A Gift of Grace

by Cooper, Inglath

  “It shouldn’t be. But we’re going to have to build a convincing case. Admittedly, Mr. Tucker has the sympathy factor on his side.”

  To Sophie, the words sounded as if they were preparing for some enormous chess game, each seeking to outmaneuver the other.

  “And your extended family,” Irene said. “We’ll need pictures of them, too. Grandparents, aunts, uncles—”

  “I only have an aunt and uncle,” she said carefully. “They really haven’t been involved in Grace’s life.”

  Irene sat back in her chair. “Hmm.”

  “Will that be a problem?”

  “Maybe. It would be beneficial to have relatives who can vouch for you as a mother.”

  “I have friends, coworkers.”

  Irene considered this for several moments. “Sophie, I think it would be extremely helpful if we had at least one relative to stand up for you. I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t scare you to death, so I’ll just put it straight out. We need every ounce of ammunition we can get. Even this particular detail could make or break our case.”

  A little while later, Sophie drove home well under the speed limit, still dazed by Irene’s last statement.

  She had not spoken to Ruby or Roy since Grace’s birthday party, and she’d realized that the only reason they’d come had been to convince her to sign over something that had belonged to her mother.

  But what was pride when faced with losing her daughter? Grace was all that mattered now.

  And for her sake, Sophie had no choice but to ask for her aunt and uncle’s help, difficult though it would be.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ON THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, Sophie packed the car and headed down I-81, her heart beating faster with every passing minute of the four-hour drive to Hubbard Springs, the small town tucked into a corner of southwest Virginia where she had grown up.

  From her car seat in the back, Grace sang along to the CD of children’s music Sophie had brought with them. Her happy little voice squeezed at Sophie’s heart, and she prayed that Grace’s joy for life would not be diminished by this nightmare she felt she had less and less control over.

  She took the exit off I-81 and drove toward the center of town. Fifteen years and little was different. Another fast-food restaurant or two. Signs that had sprung up by the side of the road like stray weeds, bold and abundant.

  She drove to the west side of town, then took a secondary road to the section of the county where her aunt and uncle lived. The house was medium-size, a brick ranch-style surrounded by a neighborhood of others exactly like it, save for different colors of trim. A burgundy minivan sat in the driveway.

  The front door of the house opened. Ruby stepped outside.

  Sophie got out of the car, the urge to pull away from the curb and leave as strong as it had been so many years ago when she actually had left. She lifted Grace from her car seat, queasiness now making her legs weak, and walked up the driveway, stopping just short of the minivan. “Hello, Aunt Ruby.”

  “Unless you’re here to sign those papers,” the older woman said, her tone dismissive, “we have nothing to say to one another.”

  “Could we go inside?”

  Ruby said nothing, simply turned and headed for the door. Sophie followed, old feelings of rejection pummeling through her.

  Not much inside the house had changed. The lighting still dim behind tightly drawn curtains, polyurethane wood floors shined to a mirror gloss. A long narrow table covered with family photos sat just beyond the foyer. There wasn’t a picture of Sophie anywhere among them.

  In the living room, Sophie set Grace on the couch, placed a LeapPad on her lap and told her she wouldn’t be long. “Could we go in the kitchen?” she asked Ruby.

  Without answering, Ruby led the way, turning on the faucet and filling the same teakettle that had sat on the stove for the duration of Sophie’s childhood.

  “I’m a little surprised you’d have the nerve to come back here,” Ruby said, the condemnation behind the statement barely contained.

  Sophie pressed her lips together and then said, “Aunt Ruby, I didn’t come here to talk about the past.”

  “So why did you?”

  “I need your help,” Sophie said, her voice low.

  The silence was heavy. “It’s always been about your needs, hasn’t it?”

  Sophie flinched beneath the harsh unfairness of the words. There would be no changing her aunt’s perception of why Sophie had left here. She wouldn’t even bother to try. “It’s about Grace. The man who signed away his rights to her wants her back. I have to go to court.”

  For the briefest second, Sophie thought she saw sympathy in her aunt’s eyes. But she turned her back and picked up the whistling kettle from the stove. “What is it you want?”

  “My attorney says it’s important to have a family member testify for me.”

  “I think you’ve written us off as anything close to that, don’t you?”

  Sophie let the accusation go, focusing on the sole reason she had come. “If you could be there, it might make the difference between my keeping her or losing her.”

  “Funny how we think we can cut our ties, turn our backs and walk away, but family is always family, isn’t it? You never know when you’ll need each other.”

  Accusation underlined every single word, but Sophie said nothing, just waited, her gaze level with her aunt’s.

  Finally, Ruby turned away again and poured the hot water over the tea bags. “I tell you what. You give me what I want. And I’ll give you what you want. Sign your mother’s part of the land over to me, and we have a deal.”

  Sophie stared at her aunt’s back, then said softly, “It must have been awful for you.”

  Ruby turned to look at her. “What?”

  “Having to raise me.”

  She lifted a shoulder. “I did what was expected of me.”

  “An obligation.”

  “Would you rather I candy coat the truth and tell you it made our lives easier? That we had the things we wanted because of you?”

  Sophie let the words settle, a sadness she had long ago locked away inside herself rising to the surface. “Aunt Ruby. I was a child. The only thing I ever wanted from you was love. And I guess the truth is that was the only thing you could never give me.”

  Sophie reached for the purse she had set on the kitchen table, pulled out the papers Ruby had left with her when they’d come to Charlottesville. She scrawled her signature across the bottom of both pages, refolded them and handed them over. “Here. You have what you want now. The hearing is Wednesday at ten o’clock. My attorney has asked if you can come to her office the day before to go over some questions.”

  Ruby glanced at the papers in her hand. “I’ll need a hotel room then,” she said.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Sophie went into the living room and picked Grace up from the couch. She walked to the front door, then turned. Ruby stood in the hallway, arms folded across her chest. “And you don’t have to worry after this, Aunt Ruby. Be assured this is the last thing I will ever ask of you.”

  GRACE SLEPT DURING MOST of the drive home, her head resting against the side of her car seat, a toy giraffe clutched in one hand. Every time Sophie glanced at her innocent face in the rearview mirror, fear washed over her in a dizzying wave.

  Despite the fact that she had agreed to ask for her aunt’s help, she didn’t see how Ruby could change any of this for them. Regardless of how glowing a picture she painted of Sophie as a mother.

  The truth? There was only one person who could stop the horror that had taken over Sophie’s life. And there had to be some way she could make him see.

  IT WAS NEARLY DARK on Sunday night by the time Caleb finished his barn work and went inside the house. He took his boots off and headed with little enthusiasm to the kitchen, Noah trailing behind him with a stuffed bear in his mouth.

  Caleb had filled every minute of the past few days with work, anything to ke
ep himself from thinking too far past his own exhaustion.

  He opened the refrigerator door and stared at the nearly empty shelves. A half-full bottle of ketchup. Gallon of milk, date still good. Two sticks of butter. Eggs.

  He pulled out the carton of eggs, the few slices of bacon left in the Tupperware container, set a frying pan on the stove and sprayed it with PAM.

  The bacon had just started to sizzle when a flash of light arced through the kitchen from the front windows of the house. A minute later, there was a knock. Thinking it might be his mom, Caleb stuck his head around the kitchen doorway and called out, “Come on in.”

  The door swung open. Sophie Owens stood framed against the night with a bundle of photo albums in her arms.

  Surprise smacked Caleb in the chest. He could think of nothing to say.

  “I should have called first,” she said. “But I thought you might think it was a bad idea for me to come.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “Sounds like it might be.”

  She hugged the albums tighter to her chest and said, “I won’t take up too much of your time. May I come in for a few minutes?”

  The smell of burning bacon reminded him of the pan he’d left on the stove. “My dinner,” he said and headed back to the kitchen. She followed him.

  Noah got up from his spot under the table and trotted over to greet her, tail wagging.

  Sophie reached down to rub the dog’s head.

  Caleb dumped the burned bacon in the sink, shot another glance at the woman still rubbing his dog. Her hair was pulled in a ponytail at the back of her neck. The color wasn’t blond, and it wasn’t brown, but fell somewhere in between the two, nondescript but for its shine. He gazed just to the left of her and said, “Why are you here?”

  She put the albums on the table. “I wondered if you might look at these.”

  Caleb knew what she was asking him to do, knew also that he would be better off telling her no. But she looked vulnerable, and it must have taken a decent amount of courage to come here tonight. He couldn’t find it in him to ask her to go.

  So he pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, opening the first of the albums.

  A soft breeze stirred through the open kitchen window. The smell of green grass drifted through, and it was the first time in a long while that he could remember appreciating the scent.

  The pictures were dated with little captions written in calligraphy beneath each, the obvious effort of someone who never wanted to forget the details of the events captured there.

  The first was of a smiling Sophie—a look of clear incredulity in her eyes—holding a tiny infant whose mouth made an O of outrage. Caleb felt a jolt of pain for the fact that the baby pictured in Sophie’s arms had so recently left his wife’s womb. He had chosen not to see her the day of her birth. What would have happened if he had? Would his heart have softened? Could he have seen past his rage to the needs of that baby?

  He turned the pages, one by one, reading each caption. Grace’s first day at home. Grace’s favorite blanket. Me with Grace on her first stroller ride in the park.

  While he immersed himself in the album, he was aware of the woman in his kitchen moving quietly across the room to the stove. At the sound of bacon sizzling in the pan, he looked up. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

  She shrugged. “It’ll keep my hands busy.”

  The protest inside him dissolved as quickly as it had risen. He went back to the albums, still aware of her putting the bacon on the plate he’d set out earlier, then cracking eggs into the pan. She went to the front porch, Noah on her heels, returned with a handful of something green, rinsed it in the sink, then minced it into pieces and threw it in with the eggs, adding salt and pepper from the shakers on the counter.

  A few minutes later, she brought the plate over and set it beside him, a fork wrapped inside a napkin.

  “Thank you,” he said, looking up at her, caught off guard by sincere appreciation for her effort. “Have you eaten?”

  “Yes. Go ahead, please.”

  The bacon was perfectly cooked, and she’d found a couple of pieces of bread to toast and butter. The eggs were good, too, the herb she’d thrown in—parsley?—adding an interesting layer of taste. Laney had planted the herbs when she’d become interested in cooking, but Caleb had been tempted to pull them up when they returned each spring even though she was no longer here to care for them. He was glad now that he hadn’t, glad that Sophie had noticed them, given them purpose again. He ate everything on the plate, actually wished for more. “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.” She smiled in a way that reminded him how nice it was to have another human being in his house. A woman in his house. Watching her, fresh pebbles of remorse scattered through him.

  He put his attention back on the second album, opening the cover to what must have been Grace’s first Christmas. She sat in one of those baby swings a short distance from the tree, looking up at the star on top with wide-eyed delight. Her face was beset with pure joy, and Caleb was struck still, wondering whether she would have had that look had he brought her home as his own. With only grief and misery in his heart, how could he have introduced a child to anything so selfless as joy?

  It was a sobering thought. His hand slowed at turning the pages. And suddenly he couldn’t look anymore. He slid his chair from the table, got up and went out into the yard.

  He stood in the dew-soaked grass, dropped his head back, breathed in deep and hard.

  Behind him, the screen door squeaked open. How long had he been meaning to fix that hinge? Like so many things on this place, he just hadn’t found the energy or the will to get to it.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her voice held a note of concern, and uncertainty as well, as if she weren’t sure whether she should have followed him out. “I’m fine,” he said, wishing she hadn’t.

  She came out into the yard, stopping just short of him. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “If your intention was to make me see that I could not have given Grace the life you’ve given her, then you were successful.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.” Her voice was soft, sympathetic.

  At that, he balked. He did not need this woman’s pity. He was tired of being pitied. Sick of being poor Caleb Tucker, what-a-shame-things-had-to-turn-out-that-way. “So what was it then?” he asked, the edge of the question sharp.

  “To humanize myself in your eyes,” she said, throwing up her hands in a burst of emotion. “Show you that I’m not just some name on the court docket opposite yours! This is my life! My daughter’s life! And what you are about to do—” She broke off there, struggling for composure. “What you are about to do…please,” she said. “I beg you. Don’t.”

  She swung around then, ran up the steps and through the screen door. A few moments later, he heard a car start. And as unexpectedly as she had arrived, Sophie Owens was gone.

  CATHERINE LIVED FOR Jeb’s visits to the farm.

  He never came in the house, just went to the barn, completed the list of chores she could not do alone and then left again, as silently as he had arrived.

  Each day, she watched him from the kitchen window, and even though he was only a hundred yards away, he felt distant and unreachable to her.

  This morning, the sun stood high in the sky. The day would be a hot one. She watched while Jeb backed the big John Deere tractor out of its shed, a mower attached to the back. She opened the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink and saw the water Thermos Jeb always took with him when he was mowing.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she put it under the tap, filled it to the rim, then carried it outside.

  Jeb had just started toward the field at the back of the barn when he spotted her. He stopped the tractor and turned off the engine.

  She held up the Thermos. “I thought you might want this.”

  He jumped down, landing on the ground with the grace of a much younger man. “Thanks,�
�� he said, taking it from her and setting it beside the tractor seat. “I’ll need that today.”

  She nodded and folded her arms across her chest, suddenly too conscious of her uncombed hair, her lack of makeup. “Do you have your phone?” she asked, the words out before she remembered maybe it was no longer her place to worry about him.

  He patted the side pocket of his Levi’s. “Got it.”

  She glanced down at the grass beneath her feet, biting her lip. “Jeb—”

  “How are you, Catherine?” he asked before she could finish.

  She looked up and saw the sincere interest in his eyes. “Okay,” she said, even though she was anything but. “How about you?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  They stood there, staring at one another. It seemed unfathomable to Catherine that after all their years together, they could find nothing to say.

  “You’ve seen Caleb,” Jeb said finally.

  “He comes by every day.”

  “Good. He’s pretty angry with me.”

  Unable to deny it, Catherine said nothing.

  “Is he all right?” Jeb asked.

  “As much as he can be, I think,” she said.

  Jeb inclined his head, regret clear in his expression. “He came to see me after he found out about us.”

  “I didn’t ask him to do that.”

  “I know,” he said. “I doubt he’ll ever forgive me.”

  For several long moments, they stood, silent. There was so much she wanted to say. Pride had long ago deserted her. Suddenly, she didn’t think she could stand one more lonely night without her husband. “Come back, Jeb.”

  “Catherine,” he said, pain etched in his voice. “If I thought things would be different—”

  “They will be,” she said, putting a hand on his arm, hopeful that she had finally reached him. “I promise they will be.”

  He looked at her for several moments. “You’ll see a doctor then?”

  The words hit her like a cold splash of water. She took a step back. “I don’t need a doctor,” she said. “I’m fine. Can’t you see that?”