A Gift of Grace

by Cooper, Inglath

  “Sure,” he said, popping the tailgate and grabbing a bale with each hand. “Just show me where.”

  She nodded and moved off in the direction the child had taken, saying again how much she appreciated his help.

  The house was neat and well maintained, not huge, but cottagelike with groomed boxwoods neatly clipped into roundness. A huge old magnolia tree stood to one side of the lawn. At the rear of the house, Caleb came up short. The backyard looked as if FAO Schwarz had set up a display. Big red slide with a small trampoline-like thing at its base. A playhouse in bright yellow and green with shutters. A mini picnic table where two dolls sat waiting for tea. The little girl was at the top of the slide, getting ready to come down.

  “Watch, Mommy!”

  She turned to look, shading her eyes with one hand. “Be careful, honey.”

  The girl zipped down, hitting the trampoline at the bottom and letting out a high squeal-giggle that had delight at its center.

  The woman stopped at the edge of the yard. “You can put that down here,” she said, smiling at him. “I’ll figure out where to place it later.”

  “I’d be glad to put it where you need it.”

  “Well, okay.” One finger under her chin, she said, “I thought we could use them as chairs for the children. How about under the oak tree?”

  Caleb nodded and dropped the bales. “I’ll get the rest.”

  Two trips back to the truck, and the last of the bales formed an L-shaped backless bench at the yard’s perimeter.

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “We’re having a barnyard party on Saturday. Mini-donkeys. Grace has hardly been able to sleep for thinking about it.”

  The little girl skipped over and took her mother’s hand. “They’re only a little taller than me,” she said, looking up at Caleb.

  “Perfect size then, huh?”

  “I haven’t even introduced myself,” the woman said. “I’m Sophie Owens. And this is my daughter, Grace.”

  “Caleb Tucker.”

  “Oh.” She tipped her head back, her eyes widening a fraction. “Then you own the—”

  “My family does, yes.”

  “Well, again, thank you so much for hauling those out here for me.”

  “No problem.”

  “Is that your dog at the store?” the little girl asked.

  “He is.”

  “I like him.”

  “I think he liked you, too.” Caleb looked into the child’s clear blue eyes. She smiled at him, a shy child’s smile, and in that single moment, Caleb saw her. Dark arching eyebrows contrasting with sunshine-blond hair. The small square chin.

  He took a near stumbling step backward, as if he’d been delivered a blow to the chest. Snapshot memories of Laney as a little girl flew through his mind. Not possible. A too-long stretch of silence dropped over them like a blanket trapping all available air beneath it.

  “How old will you be, Grace?” he asked, his voice unsteady.

  She held up three fingers. “This many.”

  Her birthday was Saturday. The twenty-second of April.

  The day Laney’s child had been born.

  The day Laney had died.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE WAS LOSING HIS MIND.

  No other explanation for it. Things like this didn’t happen. The world was too big a place.

  When Caleb arrived back at the store, Macy stood at the front counter, sorting invoices.

  She looked up, started to say something, then stopped. “Caleb, you look like you just saw a ghost. What’s wrong?”

  “Dr. Owens. Is she married?”

  Macy closed the folder in front of her. “Divorced. I know a graduate student who helps out as a part-time nanny to her daughter. Ann Whitley. Really nice girl. She says Dr. Owens has inspired her to adopt a child some day.”

  The words hit Caleb at a decibel so high he thought he might have imagined them. The truth fluttered down, registered. He gave an abrupt nod, told Macy he had some work to do at the farm, then called Noah and got in the truck, heading home with little memory of how he’d gotten there.

  In the driveway, he jumped out, loping into the house and up the stairs to the second floor. At the top and to the right was another smaller staircase that led to the attic. He opened the door, a whoosh of heat hitting him in the face. Sunlight cut through the dormer window on the far wall. Boxes covered the floor, lined the walls. All Laney’s. He’d put everything that belonged to her in this room. Out of sight. Unable to throw any of it away, equally unable to look at it.

  He hadn’t opened this door once since the week after her funeral when he’d hauled it all up here. Box after box until he’d collapsed, exhausted, in the bed they had shared. He had slept for three days straight.

  He weaved his way into the room and knocked over a tall box, spilling two of her competition swimsuits and a pair of goggles. He put them back where they’d been.

  Most of the boxes were sealed and unmarked. He moved to the far wall, pulled out a couple of smaller ones, using his pocketknife to slit the tape. Inside was a quilt her grandmother had made her for college graduation. A half-full bottle of Chanel No. 5. A set of electric hot curlers. The next box held books and a headset she’d used for running.

  He opened a half dozen more, dumping their contents onto the floor, reaching for another when he didn’t find what he was looking for.

  Finally. There.

  A dozen or more framed photographs he’d pulled from their living-room walls three years before, pictures of them both as children, as high-school sweethearts, as husband and wife.

  He lifted them out, one by one, each picture creating its own well of pain. He and Laney at junior-year homecoming, her hair long, blond and straight. He and Laney on the rocks at Badger Creek playing hooky from school. There were pictures of him as a boy, an elementary-school photo when he’d decided to give himself a crew cut with his dad’s horse clippers.

  And there were pictures of Laney. Prom queen. Preening with Alice and Amy, her two best friends from high school.

  At the bottom of the stack was the one he’d been looking for. Laney as a toddler standing next to her father.

  Caleb flipped the frame. On the back she had written: Me and Daddy. Three years old. Me not him!

  He turned it over again, stared at the little girl in the picture. If he’d needed proof of the resemblance to the child he’d met today, here it was. Same silky blond hair. Blue eyes with their long, dark lashes. Even the mouth was the same. Wide and full.

  Caleb sat down on the wood floor, propped his head on one hand and stared at the picture.

  How could this have happened?

  His life had finally begun to even out, to settle into something he could accept as living. Now, all the old pain was back, rushing through his veins like injected poison.

  He sat for a long time, his eyes closed, head against the wall behind him.

  An extraordinary sense of calm slid over him, as it had the other times just before he sensed her presence.

  He kept his eyes closed, knowing that if he opened them, she would slip away.

  A single touch to the back of his hand, and he knew she was there. As she had been countless times in the past three years.

  He wondered if these moments were the only thing that kept him going. Wondered if all this time he had been straddling the line between the sane and insane, if visits from a dead wife automatically put a person in that category.

  He had told no one about it. Not his mom or dad. Not his doctor or pastor. As real as he knew her presence was, he could not bring himself to share it with anyone else for fear that maybe he really was going crazy.

  He sat for a long time, the peace inside him the only proof he had that he wasn’t losing his mind. It had been like this when she’d been alive, as well, Laney’s ability to soothe, to bring reason and calm to the times in their lives completely void of either.

  With the calm, the feel of her touch receded, and he was alone agai
n. He opened his eyes then, stared up at the slow-twirling ceiling fan above him. Tears spilled down his cheeks and fell onto the glass covering her face.

  CATHERINE TUCKER SAT in a striped lawn chair, enjoying the sun’s warmth.

  The backyard of Betsy Marshall’s modest, but immaculate, North Carolina ranch-style home was full to overflowing. Jeb and his brother Saul were in charge of the grill. The smell of sizzling hamburgers and hot dogs threaded the late-spring breeze.

  Jeb came from a large, extended family. The opposite of Catherine, who had been an only child. His sister Betsy was the third in a family of five children, and she was the most like Jeb’s mother in that she loved to get the whole family together, seemed happiest in the middle of so much talking and laughing.

  Jeb stood by the grill now, smiling at something his brother had said. He looked more relaxed than she had seen him in a long time. Unfair though it might have been, a wave of resentment washed up through her, made her face too warm, like the hot flashes she’d had after she’d stopped the hormone-replacement therapy a couple of years ago.

  In that moment, she saw the two of them on either side of a huge divide, she still immersed in grief, he ready to move on. He wanted her to go with him. Catherine knew this. And yet it was as if her feet were planted in concrete. No matter how desperately she tried to pull herself free, she couldn’t.

  “You’re awfully quiet.”

  Catherine glanced up. Betsy stood in front of her, holding two red cups. She handed one to Catherine. “Iced tea. Sweet like you like it.”

  “Thanks,” Catherine said, taking the cup and lacing her fingers together around it.

  “Could we talk?” Betsy asked, her voice candid.

  Catherine had known the gesture was not of the freestanding variety. With Betsy, they never were. “Sure,” she said, waving a hand at the chair beside her.

  Betsy sat down, took a sip of her tea, then sighed. “How are things with you and Jeb?”

  Catherine looked up in surprise. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

  “May I be honest?”

  “By all means,” Catherine said, since to her knowledge, Betsy had never once refrained from speaking her mind, even when the other party did not want her opinion.

  “I don’t remember ever seeing Jeb so unhappy.”

  Catherine sat for a moment, too numb to respond. “Did he say something to you?” she finally said, her voice cracking a little.

  Betsy took another sip of her tea, and then said, “He didn’t have to.”

  “Oh. You can just see this in him?” Catherine asked, trying to keep her voice level.

  Pity clouded Betsy’s eyes. “And you can’t?”

  “Whatever problems Jeb and I have,” she said, anger fanning through her, “I’m sure we’ll work through them.”

  “I know things haven’t been the same for any of you since Laney—”

  “No, they haven’t,” Catherine interrupted. “But that’s hardly surprising, is it?”

  “Of course not,” Betsy said quickly. “These things take their toll on everyone.”

  “These things?” Catherine bit out. “My son lost his wife—” She broke off there, her voice cracking in half.

  Betsy reached over and covered her hand with her own. “I know, Catherine. I’m not trying to belittle the enormity of it. I’m just saying maybe a worse tragedy would be for this terrible thing to ruin more lives than it already has. From what I’ve seen, Caleb has let it get the best of him.”

  Fury tunneled up through Catherine’s chest. She pulled her hand away and pressed her lips together, glancing across the yard where Betsy’s son, Harris, stood with his arm around his very pregnant wife. Third grandchild on the way. “From your point of view, it must be so easy to judge. How could you possibly understand what Caleb has lost?”

  “But there, Catherine,” Betsy said softly. “You just said it. What Caleb has lost. It’s his loss. But it’s destroying your marriage.”

  She got up from the chair then, and walked back across the yard, leaving Catherine sitting at the edge of the gathering, alone.

  GRACE BARELY SLEPT Friday night. She came into Sophie’s room three times to ask if it was time to get up yet. The last question was asked at 4:00 a.m., and Sophie finally folded back the covers and let the child climb in beside her.

  They both went back to sleep then, waking with the sunlight. Grace popped up and immediately began bouncing on the mattress. “Today’s my birthday, Mama!”

  “It certainly is,” Sophie said, smiling.

  “How many hours till the party?”

  Sophie propped up on one elbow to look at the alarm clock. “Five.”

  Grace held up a hand, five fingers splayed. “This many?”

  “That many.”

  They got out of bed, Grace too excited to stay still another minute. They had breakfast in their pajamas, after which Grace stood on a stool at the kitchen island and helped Sophie put icing on the sugar cookies they had baked the night before. They used green, yellow and blue, and Grace made sure each cookie had plenty. The icing was the best part, she said.

  Once the cookies were done, they made punch with lime sherbet and ginger ale, then put it in the refrigerator to stay cold. After giving Grace a bath, Sophie took a quick shower and dried her hair.

  The doorbell rang at ten-thirty. She looked out the window and spotted Darcy Clemen’s minivan in the driveway. The two of them had started at the university around the same time as assistant professors. They’d become fast friends, a connection between them that defied Sophie’s normal tendency to keep people at a distance.

  Darcy and her two daughters, seven-year-old Marina and five-year-old Lauren, stood at the front door.

  Sophie opened the upstairs window and called, “Come in. The door’s open. I’ll be right there.”

  Grace bounded out of the bedroom and down the stairs to meet them.

  “Take your time,” Darcy yelled back. “I’ll corral the girls in the kitchen.”

  Five minutes later, she found the foursome in the kitchen admiring the birthday cake.

  Darcy looked up and smiled. “Wow. It’s spectacular.”

  “Thanks,” Sophie said, proud of it. Shaped like a barn, the cake even had Dutch doors and miniature horses sticking their heads out.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “I actually took a cake-decorating class the summer after my divorce. I made a lot of cakes.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  Sophie gave Marina and Lauren a hug, chastised them for yet another growth spurt. “You girls are going to be taller than your mama pretty soon.”

  They both smiled.

  On the street in front of the house, a truck slowed to a stop. Grace ran to the living-room window. “Mama, they’re here!” she called back. “The donkeys are here!”

  The truck and trailer were bright red and yellow, Ben’s Barnyard Adventures painted on the sides. A weathered-looking older man got out. He wore a big cowboy hat, which he tipped in their direction. “Morning,” he said. “One of you Dr. Owens?”

  Sophie stepped forward to shake his hand. “I’m Sophie Owens.”

  “Ben Crawford.”

  “Thank you for coming. This is my daughter, Grace, and our friends Darcy, Marina and Lauren.”

  “Morning, ladies,” he said.

  “Are the donkeys in there?” Grace asked, pointing at the trailer.

  “Sure are,” Mr. Crawford said, smiling. “Munchin’ on hay.”

  “Can they get out now?”

  “I don’t see why not.” He looked at Sophie. “Where do you want us, ma’am?”

  “Everything is set up in the backyard. “

  He got in the truck and pulled around to the back of the house. They followed, Grace squeezing Sophie’s hand tight, her blue eyes wide with excitement.

  A few minutes later, Mr. Crawford lowered the tailgate and led the two miniature donkeys out.

  “This is Oscar in the red halter
, Lulu in the blue,” he said.

  Grace reached out and rubbed Lulu’s neck. “She’s so soft.”

  The little donkey nuzzled Grace’s hand. She squealed with delight.

  “Here,” Mr. Crawford said, reaching in his pocket and pulling out a couple of sugar cubes. “You can give them one of these.” He showed Grace how to hold her hand out flat with the sugar in the palm so they wouldn’t accidentally nibble her fingers.

  Grace was in love. Mr. Crawford hooked the donkey’s lead ropes to the shaded side of the trailer and asked if she would like to brush them. Grace nodded, and he put a soft brush in her hand, showing her how to stroke in the direction the hair grew.

  “I don’t think you could have gotten her a better present,” Darcy said.

  “She loves animals,” Sophie said, telling Darcy about the yellow Lab at Tucker Farm Supply.

  “You lugged all that hay out here? You should have called. I could have helped.”

  “Actually, the man who owns the store brought it out. Caleb Tucker.”

  Darcy looked surprised. “Is he the dark-haired guy I’ve seen in there? Tall? Good-looking?”

  Sophie lifted a shoulder, reaching for nonchalance. “Probably.”

  Darcy eyed Sophie intently. “Is that a blush in your cheeks?”

  “Don’t even go there,” Sophie admonished.

  Darcy laughed. “I think you already have.”

  Sophie headed for the kitchen. Darcy followed. “Not so fast,” she said.

  “What?” Sophie pulled Saran wrap from platters of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches carved in various shapes with the aid of cookie cutters.

  “I saw that look in your eyes.”

  “What look?” Sophie said with a laugh.

  “That I-think-he’s-hot look.”

  “Even if I did, I assure you he barely noticed me.”

  “Sophie, you’re way too hard on yourself.”

  “Realistic,” she corrected with a tip of her head. “Plain Jane and Charlottesville’s answer to Kevin Costner. I don’t think so.”

  “Sometimes I wonder who you see when you look in the mirror.”