So he’s
cranky, arguably funny, and not all that
good-looking.”
Grace laughed. “Well, love is blind,
maybe.”
“Love!” Lily exclaimed. “You don’t seem
like you’re in love to me.”
Grace wasn’t aware that the look of
love really existed outside of Burt Bacharach songs. “Why
not?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re here and
he’s in Oregon. And you never talk about him.”
“Not everybody wears her heart on her
sleeve. Ben and I call each other all the time.”
“Every day?” Lily asked.
“Well . . . twice a week. Usually.” She
frowned. Come to think of it, it had been a week and a half now
since they’d spoken.
“So you really do miss him, then,” Lily
said, and Grace couldn’t help noticing that she sounded
disappointed. “I thought maybe it was all off with you guys, and
maybe you’d move here. It’s better with you here.”
“That’s sweet of you to
say.”
“If you weren’t here, it would just be
the professor and the guys, and I’d feel weird about coming over so
often. But with you here, I feel better about just hanging
out.”
Grace laughed. She’d never quite met
anyone who could be so sly and guileless at the same
time.
“But if you actually miss him . . .”
Lily shrugged.
Grace started whisking, and then hopped
back to evade the splatters she’d kicked up. “I do miss him. He
seems so far away. They all do.”
“Who is all?”
“Ben . . . my friends . . . Heathcliff
and Earnshaw.”
“You have friends named Heathcliff and
Earnshaw?”
“Heathcliff is a big orange cat,
fifteen years old, a furry lummox, and Earnshaw is a
seventeen-year-old tabby female.”
“Wow,” Lily said. “That’s really
weird.”
“What?”
“You just volunteered a lot more about
your cats than you ever did about Ben.”
“Well . . .” Grace busied herself
mixing oats into her mixing bowl. Now that she studied it more
closely, the recipe called for a lot of oats. Almost the whole box.
No wonder she’d had to make so much goop to coat them
in.
“It’s also weird that you’d name a
female Earnshaw,” Lily said. “We read that book last year in
school, and the woman in the book was Cathy. Earnshaw was her last
name.”
“I know, but I worried that if I called
her Cathy it would sound like I’d named my cats after two defunct
cartoons.”
“Did you actually like that book?” Lily
asked. “When I read it, I thought Heathcliff was a
lunatic.”
Grace stopped stirring for a moment.
“Oh, no—he was just wounded, and hopelessly devoted to
Cathy.”
Lily laughed. “Hopelessly devoted reminds me of that stupid song the
girl in the movie Grease
sings.”
“Olivia Newton-John?” It had been years
since Grace had seen that movie, but she’d loved it when she was a
teenager.
“But when you think about it,” Lily
said, “they’re sort of similar.”
“Who?”
“Heathcliff and Olivia Newton-John.
Heathcliff is hopelessly devoted to Cathy, who is faithless and
flighty—even though I personally think she made the absolute right
choice to go live in the nice house with the civilized people—and
Sandy is hopelessly devoted to John Travolta, who is, you know,
greasy. Yuck.”
“Heathcliff was always my idea of a
romantic hero,” Grace said. Until now. “Now I’ll always think of
him as a lunatic, or as Olivia Newton-John man.”
Lily stood and came closer to inspect
Grace’s granola-making progress. “You can buy granola in the store,
you know. They sell it in bulk at Central Market.”
“I can put my own stuff in it this way.
Like pumpkin seeds. They’re good brain food.”
Lily angled a serious glance up at her.
“It’s for Professor Oliver, isn’t it? There’s something wrong with
him—it wasn’t just that he broke his leg, was it?”
“He’s . . .” Grace swallowed. The kids
would find out soon enough. Really, she was surprised they hadn’t
guessed before now. “He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
Lily frowned. “That’s really bad, isn’t
it?”
Grace nodded. “But it’s gradual.”
Although she couldn’t get her mind to erase the vision of her
father walking across the road in that poncho. It was a miracle he
didn’t get run over again.
Someone knocked at the front door.
Dominic and Crawford were outside somewhere with Iago, so Lily
twirled around. “I’ll get it!”
Grace followed her, and when she saw
the strange man on the other side of the screen door, she was glad
she did. The guy was about thirty-five years old, wearing a torn
T-shirt and old jeans, and he apparently hadn’t shaved in days. He
kept his gaze focused down on the welcome mat, not on their
faces.
“Grace Oliver live here?” he
asked.
Lily turned to Grace, her brows darting
up like question marks.
“I’m Grace.”
The man finally looked at her. “I’m
from Portland.”
Grace tilted her head. “Do I know
you?”
“No, see, I answered a classified.
Someone was looking for someone driving to Austin from Portland?
Guy named Ben?”
Grace gasped. Ben was here? She scooted
past Lily and shot out onto the porch, looking around.
“Ben asked me to bring you something,”
the stranger explained.
He pointed down to two beige plastic
cat carriers sitting in the front yard.
In shock, Grace launched herself off
the porch and fell to her knees in front of the metal grill of the
cages. “Oh my God—Heathcliff! Earnshaw!” She looked up at the man.
“You drove them here?”
He nodded.
“But—”
“Your friend paid me two hundred
dollars. It sounded like a lot of money four days ago, but now . .
. I’m not so sure if I’m ever gonna get that smell out of the
upholstery.”
Grace couldn’t work up too much
sympathy for the man, although she was grateful he actually got
them to Austin safe and sound. But her surprise and happiness at
seeing Heathcliff and Earnshaw were quickly being displaced by a
rising tide of anger. How could Ben have handed her cats over to a
total stranger? From a classified ad! Anything could have happened
to them!
“Well, I can’t say that guy Ben didn’t
warn me. ’Course he didn’t warn me about the sound of one cat
yowling for twelve hours straight, days on end, right in the back
of your head as you’re trying to drive.”
“Thank you for bringing them to me
safely.” The man seemed hesitant to leave, like those bellboys you
see in movies lingering in the room hoping for a tip, but he
finally took off when he saw her and Lily picking up the cat
carriers and taking them into the house.
“This is so weird,” Lily said. “You
were just telling me about them, and now here they are. It’s like
it was fate.”
Fate, shmate. Grace’s blood pressure
was soaring. The boys came in from the back, along with Iago, who
started barking up a storm, which in turn caused Heathcliff to
bristle, growl, and hiss. In the other cage, a series of esophageal
gulps had commenced, the prelude to a hairball.
“I guess I’ll take Iago back out,”
Dominic said, just as Lou, roused from his afternoon nap by the
commotion, came down the stairs.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s
that smell?”
Grace clenched her hands in fists and
ran upstairs, closed the door to her room, and got on the cell
phone. She speed-dialed Ben, pacing as she waited for him to pick
up. When he did, she lit into him. It was early afternoon in
Portland and he was probably at Rigoletto’s, but she didn’t even
care.
“How could you do this?” she asked.
“How could you be such a thoughtless jerk?”
“Wait a second!” he replied. “What did
I do that was thoughtless? I sent the cats down to you. Aren’t you
glad to see them?”
“Of course I am!” she yelled. “That’s
not the point. That guy who drove them down could have decided that
it wasn’t worth the trouble and dumped them on the side of the road
in Wyoming! Or he could have been some crazy who sells cats to labs
for medical experiments.”
“Wouldn’t labs be interested in healthy
cats?” Ben asked.
“It doesn’t matter—the point is, you
didn’t know this guy from Adam. Why didn’t you at least tell me
what you were doing?”
“Because I wanted to surprise
you.”
She cursed under her
breath.
“And I knew you’d have a cow,” he
added, “which you are. For no reason. The cats obviously got there
safe and sound.”
“Why did you feel the need to send them
at all? The last time we spoke, I was talking about coming home
this week. For all you knew, by the time the cats arrived, I
wouldn’t even be here.”
“But you are
there,” he pointed out. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re ever coming
back.”
She sighed in frustration. “So, this
was a passive-aggressive move to get me to go back to
Portland?”
“Maybe so.” Uneasy silence crackled
over the line until Ben spoke again. “Everything’s fine here,
Grace. You could even say your leaving has been good for me. I
manned up to the challenge. The store’s eking out a profit, the
duplex is spic-and-span, and I feel good about that. But you know
what? It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We had finally decided to
be together, remember? Instead, I’ve never felt more alone in my
life. I miss you. I know you feel your dad needs you, but the fact
is I need you, too.”
As he spoke, the anger seeped out of
her. She sat on her bed and then sank back on the
mattress.
“What can I do?” she
asked.
“Come home. It’s crazy, you staying
there so long.”
“I know. I should just set a date . .
.” Another one.
“But you should make it a do-or-die
date, and make it realistic,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re coming
the day after tomorrow and then freak out again because your dad
stubs his toe or something.”
“It’s been a little more serious than
that,” she said.
“I know, I know,” he said
apologetically. “But I’m serious. By what date do you think you can
get things arranged there and get yourself ready to come
back?”
She bit her lip.
“Thanksgiving?”
“That’s a month away.”
“I know. But I’ve promised Dad I’ll be
here for Thanksgiving anyway, because he wants everybody here. Even
Sam’s flying in. And that will give me time to get together with
Steven and arrange things. He’s even mentioned moving into the
house here, so if we could find some day help . . .”
“Great!”
“And—oh!—you should come for
Thanksgiving, too.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long way to go just to eat
turkey,” Ben said. “And what about Rigoletto’s? Put on your
capitalist thinking cap, Grace—Thanksgiving weekend? Black Friday?
Do you really want to give that up?”
She took a deep breath. She had
imagined him flying in and the two of them driving back together.
He had sounded so eager to have her there.
A silence fell over the line . . .
though it wasn’t quite as silent as she would have liked. She could
make out a rhythmic pulsing beat in the background . . . a
tambourine . . . and was that a banjo? “What are you
playing?”
“Just music,” Ben answered in a
staccato voice.
“But it’s—”
“It’s the Freelance Whales, okay? I put
in an indie section. Just a small one. It’s very
popular.”
“Oh.”
And to think a few months ago she’d
been worried he might play a Miles Davis record. Her line in the
sand hadn’t just been crossed, it had been obliterated and washed
out to sea with the tide. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to say a
word of reproach. He was there and doing his best.
“I guess I could find someone to sub
for me,” Ben said, relenting. “Or maybe we will have to close the
store for the weekend. But if it’s important to you, Grace, I’ll be
there.”