Grace Grows

by Shelle Sumners

  Bogue was quite the smooth, drunk operator. His face was now bright red. Adorable! Or maybe I was a little tipsy, too. I scooted closer and gave him a friendly peck on the cheek. He grinned.

  “What are you doing, Bogue?” Tyler said. He and Peg were looking at us.

  “Just following the biological imperative, man,” Bogue said.

  “Why don’t you follow it right on out of here.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bogue said.

  “You’re gonna worry,” Tyler said.

  “When you do what?”

  “You don’t want me to show you.”

  “Come on, show us,” Boris threw in.

  A girl came and tapped Tyler on the shoulder. He stood up and moved away with her and while they talked he pulled out his cell and added a number.

  “Oh, sure,” Bogue said. “He can score a hookup, but I’d better not even try in the same space. New city, same old shit. I don’t know why I still hang out with him.”

  “You two do seem kind of different.”

  He looked at me with interest. “How so?”

  “Well, ‘biological imperative.’ I think Tyler would say the same thing differently.”

  “Yeah.” Bogue grinned. “He’d call it ‘the urge to fuck and run.’ I’m way more educated. Not to mention classy. Do you want another beer?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “He’s lucky to have you. This would be a hard city to come to alone.”

  “No shit. He probably wouldn’t even have come if I hadn’t dragged his ass here. I told him it was time to spread the musical love in a much wider radius than Pennsylvania, see if he could make something of it. I told him I’d learn what to do and be his manager even, but already he’s found someone else. Asshole.”

  “So what do you do? Have you found a job yet?”

  “I’m looking. I’m gonna get a beer, be right back.”

  Peg went to the ladies’ room and Edward and Boris left to meet friends at a bar down the street.

  Tyler finished with the girl and came and sat on Bogue’s chair. “Her name is Jennifer. She offered to start a street team for me with those other girls.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I guess they’ll hand out flyers for my gigs, try to get people to come. Hey, can you help me create a Facebook fan page? I don’t have a computer.”

  “I guess I could try . . . I don’t know much about it. Let’s ask Peg if she—”

  “Come on, we’ll figure it out. When can I come over?”

  “I—well, I need to check my schedule.” I stood up. “Can we talk about it later? I have to get going.”

  He seemed genuinely disappointed. “Can’t you stay?”

  “Not this time, I’m sorry.”

  He moved back to let me out of the booth. “Next time, then. I might have something special for you, if you give me that list. Why don’t you text it to me? I’ll give you my number.”

  “I think I have your number, actually.” I knew I did, buried in Big Green. Now bookmarking The Age of Innocence.

  He got his cell out. “Okay, give me yours. I promise to only use it twice a day.”

  My stomach was starting to hurt.

  “Grace?” He was waiting. I gave him the number.

  A couple of mornings later I stepped outside my door to go to work and did an ungainly, windmilling slide across the floor, just catching myself on the banister before I ate honeycomb tile. Had Mr. Rojas just mopped, or what? I searched for the telltale shine and found that the instrument of my near wipeout was not gray mop water, but a lethal calling card—a slick little bit of lamination from Pocono Community College.

  Tyler’s picture on it stopped me cold. He was shaggy-haired, grinning, a dimple in one cheek. Cocky. Completely adorable. How could anyone be that photogenic in a college photo ID?

  The card had apparently been paper-clipped to a scuffed piece of notebook paper I found nearby on the floor. I opened it up and sat on the stairs in an attempt to read his execrable handwriting. It was a poem. Or—of course!—the words to a song.

  this sign

  would you like to take a walk with me

  hold hands see what we can see

  come back and take a cup of tea with me

  suns leavin would you like to stay

  I didn’t expect it to go this way

  but theres all sorts of games that we can play if you stay

  I wanna be with you rain or shine

  theres nobody elses heart on my mind

  and if I went lookin, lord, I’d never find this sign

  theres nothin out there that we can do

  but look at each other without a clue

  and what if the others thinkin I love you?

  well I do

  The charming song he’d played Monday night. I read the words again a couple more times.

  Maybe I could tutor him on apostrophe usage.

  drinking at work: the dream and the reality

  Ed and I had a meeting with Bill about the third-grade reading book we were developing. Have I mentioned that Bill is distractingly orange? Too much self-tanning lotion, maybe, or too much carrot juice. It kind of clashes with his blond brush cut. Also, by the way, Bill never smiles. Ever.

  “So here are the issues,” Bill said.

  We were still settling into our seats. I pulled out a legal pad and uncapped my pen.

  “We need to add someone old to one of the stories. Maybe in the one about the Latino kid who goes Rollerblading in the park. Make it his granny who takes him, instead of the teenage brother.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “the thing is, that story is an excerpt from a Newbery Medal–winning book. The brother is important to the little boy in the plot. I don’t know if the author—”

  “He’ll change it for our text. Tell him we can’t use the story, otherwise.”

  “The author is a woman.”

  “Right. All the more reason she’ll agree to change the brother to an old lady. Okay, next.” He consulted his notes. “Get rid of the ice cream sundae in the story about the kid who loses her library book. Change it to fruit salad.”

  “Fruit salad.” Ed wrote it down. “So, she knows she’s going to get in trouble for losing her book, and she uses the last of her allowance to treat herself to fruit salad, before she tells her parents?”

  “Yeah, it sucks,” Bill said. “But we can’t have foods with no nutritional value in the stories. Too many little fatties will be reading them.”

  Ed kneed me under the table.

  Bill looked at his notes. “And one more thing. We’re dead in the water with California if we don’t have an equal number of male and female characters throughout the book.”

  “We do!” I said vehemently. I knew this for a fact. “Forty-nine of each!”

  “Not true,” Bill said. “You have to count the animal characters, too. Freddie the Fox and Malachi Mouse in that barn story bring it up to fifty-one males. So change one of them to Fanny the Fox or Mary Mouse. Well, maybe not Fanny. That’s awkward. Felicia. There you go.”

  He stood up and slid his folder across the table to me. “Double-check my notes to make sure I covered everything.” He left the conference room.

  I looked at Ed, who smiled ruefully.

  “Do we have to pick life apart like this?” I asked.

  “We do, to ensure diversity.”

  “But we’re making this book dumb and bland. It’s undiverse, what we’re doing!”

  “Is that a word?”

  “I just invented it.” I gathered my stuff and stood up. “You know what, Ed? This meeting made me want to drink.”

  “I have a bottle of Bushmills in my desk. Let’s make Irish coffees.”

  “Some of these stories aren’t even that good. What is our priority, here?”

  “Demographic balance. Grace, you know we have to follow the bias and sensitivity guidelines if we want to sell this book.”

  “What about literary quality?”

 
“That would be nice.”

  “Ed. You’re becoming a Stepford editor.”

  “Oxygen, baby girl.” He patted my shoulder. “Slip on the mask and breathe.”

  Tyler called me that afternoon.

  “Hey, beautiful, how’s it going?”

  “Just great, thanks.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Sitting at my desk at Spender-Davis Education.”

  “Oh, yeah. The job. So will you still help me do the Facebook page?”

  Apparently he was helpless. And apparently I was a sucker for it. “Well, I guess we can try to figure it out.” I told him to come to my office Thursday night at seven.

  He showed up at 7:22.

  “Hey!” He hugged me with one arm and held up a fragrant paper bag and a plastic bag that clanked in a bottle-y way. “I brought supper.”

  I led him through the maze to my deluxe, corner, outer-wall cubicle.

  “Hey, that’s pretty.” He liked my rosemary-bush Christmas tree.

  “I have windows!” I said.

  “I see that.” He touched the grinning Green Man sun catcher hanging on the glass.

  “That’s Pan. Father Nature. Peg hung him there to keep me ‘connected’ while I’m up here in this artificial environment all day.”

  “She seems like a real friend.”

  I cleared many piles off my desk and got us plates and forks from the break room while he unwrapped our first course: mozzarella and prosciutto panini. The singular of which is panino, but not many people realize that. My stomach twanged.

  “I got here just in time,” he laughed. He pulled out a Swiss Army knife and opened a giant bottle of beer and placed it in front of me.

  “Either you’re way overestimating my capacity for alcohol, or you have evil intentions.”

  “It’s the second one.” He opened his own two-liter. “Why are we doing this here?”

  “My computer here is better. Faster. Plus Steven is out of town, so I can stay late.”

  Instant flash of unease. I was here alone with him in this big, empty office, after dark on a cold December night. He had a knife in his pocket. And now he knew that no one would notice if I never made it home. I took a tiny sip of beer and studied him for any sign of a dark vibe. What I saw was a pale, scruffy, hungry young man with crumbs on his chin, looking at me with warm eyes. It felt like I had known him much longer than just a few weeks.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Steven? London.”

  “For how long?”

  “Four days, this time.”

  “Does he go away a lot?

  “A fair amount.”

  “How come?”

  “He’s a patent attorney for a pharmaceutical company.”

  “I guess he makes a lot of money.”

  I shrugged. “Some, for sure.”

  “So, you gonna bring him to hear me play?”

  “Not likely. He’s a recovering alcoholic. He stays away from bars.”

  “Yeah, I’ll probably end up having to do that one day.” He grinned and I got a flash of the adorable college ID guy.

  “By the way.” I reached under my desk and groped around in Big Green till I found my wallet. I waved his ID at him. “Thanks a lot. I skated across my hall on this when I came out to go to work the other morning.”

  Tyler smiled. “No way! Sorry about that.”

  I pushed it across the desk.

  “You can keep it, if you want.” He took a giant bite of his second panino. “Do you want some of this?”

  “No thanks.” I nudged the ID closer to him. “You might need this.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to. But could you keep it for me? Sometimes I lose things.” He seemed completely earnest. But something about the way he was looking at me made my face feel warm.

  “Oh, well, okay.” I opened up my wallet. “It’ll be right in here with this picture of my mom.”

  He leaned across the desk. “Hey, let me see.”

  I held up the photo.

  “Your mom looks like one of those desperate housewife ladies.”

  I slid the pictures back in my wallet. “That’s just the surface. My mom is powerful.”

  “Yeah, she looks like she could kick some serious ass, if she wanted to.”

  “Believe me, she wants to. And she does.”

  He laughed. “Okay, I think I’ll steer clear of her.”

  He broke out a gigantic cheesecake brownie and we split it. I washed my half down with beer while I brought up Facebook on the computer. He pulled a chair around next to me.

  We created his personal profile and then a musician profile page. Then I showed him the pages of several musicians and bands.

  “So,” I said, “we’re going to need pictures of you. Do you have any?”

  “I just got some taken, I can get Bogue to e-mail them. He’s building me a website, with songs on it and everything.”

  “Oh, great, we can—” I did a double take. “Wait a minute, he is? Why isn’t he doing this for you?”

  Tyler shrugged.

  “Maybe you should have brought him with you tonight.”

  He smiled. “No way.”

  I looked back at the monitor. The animated frog on my screensaver was doing a jaunty little dance. I tapped the keyboard to wake up the computer and closed Facebook. “To be continued, I guess, when we have the photos to upload.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Okay. Thanks, Grace. I appreciate you being so sweet and helpful to me.” The drawl was thicker than ever.

  “Oh, no problem!” I said crisply, gathering up our empty plates, sweeping crumbs off the desk. I stood up, and found myself just about standing between his knees.

  “Well,” I said.

  He was not getting the message that we were leaving. He sprawled in a casual slouch in his chair, looking up at me from under auburn lashes.

  He patted his thigh. “Sit here.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, Gracie.” He grazed a finger down my forearm. “I promise you’ll like it.”

  I kicked his chair.

  He got up.

  Coming down in the elevator he asked, “Are you mad at me?”

  “Why would I be?” I said cheerfully.

  He walked me to the subway at Fiftieth and Broadway.

  “ ’Bye,” I said. “If I don’t see you, Merry Christmas.”

  “I thought you were coming Monday night.”

  “Well, probably not, it turns out. Lots of shopping still to do.”

  “But you have to be there! I’ve been working on your Christmas gift.”

  “You have?”

  He smiled.

  “Ty, what is it?”

  “Come and find out.”

  arson becomes a subconscious possibility

  It was my last day at work for more than a week. The next day was Christmas Eve, and Steven and I were going to New Jersey.

  No one actually did any work. Edward had already gone to Houston, and the office was boring without him. We had cookies and eggnog in the break room and opened our Secret Santa gifts.

  I was Secret Santa to a slightly gruff older woman in Production, named Carol. We hadn’t worked together much, and all I knew about her was that her husband had recently died and she liked making crafts. Someone told me she had cats. So I spent way more than the twenty-dollar Secret Santa limit and gave her a needlepoint kit I got at the Met gift shop, based on The Favorite Cat lithograph by Currier.

  She unwrapped it, smiled tremulously, and covered her face with her hands.

  I put an arm around her shoulders. A couple of others gathered around us.

  “It’s just so hard,” Carol said.

  None of us knew what to say. I hoped just listening was helpful, somehow. Someone gave her a tissue. I patted her shoulder.

  “Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s this fucking time of year.”

  Turned out Bill was my Secret Santa. He gave me a tin of Danish butter cooki
es and a Chia Pet in the shape of a cow. Obviously he did his Christmas shopping at Walgreens. I pondered the placid, bovine expression on my Chia and said thank you.

  Before I left work Peg called to check in with me about going to Tyler’s gig. I said that I would meet her there, but first I had to go with Steven to his office party.

  When we hung up, I grabbed my personalized Spender-Davis notepad and jotted down a sampling of my favorite songs. It was a mix of old oldies, like Earth, Wind & Fire’s “That’s the Way of the World,” and semi-oldies from high school days, like Blind Melon’s “Change.” I also special-mentioned Kate Bush’s seminal album The Kick Inside, an incredible late-seventies record a friend turned me on to in college.

  Steven’s company had rented a midtown nightclub for their party, complete with lavish buffet and open bar. A jazz band. We sat with two of his fellow attorneys, Nico and Ron, and Ron’s wife, Jody.

  Nico was going through a breakup that sounded a lot like what had happened to Steven: He met his wife in law school, was married a few years, and then she fell in love with a guy she worked with in private practice. Nico was doing a pretty good job of functioning socially, but he had this base facial expression of haunted vulnerability, overlaid with quick flashes of anger and cynicism. He laughed too quickly and loudly. When he spilled his drink, Steven cleaned it up and Ron went to the bar to get him a cup of coffee.

  “Poor guy,” Jody whispered to me.

  “Hey, man,” I heard Steven say quietly while he was blotting Nico’s shirt. “It gets better. Remember how I was when Katie left me? I thought my life was over. I could barely get out of bed, except to drink.”

  “I know, man,” Nico said. “I’m drunk now!”

  “Ron’s bringing you some coffee.” Steven squeezed his shoulder. “Hang in there, man. Look at me. Look at this beautiful girl I get to go home with.”

  Nico peered at me across the table. “Yeah, man. Sweet.” He raised a drunken power fist in tribute to me. “I hope I meet someone just like you one day, Grace.”