There was nowhere else in the world where, for good or bad, she would be such a known quantity. She was beginning to sense how hard it would be to leave it behind. She was beginning to wonder if she ever really would, no matter where else she settled.
Her uncle Mark took her aside during a lull. “I went to see your dad yesterday.”
Grace felt her face harden. She hoped he would not start talking about forgiveness. She was tired of hearing about forgiveness.
“I said I’d tell you hello from him. He wanted to know how you were.”
“Tell him whatever you want.”
“He’s not doing so good in there, Grace. It’s tough on him.”
“He’d better get used to it.” There was going to be some delay before any trial. The lawyers were keeping busy with motions. It was confounding to Grace that there could be so many qualifications attached to outright guilt, so many side issues and efforts at argument and mitigation. At least he was not going to be out on bond. The judge had been unimpressed by the rationale that since he had no son left to murder, her father was unlikely to commit any new crime.
Her uncle began explaining some point of order in the legal process, then stopped himself. “Hold on a minute.”
He walked away and returned with another man at his side. “Grace, I want you to meet Bob Malloy.”
“Oh, sure, how do you do,” Grace said, shaking hands with him, and Bob Malloy said he was pleased to meet her, and her uncle began to speak and then stopped himself, and a strange, humming sort of silence descended on the three of them. Grace felt her face reddening, at the same time she was watching the color rise in Bob Malloy’s.
“Well,” Mark said after a moment. “How about I let you two get acquainted.”
Left alone, they fumbled through one or two attempts at speech. Bob Malloy said, “I’m an old friend of Mark’s. From way back in the day.”
“Way back in the day,” Grace repeated. “My mom . . .”
Dead stop. He looked away. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” Grace said. She cut a path through the crowd, waving off people who wanted to speak to her, pretending some urgent errand. She had never before in her life fainted, but she thought she might now. She and Bob Malloy looked way too much alike, uncannily alike.
He found her sitting beneath one of the shade trees, her knees drawn up and her green dress tented over them. “Is it OK if I talk to you?” he asked, and Grace motioned for him to sit beside her. He did so, letting himself down carefully. “Bad knees,” he explained, and Grace nodded. He had her same big forehead and wide-set eyes, or rather, she had his. Same high-bridged nose and curving mouth, same tall and rangy frame. Lines around his eyes and mouth. Not old yet. Just older, some of his sharp edges worn down. What she might look like, in time.
She said, “My mom said your name. At the very end.”
He pulled up a handful of grass and scattered it. “I hadn’t seen her in—”
“I’m twenty-six.”
“In about that long.”
“She never said.”
“I guess she wouldn’t.” He looked at her straight on now, appraising. “Look, I’m sorry about—”
“Sure.”
“It’s kind of a lot to think about,” Bob Malloy said, and Grace agreed that it was. She was trying to decide how it changed things, and how it didn’t. She was trying to sneak looks at him. He was wearing a pair of jeans with the creases still in them, as if they had been bought new for the occasion, and a long-sleeve button-down shirt in a small blue check. The dress-up clothes of somebody who didn’t dress up often. He said, “How are you holding up these days?”
“I don’t know yet,” Grace said, which was the truth. “Sometimes I’m pretty normal. Then something sets me off and I get reminded all over again what happened. Like I’m hearing the news for the first time. I think it’s like, this sounds stupid, but, PTSD.”
“That’s not one bit stupid.”
Grace shrugged. She felt stupid because she was stupid, although it was nice of him to try and talk her out of it. She said, “Anyway, it helps to keep busy. This whole garden project, it’s been . . . enormous.”
“Your mom would love it.”
“I hope so.” She looked away. Her eyes were filling with tears, which she guessed was all right, but she didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.
“She was a wonderful lady.”
Grace nodded and kept quiet. A little breeze sifted through the tree leaves. Overhead, the clouds formed and reformed themselves. They watched the milling crowd, the people eating cake, the people bending down to read the tags on the plantings. He said, “Maybe we could grab a bite to eat one of these days. Get to know each other a little. If that’s all right with you.”
“Oh, that would be great, but I’m going to be moving pretty soon. Leaving town.” She saw him drop his eyes, ready to give up. “But not right away,” she qualified. “Not so soon that we couldn’t have dinner. Anyway, I’ll have to come back to town. For a while, at least. I’ll have business here.”
She had meant the trial, but he nodded at the garden. “Sure. You’ll want to see how it’s doing.” He squinted at something. “Whoa, what’s this?”
A procession was making its way from the parking lot, a group of young men armed with guitar cases, a drum kit, amplifiers, extension cords. One of them wore a blue satin tuxedo coat over cutoffs. Another, a kind of Tyrolean hat with a feather, like Pinocchio. Well, it wasn’t like there was a dress code. “The entertainment,” Grace explained. “Some of my brother’s friends. You know he was a musician, right?”
“Oh, right. Do you need to go help them?”
Grace shook her head. “They know what to do. But listen, I’ll have to go talk to people in a minute. I should give you my phone number.”
“Sure. But sit here a little while longer. If you can.”
Grace said that she could. And after all, things would go on without her once she left, things were going on with and without her, and always had and always would. Her heart hurt. It would always hurt. Sometimes more than others, the way bad weather might make an old injury throb and come to life again.
They watched the band members set up their instruments on the level concrete in front of the garden, watched them string their extension cords across the grass and plug in the guitars. The band members took up their instruments. The boy in the blue satin coat counted down and they launched into a song that was immediately cut short by alarming, amplified squawks.
They stopped playing. One of them bent over an amp, adjusting something, while another boy ran off toward the parking lot for whatever it was they’d forgotten and now required. Then he ran back and he too examined the amp.
People waited. You never knew how these things would go. Amateur hours, open stages. You hoped they would either play well or give up entirely, before everyone, both playing and listening, was embarrassed. Grace closed her eyes, willing them to get it together. Just this once, for her brother’s sake, let it fly.
A guitar tried a single note and found it good. Again the countdown and the first chord, then the rhythm kicked in, then the sweet and urgent melody. The boys knew their business. The music was a scroll of sound unrolling, rolling, rising, swinging for the fences, connecting. Everyone hearing it felt themselves to be lucky. And Grace felt blessed, because for just this little while, on this particular day, there was no better place to be.
More from the Author
The Year We Left Home
City Boy
Wide Blue Yonder
Do Not Deny Me
Throw Like A Girl
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© MARION ETTLINGER
JEAN THOMPSON is a novelist and short story writer. Her works include the novels She Poured Out Her Heart, The Humanity Project, The Year We Left Home, City Boy, Wide Blue Yonder, The Woman Driver, and My Wisdom and the short story collections The Witch and Other Tales Re-Told, Do Not Deny Me, Throw Like a Girl, W
ho Do You Love (a National Book Award finalist), Little Face and Other Stories, and The Gasoline Wars. Thompson’s short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Thompson has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and has taught creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Reed College, Northwestern University, and other colleges and universities. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jean-Thompson
@simonbooks
ALSO BY JEAN THOMPSON
NOVELS
She Poured Out Her Heart
The Humanity Project
The Year We Left Home
City Boy
Wide Blue Yonder
The Woman Driver
My Wisdom
STORIES
The Witch and Other Tales Re-Told
Do Not Deny Me
Throw Like a Girl
Who Do You Love
Little Face and Other Stories
The Gasoline Wars
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Jean Thompson
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2018
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Interior design by Carly Loman
Jacket design by Sandra Chiu
Jacket image of Woman © Elisabeth Ansley/Trevillion Images; Leaves by Kate Macate/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thompson, Jean, 1950- author.
Title: A cloud in the shape of a girl : a novel / Jean Thompson.
Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018000350| ISBN 9781501194368 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501194375 (trade paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.
Classification: LCC PS3570.H625 C58 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000350
ISBN 978-1-5011-9436-8
ISBN 978-1-5011-9438-2 (ebook)
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 30