Finding Grace

by Becky Citra

  A waiter shows us to a round table near the dance floor. A man with a pointy white beard is playing the piano, a man dressed entirely in black is playing an instrument that Mom whispers is a saxophone, and a woman with frizzy hair is singing.

  We study the menu for ages. “Holy Toledo!” I gasp when I see the prices, but Mom says firmly not to worry, this is a celebration. We order shrimp cocktails to start with, and roast beef. We’re going to decide on desserts later. Mom has a glass of house wine and I have something called a Shirley Temple, which is pink and comes in a glass with a little paper umbrella.

  A few couples are dancing. Mom taps her foot. I sip my Shirley Temple and look around. Most of the tables are full. I spot a man sitting by himself, reading his menu. It takes me a second to recognize him. It’s Mr. Pinn!

  “Granny’s lawyer is over there,” I tell Mom. “Mr. Pinn.”

  “Mr. Pinn?” Mom says. She sounds confused. “Here? Are you sure?”

  “Right over there.” I point and Mr. Pinn looks up at that exact moment. He waves. Then he gets up and makes his way to our table. He’s wearing a gray-striped suit and a fancy purple polka-dot tie.

  “Flora,” he says. His face is bright red.

  “Gerald,” Mom says. “What a surprise.”

  Mr. Pinn turns even redder. “I’ve got a week’s holidays and our conversations about Harrison Hot Springs made me realize how long it’s been since I stayed here. So I thought, why not?”

  “Why not?” Mom’s face is red too. “Um, would you like to join us?”

  “I’d be delighted! I’ll just go back and get my glass of wine.”

  We watch him thread his way back to his table.

  “He likes you,” I say. “And he’s quite good-looking.”

  “What?”

  “He likes you. That’s why he came here. It’s obvious.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “Doesn’t,” Mom hisses as Mr. Pinn comes back. A waiter brings an extra set of cutlery and Mr. Pinn insists on ordering a whole bottle of wine and another Shirley Temple for me. “Drinks are on me,” he beams.

  The wine is opened and tasted. I have never seen this done before. Mr. Pinn swishes it around in his mouth and looks thoughtful and then nods. Once it’s poured, he says in a gallant voice, “Would you like to dance, Flora?”

  Mr. Pinn is at least five inches shorter than Mom. He turns out to be a snappy dancer. He whirls Mom around the dance floor until she is breathless. Their feet fly. Mom’s blue dress swirls; she looks gorgeous and everyone is staring at her.

  By the time we’ve finished our roast beef, Mom and Mr. Pinn have danced five times. I’ve danced with Mr. Pinn twice. He told me exactly what to do, and it was easy! His polka-dot tie has come loose. He and Mom have polished off the bottle of wine. They’re getting along like a house on fire. I’m not sure how I feel about this. The dancing was fun, but this is supposed to be our celebration. Mr. Pinn has butted in.

  To my shock, halfway through our Baked Alaska desserts, Mom puts her fork down and tells Mr. Pinn about Grace. She tells him the whole story. Mr. Pinn hangs on every word, spellbound.

  By the time she’s finished, she’s crying. “I’m a terrible mother,” she gulps.

  “Oh no,” Mr. Pinn says. “No, no, no, no, no. Why, look at Hope here. She’s a credit to you.”

  Mom wipes her eyes.

  Mr. Pinn says, “We need a toast.” He raises his wine glass. “To Grace.”

  Mom and I lift our glasses. Mom gives me a wobbly smile.

  “To Grace.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Not yet,” Mom says. “I’m not ready.”

  It’s the next day and Mom, Mr. Pinn, and I are having lunch at the Top Notch. We’ve been going around in circles for an hour, trying to figure out what to do.

  These are the burning questions:

  1. Does Grace know she was adopted?

  2. Should I tell Grace that I’m her sister?

  3. Should Mom meet Grace?

  Mom twists her napkin into a knot. “I don’t want to upset Grace. I don’t want to turn her life upside down. I just want to know that she’s happy and loved.”

  “Well, of course you do,” Mr. Pinn says. “She’s your daughter.”

  “I don’t know what we should do,” Mom practically wails. “We just kind of jumped into this without thinking it through.”

  “We need a strategy,” Mr. Pinn says.

  I notice the “we” right away. Since when did Mr. Pinn become part of this?

  “This whole thing was a terrible idea,” Mom moans.

  I give Mom a cold look. If that’s true, what was the big celebration last night all about? After all my detective work, not to mention hours of biking in the baking sun, I think Mom’s being ungrateful.

  “I don’t think I ever really thought we’d find her,” Mom confesses.

  She takes a big breath. “I should talk to Grace’s aunt first.” Mom sounds kind of wild. “That would be the right thing to do. I could explain things.”

  “There’s an idea,” Mr. Pinn says. He looks pleased.

  But I know Mom will never do that. There’s this thing I’ve always known about Mom. She’s terrible at doing things that are hard. Getting up in the morning and looking for a job. Going to Strawberry Teas with all the other mothers at my school. Now I can add talking to great-aunts and meeting her long-lost daughter to the list.

  “Could you just play with her for a few days, Hope?” Mom pleads. “If she gets to know you first…”

  “You mean, gets to know I’m a liar.”

  Mom’s eyes well up with tears.

  I mutter, “I’ll try. But if you don’t talk to her aunt soon, I’m going to tell Grace myself.”

  “Your mom just needs some time.” Mr. Pinn reaches across the table and puts his hand on top of Mom’s.

  That makes me feel a little weird. They hardly know each other. And it’s easy for Mom and Mr. Pinn not to worry. They aren’t the ones who have to pretend to be someone else.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I’ve abandoned the bike. It’s just too much trouble. And it only takes ten minutes to walk to Grace’s house.

  She’s sitting on the porch in shorts and an orange sleeveless top, waiting for me. She wiggles over on the couch to make room. “Coast is clear,” she says. “Aunty Eve has gone to Agassiz.”

  Grace is armed with a notebook and a pen. At the top of the page, she’s written Book Report for Jane of Lantern Hill.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Grace says.

  I talk and Grace scribbles madly. I’ve still got plenty more to say, all about Jane baking her first pie, about her garden and her cats, when Grace puts her pen down. “Okay, that’s good enough.”

  “But I’m not finished.”

  Grace yawns. “I am. I’m not writing a novel. This should satisfy the old bat.” She grins at me. “You’re a lifesaver. It was my lucky day when you crashed your bike.”

  My stomach clenches, waiting for Grace to ask me again why I was riding past her house. But she doesn’t. “I’ve never met anyone who likes doing book reports,” she says.

  I don’t want her to think I’m weird. I shrug. “I don’t especially like doing book reports, I just like reading, that’s all.”

  “Not me.” Grace’s blue eyes gleam. “You should join the reading club at the library. I bet you could beat David. He thinks he’s so great, but he’s actually an idiot.”

  I could beat him. He’s read fifteen books and I can’t remember how many books I’ve read this summer, but it’s more than that. But when Grace mentioned the library before, I never said that I’d been there. Now I have to pretend that I don’t know who David is.

&nbs
p; “Why don’t you join?” Grace persists.

  “I’m not going to be here for very long.”

  “You’re staying at the hotel, right?” Grace says. “Your whole family?”

  I tense slightly. “Just me and my mom.”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “I don’t have a dad.”

  Grace looks interested. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  My voice comes out in a kind of croak, but Grace doesn’t seem to notice. “Me neither,” she says. “It’s just me and Aunty Eve. My parents died in a car accident when I was five. That’s when I moved here. I used to live in Vancouver.”

  “I live in Vancouver.” My voice still isn’t working right. I swallow a few times.

  “Are you, like, on a holiday?”

  “Sort of.” What if I told her? What if I told her right now? I feel sick when I imagine the shocked look on her face.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble. “A few more days I guess.”

  Too many questions. I need to change the subject fast. “How was Bible Camp this morning?”

  Grace heaves an enormous sigh. “Horrible, awful, boring. I’m the oldest one there. We sang a hundred million hymns and colored pictures like we were babies. Then we planted bean seeds in cups. I refused. How am I supposed to get excited about growing a bean?”

  “Why do you go if it’s so awful?” I say.

  “I don’t go because I want to. I’m forced to go. Aunty Eve makes me. What I want to do is go to a real camp. There’s one in Sechelt and my best friends Janey and Louise are there right now. I begged to go.”

  Grace changes her voice so it’s sharp and cross-sounding. “Why should I spend money to send you all the way to some fancy camp in Sechelt when there’s a perfectly good camp right here in our village?”

  “Your Aunty Eve said that?”

  “Aunty Evil. That’s what I’m calling her this summer. She doesn’t get it. At a real camp, you get to canoe, sleep outside, have talent nights, and raid the boys’ cabins. Janey and Louise got to go last year too. They said it was a scream. Wouldn’t you just love that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly. Camp sounds terrifying to me. I bet there’s nowhere to escape from popular kids and just read a book or something.

  Grace sighs. “Oh well. This is the last week of Bible Camp and then the torture is over. And then, in one more week, Janey and Louise will be back. They are my absolute best friends. They just about died when Aunty Eve said I couldn’t go with them. They were going to go on strike and stay home too, but their parents had already paid for it and everything, so they had to go.”

  I feel a sharp pang of envy. I can’t imagine having two absolute best friends who would go on strike and give up camp just for me. To be honest, I can’t imagine having any best friends at all. I never have. It’s one more thing besides loving books that’s different between Grace and me. This is stupid and makes no sense at all but I’ve decided not to like Janey and Louise. I’m glad they’re away.

  Grace’s legs were curled underneath her, but now she stretches them out. “God, my legs are hairy,” she moans.

  I stare at Grace’s legs, which actually are quite hairy. A hot flush spreads across my cheeks.

  Grace’s right leg is way skinnier than her left leg, and it kind of curves towards her foot. It’s the first time I’ve noticed it.

  It must be the polio. It hits me full blast then, that this whole thing is not just some made-up story in a book. I really do have a twin sister and she’s sitting beside me, right beside me, and my mother gave her away because she had polio.

  Don’t stare, a voice whispers in my head.

  And then, Tell her, you have to tell her.

  “Are you allowed to shave?”

  “What?” I struggle to pull my thoughts together. Grace’s skinny leg has totally flustered me.

  “Does your mom let you shave your legs?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never asked.”

  The truth is, I’ve never worried about hair on my legs. I inspect them now. They’re not nearly as bad as Grace’s (one more thing that’s different about us), but they’re definitely hairy. How did I miss that before? I have so many things to worry about and now I have to add hairy legs to my list.

  “I’m not allowed,” Grace says. “Aunty Evil has a fit if I even mention it. She says it’s vain to worry about hairy legs when you’re eleven years old.”

  She jumps up. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yeah.”

  I mean, aren’t I keeping the biggest secret of all? I get this crazy urge to burst into hysterical laughter, even though it’s not one bit funny.

  “Come on.”

  Grace pushes open the screen door and I follow her inside her house. After being out in the bright sun, it’s dark inside. We walk down a long narrow hallway, past a kitchen and a living room, and then up a flight of stairs.

  As I walk behind her, I try to decide if she’s walking normally. She doesn’t really look like she’s limping, but it’s hard to tell. She certainly has no trouble climbing up the stairs.

  “This is my room,” Grace says.

  The room is tiny. There’s a bed with a yellow bedspread and with a mound of stuffed animals on the pillow, and a blue dresser and a desk by the window. The window is open and a lace curtain is blowing in the breeze. I can smell something sweet like flowers. The floor is buried under heaps of clothes.

  “It’s a mess,” Grace says cheerfully. “I’m not allowed to go anywhere until I clean it up or else I’ll be grounded.”

  I’m only half-listening to Grace. My eyes are riveted on the stuffed animals. There’s a monkey, a dog, a teddy bear, a rabbit, and a hippo. My heart skips a beat. It’s my hippo, Harry. The same pinkish fur and black button eyes.

  It’s Harry all right, but it can’t be.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I pick up the hippo. “Where did you get this?”

  “That old hippo?” Grace shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve always had it.”

  “Did someone give it to you?”

  “I told you, I’ve always had it.” Grace is looking at me like I’ve lost my marbles. “My mom must have given it to me when I was little. I think she gave me all these stuffed animals.”

  “Your mom?” I say, confused.

  And then I get what Grace means. Her adopted mom, the nurse Sharon.

  How can I tell Grace that she’s wrong? That I don’t think it was Sharon who gave her the hippo. That I’m positive it was Granny. Granny told me that when I was two, she and Grandpa went on a cruise to Alaska and they bought Harry in a gift shop in one of the little towns they stopped in. Granny didn’t tell me the whole truth. She must have bought two hippos.

  Grace opens her top drawer and pulls out a piece of newspaper. She hands it to me, “Look at this.”

  I read it out loud:

  Ladies: Read This!

  Unwanted hair removed permanently from face, arms, and legs, with Egyptian misopile. Harmless – leaves skin soft and smooth. Egyptian misopile is a liquid and is applied directly from the bottle.

  Money back guarantee.

  $3.00 per bottle

  Fortune Products

  1176 Sherbrooke West

  Montreal, Quebec.

  By the time I get to the last line, we are both giggling like hyenas.

  “I sent away for it,” Grace says. “It might even come today. The mail will be sorted by now, so I gotta go to the post office before Aunty Eve gets there. She’ll kill me if she finds out I ordered this.” She grins. “But at least I won’t have hairy legs in my coffin!”

  This makes us screech with laughter again.

 
Grace kicks at a mound of clothes. “I’ll do this later. Aunty Eve won’t be back for ages. She’ll never know if I go out. Come on!”

  If Janey and Louise were here, would Grace want to be with me? I guess she’s desperate for someone to hang around with. I push that thought away and follow Grace downstairs. She’s a little bit slower going down and she’s holding onto the rail with one hand.

  “You didn’t bring your bike,” Grace says when we get outside.

  “It’s the hotel’s and it doesn’t work that well,” I say. I add uncertainly, “If you want to bike, that’s okay; I can walk fast.”

  “I don’t have a bike,” Grace says. “I can’t ride one. My leg gets too tired.”

  I freeze.

  “I had polio when I was little,” Grace says. “It made my leg gimpy.”

  Grace sounds like it’s no big deal. I can’t think of anything to say. Not one thing. Finally, I stammer, “Does it hurt?”

  “Not really any more. It used to hurt a lot. Sometimes it aches, but mostly it just gets too weak to do stuff.”

  “Oh.”

  Grace doesn’t have any trouble talking about herself. Not like me. I’m a pro at hiding stuff. I can’t believe how she can just rattle on. As we walk along the shady streets, she tells me more about the polio. She tells me how she used to wear leg braces and how when she moved to Harrison Hot Springs, the kids at school thought she was contagious.

  “David was the worst. He has this gang of horrible boys he hangs around with, but he’s the worst. He told everyone not to play with me. That I would give them polio germs.”

  “That’s awful,” I gasp.

  “It was awful. But then I met Janey and Louise. And we instantly became best friends.”

  When we get to the post office, we go inside and Grace takes a silver key out of her pocket. She opens a box in the middle of a wall of mailboxes. “Nothing,” she says, crouching down so she can see right inside. “Darn!”

  A man is sorting parcels behind a counter at one end of the post office. “Hi there, Grace!” he calls out.