Tending to Grace Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Steven

  1

  We drive out Route 6 on a silent day at the end of May, my mother, the boyfriend, and I. We pass villages with daisies at the doorsteps and laundry hung in soft rows of bleached white. I want to jump out of the car as it rushes along and wrap myself in a row of sheets hanging so low their feet tap the grass. I want to hide because my life, if it were a clothesline, would be the one with a sweater dangling by one sleeve, a blanket dragging in the mud, and a sock, unpaired and alone, tumbling to the road with the wind at its heel.

  But I don’t say anything as we head east.

  My mother is a look-away.

  2

  My teacher is a look-away.

  I am a bookworm, a bibliophile, a passionate lover of books. I know metaphor and active voice and poetic meter, and I understand that the difference between the right word and the almost right word, as Samuel Clemens said, is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

  But I don’t talk, so no one knows. All they see are the days I miss school, thirty-five one year, twenty-seven the next, forty-two the year after that. I am a silent red flag, waving to them, and they send me to their counselors and they ask me, “When are you going to talk about it, Cornelia?” I curl myself into a ball and squish the feelings down to my toes and they don’t know what to make of me so they send me back to this class where we get the watered-down Tom Sawyer with pages stripped of soul and sentences as straight and flat as a train track.

  We read that the new boy in Tom Sawyer ran like a deer, while the kids in the honors class read that he “turned tail and ran like an antelope.”

  I know because I read that book, too.

  3

  Sam finishes reading; Allison begins. Up one row and down another we go like a set of dominoes, each kid taking a turn at reading aloud and me waiting for my morning to collapse.

  “ ‘It was Monday morning and Tom Sawyer was miserable,’ ” Allison reads. “ ‘He was always miserable on Monday mornings because it meant he had to go to school.’ ”

  The copy of Tom Sawyer they use for this class sits open on my desk. The one Mark Twain wrote sits on my lap. I match paragraphs to keep my mind on something other than my approaching turn:

  “Monday morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so—because it began another week’s slow suffering in school.”

  Allison finishes and Betsy begins. We read aloud in this class because the teacher doesn’t believe we read at home. And so I wait, my stomach rolling, a lost ship at sea. We may be reading Tom Sawyer for babies, but Betsy’s voice, as strong and supple as a dancer, hardly notices. She skips along the tops of passive verbs and flies over the adjectives and adverbs that stack and pile up like too many Playskool blocks. When Betsy finishes, the teacher looks over at me and her eyes widen just a bit.

  “Cornelia, will you be reading today?” Her voice pitches too high, too singsong. Kids turn around. Everyone knows she gives no one else a choice.

  I shake my head and look at my feet.

  4

  I am a shadow. I burrow deeper within myself and pray that if the other kids don’t see me, they won’t talk to me. I pretend I am the desk, the book, the floor, and we all expect less of me each day. I try not to lose myself, but the shame of always looking at my feet beats me deeper and deeper into the earth, planting me as surely as my mother planted gardenia bulbs one summer, facedown.

  5

  No one likes the new girl. Her name is Ruth. She wears the goofiest glasses I’ve ever seen. But I like her. I like the way she looks me in the eye when I tell her something. She is kind underneath those glasses and she smiles when I joke around. I want to tell her my whole life story in ten minutes, quicklike so the words tumble down fast and furious, like my mother’s promises. But I don’t know how to begin, so we talk about books, which is another reason why I like her so much.

  We have just read Oliver Twist, me for the second time, and we are trying to figure out how Oliver survived on the gruel they made him eat at the workhouse. We’ve made a pact to live on gruel for one day, cold and without sugar, but unlike Oliver’s, our portions are unlimited. Ruth has brought Cream of Wheat. I’ve brought oatmeal, and it sits like cold clotted gravy on my tongue.

  The girls in the lunch line point to us. The empty seats beside us are magnets. I concentrate on my spoon. I wonder if they’ll notice our lunch. How disgusting. How odd. How much of a loser can you be, Cornelia Thornhill?

  I stuff my bowl into my bag and push it into my backpack.

  “Hey, we’re not done,” Ruth says. Her back is to the girls; she hasn’t noticed. I nod toward them. She turns and hides her bowl in her notebook and stands up to leave. She is sturdier than I, more of an eggplant to my celery stick. I am so hungry.

  “Oh, don’t go on account of us,” says Eleanor, the tallest of the three, breezing toward us. She has had a perfect mouth from the beginning of time, one that ne
ver has needed—and never will need—braces. I stare absently into the crowded lunchroom.

  “How are you today, Cornelia?” Eleanor takes her napkin, puts it on her lap, and ignores Ruth. I take my napkin and wipe my mouth.

  I smile quickly and sip my milk.

  “Did you get the last answer on the test?” Eleanor asks.

  I shake my head. The other girls are snickering behind their napkins.

  She tries again. “You didn’t read again today. How come?”

  I take another sip and shrug. Eleanor is waiting for me to answer. I take another sip and wipe my mouth. I start wiping my lips with each sip now, afraid something else horrible will fall out of my mouth. Seven, eight, nine times, I mop my mouth.

  Eleanor laughs and then her friends laugh and when I can’t listen anymore, I stand up and run out the side door of the cafeteria. The lunch aide hollers and the force of it follows me all the way to the street, where my tears mix with rain.

  6

  The boyfriend is there when I get home. My mother flicks away the thin wisps of whatever it is they’ve been smoking.

  “Hey, Corns,” she says.

  I walk past them to my room.

  “Why don’t she never talk?” the boyfriend asks, the man with the brain smaller than my little toe, the kind of guy just made for watered-down literature.

  I slam my door.

  They don’t ask why I’m home two hours early. You got a kid, you notice things. Send her to school. Make her lunch. Ask about homework. Simple as that.

  A teacher told me I should be an honor student. “Imagine, Wuthering Heights. Where do you get all those books, Cornelia?”

  This is what I should have said: I walk right out the door, as soon as my mother falls asleep on the couch. I walk past the other apartments in the projects, past the health center and the day care center and the sign at the entrance that used to say WELCOME TO HARDINGTON STREET, but now because of all the graffiti it doesn’t say anything at all.

  I climb on a city bus and get off at the library. No one pays attention to you in a library as long as you’re quiet. They think a kid with a book is a good thing. That’s how I ran around New York City with Harriet the Spy, wandered the Ozarks with Where the Red Fern Grows, went to prep school with The Chocolate War. I learned about sex from Judy Blume and about God from the Bible. Honor your mother, it says. I have to laugh over that. I really do.

  7

  I hear them talking that night. “Come on, babe, let’s me and you go to Vegas.”

  My mother laughs.

  “I’m serious, babe.”

  My mother stops laughing.

  “What about Corns?”

  “We can’t take no kid to Vegas.”

  8

  The boyfriend reads the car ads at breakfast.

  I want coffee. Thick and strong, the mug filled halfway with heavy cream, two teaspoons of sugar, the way I make it every day. Sometimes I eat one of the Little Debbie cakes my mother hides at the back of the refrigerator, but most days I just drink coffee.

  Since the boyfriend moved in a few months ago, empty beer cans pile up in the kitchen sink. I have to clear them out to brush my teeth because he broke the faucet in the bathroom. He doesn’t twist the bag of coffee closed and he forgets to put the bag in the freezer to keep it fresh; it’s on the counter in a crumpled heap beside the coffeepot. Beans scatter all the way to the stove. He mixes up my spice bottles, which I’ve been keeping in alphabetical order since my mother gave up cooking. Milk dribbles across the floor.

  “Your ma and me think we’ll head out to Vegas.”

  I spoon coffee into the filter.

  “What you think of that?”

  I pour water into the top of the coffeepot and turn the power on.

  “Why don’t you never answer me, girl?”

  I reach up and pull my Frosty the Snowman cup out of the cupboard.

  “I’m talking to you. Don’t you sass me.”

  Sass, I want to point out, means talking back. I’m not talking at all.

  My mother drifts into the room, wearing the boyfriend’s pajamas, and slumps at the table, resting her head in her hands. The pajama sleeves hide a mascara line that cuts into the thin skin below her eyes.

  “Leave her be, Joe.”

  “I was just asking what she thought of our trip. She won’t answer me.”

  “She don’t talk to nobody, Joe.”

  “She damn well better talk.” He stands, but I am already out the door.

  9

  My mother does not believe in complicated goodbyes.

  We pack and load the car by ten. My favorite books are stacked to the brim of a plastic milk crate. My mother leaves no time to return the library’s copy of Oliver Twist, so I lay it on top. She doesn’t bother to call the high school.

  “They’ll figure it out soon enough, Corns.”

  She leaves the kitchen table, the vinyl chair in the living room that I like to read on, all the heavy stuff. She puts the electric bill and the telephone bill on the counter and leaves no forwarding address. She leaves the door open.

  “There ain’t no room for all those books,” the boyfriend says when I carry them out.

  I ignore him and put the crate under my feet and look out the window as we drive away.

  10

  “Agatha’s a little peculiar, you know.” My mother turns around in the front seat and tries to catch my eye. “But you’ll get along just fine. Here, have one of these little cakes.”

  I don’t look up from my book. I’m wearing my black dress from the Salvation Army just because my mother hates it. I like the way the lace skips along the top of my boots, softening the meanness of everything somehow.

  “Corns?” My mother’s voice catches somewhere between her throat and her teeth. I wonder if she is having second thoughts. She should be having second thoughts. When you have a daughter, you don’t dump her off somewhere. Parenting 101.

  11

  Turning to stone is hard work. First you have to let the anger climb up from deep within you and as it turns over and over and rises up through your chest, you have to clamp your teeth over it and push it back down. Then you sort of imagine yourself getting real heavy, folding over onto yourself, getting thick so nothing can reach the spot far inside that hasn’t turned hard yet. And you know that if you get it right, you’re not so afraid.

  12

  A few hours later the boyfriend pulls up in front of a house with clapboards looser than old skin.

  “This it?” he says, rolling down his window and whistling a bit through his teeth. “You got the wrong place, Lenore.”

  I’m surprised by his concern. I’m wondering about my mother’s memory, too. From the back of the car, I look out at windows set with tiny panes that bubble in the afternoon sun and at ivy growing up past a cracked front door and onto the roof. A bird swoops into the gutter.

  “Come on, Corns,” my mother says, opening the car door for me. “Bring your stuff.” The boyfriend shrugs and turns up the radio.

  I wonder when a Girl Scout last sold cookies here. Not for a while, apparently, because the hem on my dress catches the grass as we trek to the front door.

  “It’s not going to be for that long, Corns. Just till Joe and me get settled.” My mother pushes some of the ivy aside and taps at the door. The skin on her hand is thin, translucent, like china held up to the light. I can hardly hear her knocks.

  I watch another bird fly across the yard and land on the roof and then an old woman walks around from the back of the house. She is tall and straight, pale as vanilla pudding, with gray hair twisted into a braid and roped around her head. Binoculars thump against her chest. My mother jumps a little when she sees her. “Agatha.”

  “Tell him to turn that noise off.” The old woman nods to the car, but her eyes are on me.

  My mother looks unsure about what she should do. She takes a few steps forward (is she thinking of hugging the old woman?), then changes her mind and turn
s toward the car, leaving me standing with my crate of books at my feet.

  I hold my breath and hope the old woman doesn’t talk. I watch another bird fly to the chimney. The boyfriend turns the radio down. “Your phone isn’t working,” my mother says as she walks back to us. Then she giggles in her nervous little way that’s nails on a blackboard to me. “I need someone to take her for a while.”

  The old woman doesn’t say anything, and my mother, who trembles like a skinny sapling against this tall oak, stumbles on. “It ain’t easy for me. Her father’s gone. Joe says we can make a better start in Vegas. But it ain’t no place for a kid.”

  My mother has run out of things to say. No one says anything for a very long time. I am comfortable with long pauses because I have turned myself to stone. Otherwise my knees would be buckling. I count eleven birdhouses nailed to trees all around the yard.

  The old woman stares at my mother. “Something the matter with your brain, Lenore?” she says finally.

  My mother puts her hand on my arm. I can feel her shudder through the sleeve of my dress.

  “Me and Joe, we’ll come get her quick as we can.”

  The old woman looks out at the Buick. Thick smoke pours out the exhaust pipe. Joe drums his fingers against the edge of the steering wheel. “You ain’t pickin’ them no better, are you?”

  My mother looks down. The old woman looks over at me. I turn and look out at the fields behind her house that rise to pine-covered hills and then to a mountain in the distance. A church bell rings.

  When the old woman takes her eyes off me and looks at my mother, I feel the temperature drop. “Get the hell out of here, Lenore,” she says.

  I step toward my mother, reaching for her. But she pushes me away and hurries to the car.

  The old woman looks down at me with eyes as hard and gray as nickels. I don’t feel them, though, because I am a stone.

  13

  “What’s your name?” The old woman waits for me to answer, but I turn away.

  I watch a dragonfly on a daisy, a beetle on a cobblestone. I think about the Yodels we bought when we stopped at the gas station and how the cream leaked out of the plastic package and I threw mine away after the first bite. I think about how I wanted a coffee but my mother said no. Think about anything, anything else, I tell myself.