Charming Grace

by Deborah Smith

  “How long have you been straight?”

  “Over twenty years.”

  “Ever look back?”

  “All the time. I lost a lot of love along the way. But it was the love that saved me, too.”

  I chewed on that fine point in silence. Before I could ask him for any gory details or more good advice, the door swung open hard enough to whack the wall. Roarke got to his feet. Protecting me. It was the strangest thing. This big, sixtyish mofo, standing guard in front of me. And me feeling suddenly misty eyed, because of him protecting me. Must be the painkillers.

  Cary Grant strode in. Big corporate honcho, graying hair, tuxedo. Had a grimace on his country-club face that said he was hunting for someone to hurt. Found me. Bingo.

  “You got business here?” Roarke asked.

  The stranger ignored Roarke and kept his laser-look on me. “You must be Boone Noleene.”

  Cary Grant had an up-coast Rhett Butler accent. I got a sinking feeling. I sat up straighter, big and ball-bearing and bare-chested, with a blood-speckled bandage on my forehead and pieces of river trash in my hair—not a respectable image. I debated whether to be girly and pull the bedsheet up to my armpits. Debated whether to say Yeah, I’m Noleene, so who wants to know? like a punk or Yes, sir! like a suck-up. I finally just sighed and gave up. “I’m Boone Noleene, sir. And I’m bettin’ Grace is your daughter.”

  “You’re betting correctly, then.”

  James Bagshaw—rich man, lawyer, estranged papa, mad papa—took a step toward me. Roarke blocked his way again. Two big mo-fo’s, from different worlds, but with the same king-dog attitude. “Do you have a problem with Boone?” Roarke asked.

  “Not if you get out of my way, Roarke.”

  “Sounds like you got a problem with me, then.”

  Bagshaw stared hard at the man who was sleeping with his mother. “No. My mother likes you. She rarely makes a mistake in her judgment of men, and since I’ve already checked out your business references, I trust you not to swindle her. Beyond that, I have no interest in you right now. So step aside.”

  “Let him by, Jack,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide and nowhere to hide it.”

  Roarke frowned but moved away.

  “Thank you.” Bagshaw now looked at the man who was sleeping with his daughter. “I came here,” he said to me, “to thank you for saving my daughter’s life.”

  One, two, three. Breathe.

  Take the sophisticated road. It was my honor, sir.

  Take the selfish road. Good. At least you don’t hate me like you hated Harp.

  Or just wander off the road completely.

  “I love her,” I said.

  Whatever James Bagshaw expected, it probably wasn’t that. He scrutinized me as if watching for liar’s blood to seep through the bandage on my head. I noticed Roarke’s satisfied nod.

  Love makes you want to live.

  Bagshaw blew out a long breath. “I will never make the mistake of not supporting my daughter’s choice of men, again. Besides, I’ve already learned everything I can about you, and you seem to be reformed, at least. If that’s damning you with faint praise, it’s the best I can do right now. Except promise to welcome you into our family if the day ever comes when my daughter asks for my blessing.”

  My little devil voice whispered, See? He likes you better than he liked Harp.

  A better me said, Tell him the truth.

  So I did. “Sir, I love Grace and I’ll always love her and I swear to you on everything holy I’ll never do anything to hurt her. But I don’t think you have to worry about welcoming me into your family. I’m leaving here when the movie’s done. Besides, I said I love her. I didn’t say she loves me back.”

  Bagshaw frowned harder. Behind him, Roarke threw up both hands. I didn’t know when to shut up.

  The door bounced open again. “Where’s my Cajun public-relations gold mine?” Stone boomed the gleeful question as if I might be hiding in the toilet. He strode in, rubbing his hands and grinning. When he saw two pissed-off strangers staring back at him, he halted and frowned. “Who started a party and forgot to invite me?”

  Roarke took the bull by the Stone horns. “Jack Roarke,” he said. “Glad to meet you.” He thrust out a hand as big as Stone’s own wrestler-sized mitts. “You’re a good man, and I know why you think there’s no way but your way. You grew up hard in New Jersey, fighting a mean stepdaddy, but you’re a grown man now and the stepdaddy’s dead and so you need to stop trying to control the whole world. You don’t know what’s best for everybody, and sometimes, you’re just full of shit. Now, look, here’s the deal. I plan to hire Boone away from you eventually and give him a job doing what he’s really meant to do—designing and building the best damn houses in the country. Let’s you and me agree to that plan for his future, and shake on it.”

  Stone gaped at him. Speechless. Stone. Speechless. It was the weirdest thing, how Roarke, a big, leathery non-Hollywooder graybeard who was nothing and nobody in Stone’s world, swelled up in size while Stone just stood there, getting smaller and younger and hypnotized—just a kid again—pretty much the way I felt, too, looking at Roarke. Neither one of us had known our papas. We were sentimental marks for a papa lecture.

  In the meantime, Grace’s papa didn’t wait for niceties. “Senterra,” he said in a low voice. The deadly tone snapped Stone’s attention to him. James Bagshaw stepped in close. “My daughter wouldn’t let me help her fight you in court over the past two years, and she refuses to ask for my help now that you’re here making this asinine movie, and she didn’t ask me to come here tonight, and in fact, she’d be mad if she knew I’d come here on her behalf. But the fact remains that she’s my daughter and today she almost drowned because of your goddamned movie. And so I’m here to do the one thing I can do for her, as her father.”

  He punched Stone in the mouth.

  Stone wobbled. Roarke shoved his way between the two men, caught Stone by one arm, and helped him sit down in the armchair. “Bend your knees. Head up. Ass down. There. You got it.”

  I was half out of bed by then, trying to do what a bodyguard is supposed to do even when he’s off-duty, dressed only in my underwear, with a sheet tangled around my legs. Bagshaw waved me to a stop. “I’m done, so relax,” he ordered. “Tell Grace I made a fool of myself, but it wasn’t your fault.”

  He cast another disgusted look at Stone, then walked out.

  Swaying in the chair, Stone gulped air and blinked like a big, hoot-impaired owl. Blood seeped from his mouth. In his movies he took head-butts from alien monsters or chin kicks from mutant Ninjas without flinching. But one punch from Grace’s sixty-year-old papa broke his kneecaps, knocked his eyeballs out, and gave him temporary asthma. Roarke, trying not to smile, bent over him. “It always hurts worse in real life.”

  “Grace,” Candace squealed, then threw her arms around me as if I’d come home from a long war in a distant land. Standing in the elegant faux-European foyer of her and Dad’s big, country-club home at Birch River, she cried and hugged me, and I hugged her back, ashamed of being such a troublemaking stepdaughter for so many years, and for never winning the Miss America crown she had deserved. Small truths had begun coming home to me, like forgotten birds.

  Clutching each other’s hands, we made our way to a sunny, enclosed porch filled with dark rattan furniture and silk pillows, overlooking the golf course where Dad never took time to play golf. “I’ll call your father,” Candace insisted. “Please wait for him to get home from the office. It’ll mean so much to him that you came to see him.”

  “No, I. . .Candace, I don’t want to ruin this moment by talking to him in person. One of us would say the wrong thing and the whole meeting would degenerate into another argument about his attitude toward Harp. Just tell him I heard about last night. That I appreciate what he did.”

  “Oh, Grace. Of course I’ll tell him. But what are we going to do now? Everyone is talking about the fight. Oh, Grace! Your father isn’t a thug who
assaults people! He’s a lawyer. He sues.” My beautifully coiffed stepmother shut her eyes and cried at the thought of Dad slugging someone without even filing paperwork first. While dressed in his best tuxedo, no less. She and Dad had just gotten home from a charity fundraiser in Atlanta when they heard about the river incident and he rushed off to the hospital.

  “Ssssh,” I comforted. “G. Helen influenced Dad more than he’ll admit when he was a kid. She taught him the same thing she taught me: Sometimes you’ve just got to knock an S.O.B.’s teeth out.”

  “But this morning Katie Couric told the whole world that your father is a monster.”

  “Now, Candace, be fair. She really didn’t say anything like that—”

  “Does the specific wording really matter? She said your father attacked Stone Senterra. Cute little Katie Couric said your father attacked a man. People believe every word she tells them. They even watched when she has her colon examined. She’s on television! If she says so, it is so. Attacked.”

  “Well,” I said slowly. “Dad did attack him.”

  The indisputable truth. Candace stared at me, then bent her head into her hands and sobbed. She set great store by image and appearance. She was, after all, a 57-year-old doyenne of beauty queens. Despite the disappointment I’d caused her in the world of pageants, she’d gone on to successfully coach several Miss Georgia’s and a slew of other state queens, including two Miss America runner-ups. If Dad intended to storm around punching famous movie stars and provoking Katie Couric to use dastardly terms like ‘attack,’ it would raise a lot of plucked and lacquered eyebrows in Candace’s world. And, as we all know, raised brows cause frown lines.

  I cuddled one of Candace’s hands in mine. “I hate to add to your misery, but you might as well hear it from me. Fox News plans to interview Aunt Tess on their national morning show tomorrow. Aunt Tess offered to defend our family name.”

  Candace gasped. “Oh. . .my. . .god! She’ll do her ‘dotty old fussbudget’ routine and everyone in the entire country will think we’re a pack of genteel idiots harboring Aunt Pittypat from Gone With The Wind!”

  “Don’t worry. G. Helen is organizing a hit squad to take her out before air time.”

  “Oh, Grace. Your father is being made a fool of. The whole Bagshaw family is being made a fool of.”

  I winced. “I’m sorry he was drawn into my fight. I never wanted to embarrass him, or the family.”

  Candace clucked and looked at me sorrowfully. “He’s not embarrassed. He’s worried about you. And depressed. And lonely for his only child. Grace, you never even told him you got accepted to law school. He’s so proud of you. But he had to hear the news from G. Helen.”

  “I just . . . I didn’t want him to think he inspired me. That I’m following in his footsteps.”

  “But Grace, you are following in his footsteps. And he did inspire you.”

  I wrestled with pride for a moment, then gave up. “Yes.”

  “Please tell him so.”

  “Not today. I just came here to ask you to tell him I. . .”

  “Love him? Forgive him?”

  “I appreciate what he did last night.”

  “Because you love him and forgive him. Of course. Honey, you’re his only child. He needs you. And you need him. He has no other children. Please don’t keep punishing him for his feelings toward Harp. He regrets how he behaved over the years, and how he misjudged Harp; you can’t imagine how heartsick and guilty he felt when Harp died.”

  I looked at her for a long moment. I’d always hidden an agonizing suspicion, never putting it into words, but tormented by the notion. One of my secret miseries. “Candace,” I said quietly, “Why didn’t you and Dad have any children together?”

  She fluttered her hands and began to turn red. “What a strange question. Let’s go have a pre-lunch drink. Something with gin in it. A double.”

  “Candace, please. The truth. You wanted children of your own. I know you did. Please tell me why you and Dad didn’t have any.”

  She sagged. Tears melted even more white veins into the perfect cosmetic landscape of her cheeks. “I love him so much. Please don’t blame him. He told me his terms when he asked me to marry him. I agreed to them.”

  “Terms? What. . .terms?”

  “No more children.” She struggled with her voice, then, “He was so afraid of losing you, after your mother died. He said he couldn’t bear the fear that came with more children.”

  I bent my head to hers and curled her hands beneath my chin like sleeping, manicured kittens. For a long time we simply sat, communing in miserable silence over the babies she’d never had, the half-siblings I’d always wanted. “I’m sorry for you,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry I’m the reason you didn’t—”

  “Hush.” She stroked my hair. “It’s not your fault. People have to protect themselves the only way they know how. Your Dad had to devote himself to you. Just as I devoted myself to him.”

  “And to me. You put up with so much from me.”

  “I loved you. I love you now.” Her voice broke. “You never think of me as your mother, but I always think of you as my daughter.”

  I had spent so many years honoring my dead mother that I’d slighted my living one.

  Don’t make the same mistake with me and Boone, Harp whispered.

  I bent my head to Candace’s, and I cried.

  Chapter 18

  Stone was sore. His mouth, his recapped front tooth, his feelings. All sore. “Noleene, no one understands me,” he moaned to me and everybody else in his inner circle, until Kanda said very gently but firmly, “Sweetheart? Baby? You’re big enough to take a punch in the puss every once in a while. Boone nearly died in the river but you don’t hear him complaining, do you? So. . .Sweetheart? Baby? Quit kvetching.” When Kanda hauled out her Yiddish, it was time to clam up.

  Stone said no more. But he stewed in Yiddish-enforced silence.

  Grace’s Aunt Tess came down with a case of high blood pressure and canceled her Fox interview. Word had it that G. Helen put the squeeze on the old lady like a swamp snake choking a rat.

  Grace’s papa sent a letter of apology and a blank check for Stone’s dental bill.

  Grace came to Casa Senterra and apologized, too. A political apology. She didn’t look sincere. Stone accepted it with grumpy diplomatic charm. He didn’t look sincere, either.

  On the set of Hero, Abbie and Lowe looked morose, like they had bad gas all the time. They spent so much of every day huddled in each other’s trailers the crew decided they were doing the hokey-pokey. I suspected different. I smelled trouble. Grace was working ‘em like a baker works bread. Knead, release, add a little more yeast. Whether they knew it or not they were rising to her occasion, slowly but surely. Just what that occasion was, I still wasn’t certain.

  Roarke didn’t spill a single word about the love conversation between me and Grace’s papa, so I was spared having Gracie feel sorry for me. In return, I didn’t tell a soul about Roarke’s prison record. I never would.

  The National Enquirer ran a picture of Stone coming out of his L.A. dentist’s office with a fat lower lip.

  Ka-bong! Stone Loses Another Round To Grace Vance, the headline said.

  Stone gave me another raise for the good publicity I got him when I rescued Abbie out of the river.

  But after the Enquirer came out, he canceled it.

  Without any sense of irony, imbued with his usual distortion of reality, Stone got only one scene right. Harp’s death. The only part of the Hero script that was horribly, totally, true-to-life was the scene in which Harp died. Harp gave up his life on a fierce August morning on the rooftop of Piedmont Hospital. On a fierce August morning two years later, I prepared to watch him die, again.

  That’s how it felt.

  Sweating, nauseated, I stood among the cast and crew and equipment sprawling atop the broad, flat roof of Atlanta’s largest hospital, wondering if I could get through the day without saying or doing something that
would only make the situation worse than it was. The scent of asphalt and steel and fetid city air roiled inside me. I hugged myself to hold everything close, my fists numb, indenting my ribs, making it harder to breathe.

  The actor playing the Turn-Key Bomber headed toward me to say something. He didn’t resemble the Turn-Key in any significant physical way; the Turn-Key (who I never thought of by name, refusing to concede any humanity to him) had been chunky and nondescript. The actor was leaner, better-looking, with heavy, sympathetic eyes as he came my way. Strapped to him were bulging canvas packets fitted with a spiderweb of wires. The Turn-Key had covered himself in high-tech explosives and planned to die along with everyone else in the vast hospital complex beneath him. The Turn-Key had also carried a large revolver. He’d emptied that revolver into Harp’s chest right before Harp sank a hunting knife into his throat.

  Now the actor was not only covered in fake explosives, but carrying an all-too-real-looking revolver of the same make and model that killed Harp.

  “Mrs. Vance,” he began in a careful tone. “I just want you to know—”

  I gave a quick shake of my head. The look on my face must have screamed at him. He halted and began backing up. “I’m sorry. Sorry. Shouldn’t have come near you—”

  “It’s not your fault. But please stay away from me.”

  Suddenly Boone angled in front of me. He waved the actor off. “Talk to her later, when you’re not in that outfit.”

  The actor nodded and hurriedly disappeared into the crowd. I wavered as pinpoints of light floated through my vision. Boone cupped a hand under my elbow. “Let’s find you some shade,” he ordered. The next thing I knew we were standing under the catering tent. Despite huge fans blowing storm-force breezes throughout, the heat of the hospital roof seeped up my bare legs, wilting the faded denim skirt that had been Harp’s favorite thing for me to wear. Withering me. “Drink,” Boone ordered. I lipped the cup of ice water he held to my mouth. My head cleared. I exhaled. “When does Stone shoot Harp?”