Two worlds were colliding, and I had no idea how to be both happy and sad—except to walk away.
But as I started to move toward the door, Tom caught me, his hands on both arms. It was a firm grasp that told me I could not escape, and the nearness of him escalated my tears into deep, rasping sobs. That’s when he clutched me tightly against his chest, a minty smell arising from the four chest hairs standing proud guard against his silky little boy skin. The harder I cried, the closer Tom held me, until we both sank onto the hardwood floor. Tom asked no questions; he simply held me as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to break into tears after a day of drywalling.
When Tom finally drew me away, gently holding me at arm’s length, I offered an explanation.
“That song, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, it reminds me of Grace; it was her favorite song.” I paused as he dabbed at my eyes with the kitchen towel from his shoulder.
“A Van Morrison fan! I like this girl.”
“Tom, I haven’t told you everything. About Grace, I mean. I should’ve said something sooner—it’s just that—well, we’ve been having such a good time, cutting up together.
“Tom, Grace is dead. She was murdered a few months before I started at the agency.”
“Jesus,” he muttered.
I gave him a few details—the stalker on the mountain, the funeral, Doro’s insistence that I come on to Chicago, and my guilt that I wasn’t there. My guilt for feeling anything even close to normality, much less happiness.
After I had finished, Tom cleared his throat.
“Tell me more, Jo. Maybe that’ll help. Tell me about you and Grace—what you guys used to do up on the mountain. Just talk. I’ll listen.”
And so I began to tell Tom the story of Mt. Moriah, of me and Grace. He said little, but kept one hand around my shoulder and the other at my knee. Without moving we sat, until the sun finished its descent and the light there in the foyer evaporated into night.
And out on the grill, two fat steaks sizzled and shrunk their way into charcoal oblivion.
14
GRACE
THERE WERE NEVER TWO MORE OPPOSITE FRIENDS than Grace Collins and myself. While I loved reading and fancied myself a writer, Grace forced her way through summer reading books and preferred math and recess. While she agonized over every decision in her life, I typically made up my mind quickly and moved on.
Even in our appearances, we were at opposite ends of the spectrum. I was short, petite, and small-chested, constantly being confused for someone much younger. Grace was tall with a chest so prematurely developed that she was often mistaken for a college girl when we were barely fourteen. My hair was thick and dark, in long curls that I continually pushed out of my face. Grace’s hair, strawberry blonde in color, was full but baby fine, and she kept it long and straight down her back. Her mahogany eyes, large and soulful, radiated warmth. Grace’s feet warranted a size nine, while I was able to buy size five off the bargain table. My olive skin tanned deeply, like my mother’s, while Grace’s face in the summer was constantly sunburnt and freckled—so much like Doro’s that she looked more like Doro’s daughter than I did.
“You’re going to have skin cancer someday if you don’t watch it,” Genia Collins fussed.
During our senior year in college—Grace at the small liberal arts college near Mt. Moriah and me at the University of Georgia—we took the Myers-Briggs personality test. It revealed that Grace was a high E and myself a high I. She was talkative and outgoing while I was shy—perhaps as a defense mechanism, because I always felt different from other children. The shortest girl in the class, the only one who did all the summer reading. The girl with no parents. I was separate, and I reacted by retreating into myself.
It was Grace who first drew me out. We were in third grade, seated next to each other. She asked to borrow a piece of paper, and I gave her one. Then she asked to borrow a pencil, and I gave her that. She continued to ask for things until I got tickled and giggled. She laughed too.
“Knew I could make you laugh. Do you talk?”
“Not much I guess.”
“Wanna sit with me at lunch?”
“Okay.”
Such is the way friendships are made when you are eight years old and haven’t yet added layers of complication to your personality. When someone asks you to be her friend, you say yes, and soon you are on the playground tire swing together. It’s that simple. Maybe that’s why childhood friendships are the foundation for our lives, why those made before you have all your permanent teeth are more lasting than those made in adulthood.
Our preferred place to play was the Inn. Mrs. Collins, although kind, was also severe. She was a fastidious housekeeper and strict about bedtimes. Doro gave us a certain amount of freedom, and so we came to feel like we owned the grounds of the Inn. In the warm weather, we would be outside from morning until evening, coming in only for Doro’s grilled cheese sandwiches.
When we had had enough of the late afternoon sun, we headed for the side porch and brought out one of our favorite games. We could have been Milton Bradley spokespeople. Clue, Monopoly, Battleship—each day it was a different game. We sneaked polish from Doro’s bathroom and painted our toenails while inside the sounds of visitors filled the parlor and dining room. The afternoons felt endless, in the way they only can in childhood. As if we had a lifetime of afternoons.
As Doro’s weekly bridge games were fodder for gossip, board games were venues for discussion.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Jo Jo?”
“A writer of books. Maybe mysteries. How about you?”
“I want to be an actress, darling!” Grace could do a great Zsa Zsa Gabor, with the exact mannerisms. “Or maybe a singer.”
“What TV family would you most want to have?”
“The Brady Bunch. I’ve always wanted lots of brothers and sisters.” From my time in her house, I knew that Grace’s constant level of activity and chattiness veiled a sadness from living alone with a stern mother. Her father had left years ago, and she rarely heard from him. I was an only child too, but I lived in an Inn that bustled with activity and people. And I had Doro, who constantly made life interesting. Grace’s mother, on the other hand, made precise ham sandwiches cut into triangles and never forgot the fabric softener.
“Which TV family for you, Jo Jo?”
It was an easy question for me.
“Oh, Family Affair.” It was our first summer of cable TV at the Inn, and Family Affair had just appeared in reruns. I explained to Grace my fascination with big cities like New York and high-rise apartment buildings.
“I don’t know; I think a big city would be kinda scary. And there would be no place for dogs to run around.” The Collins bred beagles, and there were always two, albeit perfectly groomed, at Grace’s side.
“Maybe you could have poodles, like Mr. French’s nanny friend on the show. We would live in apartments on the same floor and take your poodles to the park.”
Many of our notions of adulthood came from the television programs we watched in reruns. Our husbands would look like Brad on Petticoat Junction, and we would sing like Shirley Partridge, and bunk our children down in pink rooms as on The Brady Bunch.
And so we would plan our lives as adults, where we would live, what we would do. The stone walls of that side porch stored our dreams and our silly speculations, as the concrete floor absorbed the grape popsicle juice dripping from around our whispered secrets.
If the Inn’s side porch was one mainstay of our childhood, the second pew of First Methodist Church was another. We were not permitted to sit anywhere else because there we were next to Genia, and Doro could watch us from the choir loft. Knowing that we were under constant scrutiny, we became quite creative with our note passing. Soon we were able to pry open the offering envelopes with nary a noise, and write long messages while keeping our eyes fixed on Maddy. It was amazing how many words one offering envelope could hold.
In the end, however, we w
ere always caught red-handed.
“What was the sermon about today, girls?” Genia would ask, Doro at her side.
“Which Bible verse did Maddy read?” was Doro’s question.
Rarely did we know the answers to these questions. But what Genia and Doro didn’t realize—or perhaps they did and that’s why they brought us to church every Sunday of our lives—was that it didn’t matter whether we heard or understood the sermon. What mattered were the intangibles: the reassurance of seeing the same faces around us week after week. There was a peace in noting, each Sunday, the snagged stockings of Lillian Fry. A security in hearing the compulsive throat clearings—always three at a time, repeated at two-minute intervals—of Nancy Snowden who sat two rows behind us. A delight in the teasings offered us by Ben Bowdoin, our Sunday School teacher for three years straight.
The church was our family. We sensed the sorrows and the joys that the congregation of First Methodist brought to church: the Owens in altar prayer for their child who was terribly ill. The Fosters whose business had failed. Ed and Myrtle Truman who, at age seventy, still held hands throughout the service. Libby Nelson who kept a steadying hand around her eighty year old mother during the hymns.
Perhaps not rooted in theology, these childhood church experiences nonetheless introduced me to a God whom I had not known from the infrequent trips my parents and I took to the huge church in downtown Atlanta. There, religion seemed stilted and removed. At First Methodist in Mt. Moriah, religion seemed to move around and through me.
Although we spent so many Sundays together—so many that at age sixteen we found pencil marks made four years earlier in our pew—I only remember one distinct conversation Grace and I had about religion. It was nine at night; we were twelve and listening to the rain against the window above Grace’s brass bed.
“Do you pray, Jo?”
“Yeah, I guess. Sometimes. I mean sometimes I think things and that feels like a prayer. Ya know?”
“Yeah. Do you think prayer works?”
“I dunno. Doesn’t it depend on what you pray for?”
“Well, isn’t God supposed to have His own reasons for doing things? Isn’t that what Mr. Bowdoin was talking about?” Grace asked.
I was silent a long time before I articulated what had always bothered me, what I had always held against God.
“What was His reason for letting my parents die? How could He do that?”
Grace was silent. The kind of best friend silence that says more than words ever could.
Perhaps we talked a bit more that night, or perhaps we fell asleep quickly to the lulling rain. As so many other times in our friendship, I was comforted not by an answer that we had found together, but by a question we shared.
I remember whispering a prayer before drifting off to sleep that night. Or not really a prayer, perhaps, but a question.
“Why?”
It was Christmas Eve 1989 when we discovered Grace’s hidden talent. The morning air was bitter, and I shuddered inside my down coat. I followed behind Doro, who was decorating the church window sills with magnolia clippings and verbena berries. She was irritated because the altar guild—already a small group of only four—had deserted her.
“Decorating this whole church myself on a day when I need to be finishing my Christmas baking,” she muttered under her breath. Watching me fumble to separate the brittle branches, she hissed, “JoAnna, you’re going to have to take off those gloves if you are going to be any help.”
“I’m cold and we’ve been here since the crack of dawn.”
“Eight in the morning is hardly the crack of dawn. I’m cold too, but we have to get it done.”
The door swung open, and Maddy came in whistling a Christmas carol. On one arm was a pine wreath.
“How are my Christmas angels?”
Doro scowled. “Better if I had someone besides sourpuss here helping me.”
“Sounds like there’s more than one bah humbug in this sanctuary,” Maddy said. “Good thing I brought a reinforcement.”
From behind Maddy, Grace stepped out. “Maddy saved me from grocery hell.”
Doro didn’t smile. “Don’t say hell in church, young lady.”
“I don’t know; I have to agree with Gracie here. It did look a little like the great fiery underground.” Maddy chuckled. “Genia had a handful of coupons, and I happened upon them in the soup aisle. Grace asked if she could come along.” Maddy chuckled. “No telling how long that woman was going to be there.
“I thought Grace could start assembling the ‘Silent Night’ candles.”
Doro brightened a bit. “Oh that would be great. Gracie, in the storage closet, there is a box of candles and a box of the paper holders to put them into. Some of the candles are left from last year. Make sure none are too short.”
“Got it,” said Grace, moving down the aisle to the closet behind the chancel. “Can Jo help too?”
I started to put down my greenery but Doro said, “No. I need her here.”
Grace caught my eye and shrugged. I smiled in appreciation of her attempt to rescue me.
Maddy hung the wreath above the altar and, stepping down, said, “Did you hear that Lauren Bishop has strep throat?”
I steeled myself for Doro’s reaction. Doro’s self-proclaimed favorite moment of the year was Lauren Bishop’s mezzo soprano voice projecting the first stanza of Adeste Fideles in Latin toward the congregation. A child processed with the candlelighter, a single flame lighting the way. On the second stanza the words changed to English, and the choir began to process, but it was that piercing soprano first verse that brought tears to Doro’s eyes. Always tired after a season of entertaining, baking, wrapping and decorating, that first stanza was Doro’s Christmas.
“What are we going to do? No Adeste Fideles?”
Maddy shrugged. “It’s not like we have to cancel Christmas. It’s just one verse.”
Fatigue made Doro overreact. Her jerky hand movements told Maddy and me she was not in the mood to be talked to, and we both preferred her anger and frustration to be taken out on the verbenas rather than us.
An hour later Doro was sniffling. Still silent. I stood shaking in my coat, wishing I could be back on the floor in the cry room—where parents took fussy babies during the service—with Grace, assembling candles. Maddy moved through the Sanctuary, straightening hymnals and transitioning the pulpit paraments from Advent purple to Christmas white.
The three of us heard it at the same time.
A clear soprano voice, pitch perfect, was singing “Away in a Manger.” So pure was the tenor that we stopped what we were doing and listened.
“Is that …”
“Grace?” asked Maddy.
Maddy and Doro looked inquisitively at me, but I had never heard my best friend sing like that. The three of us tiptoed to the cry room. Peeking in, we saw Grace cross-legged on the floor. Hard at work, her blonde mane shadowing half her face, Grace continued to sing—until she saw us standing in the doorway.
Looking at her basket of candles and then back at our faces, she said, “What’s up? Am I doing them wrong?”
Doro moved toward Grace and, kneeling, took her face in both her hands. “Your voice, Gracie. It’s an angel’s.”
Grace blushed.
“Why have we not heard that before,” Maddy asked. “Never heard that in all these years.”
Grace shrugged. “I don’t sing in front of people, I guess. Mostly just when I’m alone.”
Doro stood, hands on hips. “Well that ends now. You have to be Lauren Bishop for the Christmas Eve service. You’d do a beautiful job with Adeste Fideles.”
Grace laughed, but her smile disappeared when she realized Doro was serious. “Oh I could never sing that. I could never sing in front of all those people.” Frantic eyes searched my face. “Jo Jo, you know I never could do that.”
“You do have a beautiful voice, Grace.”
“Indeed. That’s a voice that needs to be heard,” said Maddy.
Grace’s protests continued, but Doro would not take no for an answer. Maddy finally proposed a compromise. Grace would sing “Away in a Manger” from the back of the church without being seen. Then the choir would process in to “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
“I’m not sure she can do it,” Genia whispered to Doro before the service.
“Nonsense. I know she can,” replied Doro, as she set her purse down in the second row with me. “Genia, that girl needs to go into music. She has real talent.”
Genia’s lips were pursed. “You can’t support yourself as a singer.”
I’ll never forget that Christmas Eve; I doubt many in Mt. Moriah will. It was the first time Grace’s voice was heard. It was to be one of many times, as she developed the confidence to perform in school plays, to sing the National Anthem at basketball games. Hers was a clarity of sound that was simply …
“Angelic,” I whispered to Grace as she slipped into the second pew beside me at the conclusion of “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
15
DOORMAN
AFTER THE SATURDAY I TOLD TOM ABOUT GRACE, he left town for a photo shoot an hour away. I found myself oddly restless. I made excuses to ride the elevator down to his floor, where I could walk past and see his darkened office. I had the oddest feeling, then, as if he were a figment of my imagination. Did I dream up those conversations—that night that seemed to last forever where we talked and talked until we could speak no more? Did I imagine the way his hand felt on my back, fingers pressing into my spine, seeming to say, “Tell me more.”
One day, I awoke with my first thoughts of him. As I ate breakfast in the hotel cafeteria and walked the ten blocks to the el station, I thought of what Tom was eating, wearing, thinking. That day again I made an excuse to go to the sixth floor. I didn’t go into his office. Just seeing him was what I wanted—a glimpse of him, running his fingers through his rich carpet of hair. He glanced up, noticed me, and waved. Then he turned back to his lightboard. No beckoning inside. Why had I trusted a stranger? Why did I imagine there was something there?
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