The Edge of Grace

by Christa Allan

  His entire body sighed. He blinked those wet killer eyelashes my friends threatened to hijack and eased a smile from his lips. "Good idea. I don't want to get sick before school." He walked over, grabbed the door handle, and turned to me. "We can talk about this when you tuck me in bed tonight. Okay?"

  That space in the back of my throat opened again and slid right into my heart. "Sure. We'll have time."

  I paper-clipped the page with the Eggplant and Shrimp Beignets recipe and shut the cookbook. Emeril could wait. Ben couldn't.

  But when he stepped out of the bathroom sporting his Ironman pjs, I wished Ben could wait a few more years. If only I could freeze him at this age until I caught up.

  I bumbled my way through mothering. How was I supposed to be a father too?

  "What would Dad think about me wearing Ironman? I know he's in heaven and all. I mean if he was still here. With us."

  Ben picked at the blanket fuzz. Like his shoes, the blankets also showed signs of wear. Maybe I should have bought bed linens instead of baking pans. Even more reason to make sure the business could support us.

  "Mom, are you listening? You're not even looking at me," said Ben.

  He was right. I tousled his damp hair. "Sorry, dude."

  "Are you okay?" He slid from under his covers and propped himself on his elbows.

  His eyebrows almost reached for one another in that way they did when math problems perplexed him or his mother's spells of emptiness worried him.

  Harrison's eyes peered at me through his son's. Could I continue to tuck the truth under my heart long enough to answer?

  "I'm better than okay. I'm here with you, right?"

  "I guess," he said and plopped his head on his pillow. "So, what about Dad? Would he think I'm being a baby?"

  Ben was a baby when Harrison last saw him.

  "Your dad would tell you what you wear isn't important. He'd say what matters is who you are inside." I kissed his warm forehead and tucked the blanket around him. I hoped Harrison couldn't see who I was inside.

  "Well, I could be an Ironman inside too," he said and grinned. "G'night, Mom."

  "Good night, sweet Ben. I love you. Sleep tight."

  "Don't let the bedbugs bite." His sleep-soft voice followed me as I walked out of his bedroom.

  I cruised by my office to grab Emeril's Louisiana Real & Rustic. More mornings than I'd admit, I woke up curled around an open cookbook as if it needed protection. Julie warned me that no man would marry me if he knew he had to share a bed with Emeril almost every night. If she only knew—Emeril, the ghost of Harrison, me—if nothing else, it'd be crowded. At least something to fill the nothingness because not one book that lulled me to sleep had a recipe for recreating my husband's warm breath on my neck as we cuddled.

  Even after all these years, nights were like walking into a cave blindfolded. The same cave, every night. The cave where, if I stretched my arms straight out from my sides making myself a human T, my fingertips became my eyes as they brushed along the cold, but now familiar walls of loneliness. I was less likely to bump into memories of Harrison as I did in the beginning when I could barely stand as I entered the hollowness of my life. When grief and guilt hung on me like wet wool sweaters.

  Eventually I learned balance. Learned not to sprawl across the glimpses of Harrison that appeared in my mind's eye, as if I could hold them hostage.

  On my way to brush my teeth, I tossed the book on my side of the bed. My side of the bed. Every side was my side now on a bed docked like an ivory chenille barge in the middle of the room. I was years past turning down the covers on Harrison's side. Sometimes when Ben, transported by thunder cracks, crawled in next to me, I'd wake up to a familiar tangle of sheets. Otherwise, the flat space screamed Harrison's absence.

  I scrunched my pillow behind my back and leaned against the headboard, propping the cookbook against my bent knees. Finding the page I'd paper-clipped earlier, I reread the beignet recipe. I'd only recently started including recipes with seafood. Harrison had an allergy to all things shellfish, so severe that everything about his neck swelled to twice its size. All those years spent in seafood exile, but still Harrison found a way to die.

  The beignets, if I could find a way to make them bite-sized, would make an appealing addition to my luncheon and reception offerings. Targeting food snobs became my new strategy. They never seemed to mind doling out money for food that was less pronounceable, smaller proportioned, and more unfamiliar. The curse, I discovered, was if the item became too popular, then they wanted something else.

  Tomorrow I'd add a trip to Whole Foods to my school supply shopping. Ben would start second grade in two weeks, which meant if I didn't want to battle dozens of mothers for pencil boxes, construction paper, and clunky erasers I needed to knock out his list. I grabbed the pen and steno pad I kept on the nightstand for all those ideas that wiped their feet on the doormat to my brain right before it drifted off to sleep.

  The last thing I scribbled before dreaming of Harrison and Ben pulling up nets of glistening translucent shrimp while I cheered them on was . . .

  . . . Brunoise red peppers????

  6

  I'm the mother. I'm the mother. I'm the mother.

  I reminded myself of this, despite the feeling that I stood on the edge of a high dive looking into a shallow pool. My son started school today. Not me. Wasn't there a statute of limitations on the first day of school anxiety? First I had to deal with it, now it's déjà vu through Ben. First day of kindergarten, then first grade, then middle school, then high school, then college . . .

  My mother seemed to handle this so much better. The first day would be like any other that summer, except we woke up earlier and left the house for almost seven hours. David and I each carried a brown lunch bag with our names in my mother's no-nonsense handwriting. None of these curly or bubble fonts for her. We ate a sensible breakfast of eggs and toast, two slices of bacon and a glass of whole milk. We dressed in our uniforms, waited for her kiss on the forehead, and off we went to the bus stop. Now the first day required more than a brown bag could hold.

  Julie parked across the street from Cypress Grove Elementary to avoid the bus traffic and the first-day car drop-offs that twisted around the neighborhood like a conga line, minus the fun.

  "Maybe next year the school will add ‘one small wheelbarrow' to the supply list." She lifted the Honda's tailgate and dispensed new L.L.Bean backpacks, one red and one blue, to Ben and Nick. She handed me a canvas tote crammed with supplies second graders can't live without, grabbed the other tote, and shut the gate. Already, a scattered symphony of slamming car doors hyphenated by voices seasoned with squeals surrounded us.

  Ben shifted to adjust his backpack. Standing behind him, I set my canvas cargo on the ground between my legs. I pulled his shirt collar from underneath the straps and adjusted it around his neck. He turned to face me, his thumbs hooked under the padded red straps that crossed over his shoulders. "Mom," his voice signaled a warning, "I got it, okay?"

  You're about to embarrass the kid, Caryn. How is it dead people have all these opinions, Harrison? Not like you've endured the shopping wars.

  Julie and I spent the weeks before the first school day outfitting the boys with several pairs of khaki pants and shorts, polo shirts in white and navy, and Nike Zooms. Knowing my son wore shoes with toe-wiggling space and shorts that required a belt, left space in the room in my brain reserved for neuroses. Now I could obsess about other issues. Like would his teacher know he needed to be reminded to tie his shoes or that staring at the ceiling meant a deep-thought moment? What if he waited too long to ask to go to the bathroom? What if none of the other kids talked to him?

  "Caryn, aren't you walking Ben to the gym?" Julie's elbow in my waist speared me out of my brain fog. "Let's get moving before this humidity wilts the pleats right out of their shorts."

  We spotted the boys' teacher, Michelle Richmond, who waved a purple clipboard above her head and looked like a human maypole
swarmed by backpacks.

  "Step it up guys," Julie called over her shoulder as we moved closer to their class section in the bleachers. They'd already adopted that kid-respectable distance between themselves and us. Not too far back so that they couldn't find us, but not so close they looked helpless.

  I propped the bag of supplies near a cluster of paper towel rolls and tissue boxes, and watched as Ben and Nick checked in with Michelle. "Ben seems so much more relaxed this year than he did last year," I said.

  "Funny," said Julie, her tone serious, "Ben said the same thing about you."

  "When did he . . ." My voice trailed off after I saw Julie's smirk.

  "Michelle's steering the boys over here. Catch her vest. Remind me to tell her at book club that she's about fifty years too young to be wearing it."

  Michelle joined our book club after her friend and our neighbor Franny dropped out after her company transferred her to Houston. None of us could figure out why a twenty-something with a body that didn't jiggle when she walked and a face that rivaled Angelina Jolie's, dressed as if she and her mother shared a closet. Julie wanted to nominate her for TLC's What Not to Wear, but I always vetoed the idea. Unless we'd be voting today. The black sweater vest featured dancing red apples trapped by green rulers on one side, a yellow school bus and a fat wooden pencil on the other, and the alphabet along the hem. I looked at it and heard the sound of nails scraping against a chalkboard.

  She handed the clipboard to a tall man with a whistle around his neck. "Mine are all here." He nodded. I figured he must be in charge of the student inventory.

  "Tell your mothers you'll see them after school," Michelle said. Flanked by Ben and Nick, she gave each one a head pat and smiled at us in the same way the labor room nurse did the night Ben arrived who smiled at me and said, "Okay, Mom, we're going to push now." A smile that conveyed "whatever I said will happen and now, or else I won't be smiling the next time I say it."

  "Bye, Mom," said Ben. He took a sliver of a step backwards, a pre-empt in case I might have wanted to bend down and kiss him.

  Before I could tell him he was safe, he fled with Nick in the direction of the bleachers.

  "Guess we're done here." I hoped I'd masked my surprise at Ben's whiff of independence. One inch of movement. It signified miles.

  "Oh, Caryn, wait. I need to ask you a question," said Michelle. She reached out her arm and for a moment I thought she might pat my head. Instead she pulled my business card out of the yellow school bus on her sweater, which—good grief—doubled as a pocket.

  "Um, Michelle . . . Caryn has boxes of those sitting on her office floor. You can keep that one," said Julie. I looked at Julie and this time thought the head-patting might reverse itself.

  Michelle glanced at Julie, recovered from her hiccup of confusion, and handed me the card.

  "Remember that email I sent about cooking meals a few times a week?"

  "Sure," I answered and wished I really did remember. Ben was fortunate he wasn't an email or I'd have been charged with willful neglect years ago. Negotiating my real world gobbled up most of my time already. Email was on portion-control. Especially because my spam fascinated me, and generally outnumbered legitimate emails by fifty to one. David used to rev up finger-wagging lectures almost weekly that started with "you own a business now" and ended with "you need to check your email."

  "Well, yesterday at inservice I told a few teachers you'd be making meals once or twice a week, and they wanted in. I wrote their emails—"

  Whatever she intended to say after that was lost in the sound of a million swarming bees. "Morning bell," she said, almost as an apology. She peered over Julie's shoulder in the direction of the bleachers, then allowed herself enough eye contact to say, "Caryn, call me when you're ready to start."

  "Wait. You're cooking for teachers? When did that happen?" Julie sounded a bit shocked.

  "Just now. I'll explain on the way to the car. I think Michelle just dismissed us."

  We watched her walk toward kids she'd be spending more time with than some of their parents. Ben and Nick laughed as a boy standing behind them played an air guitar. Judging by his intense pinched face and the position of his hands, it must have been an electric air guitar.

  I waved, but I didn't get Ben's attention. My lips had just met to say his name when Julie squeezed my upper arm. "No," she said as if I had reached for fire. "You'll embarrass him."

  "It's not like I'm going to run over there and hug him." I loved Julie, but sometimes she thought Nick and Ben were clones. I knew my son, and he wouldn't be ashamed if I just told him good-bye.

  Michelle had started calling kids out of the bleachers, so Ben was already making his way down to the gym floor. When I called his name, he turned and almost tripped. The snorts and giggles rose from the class like smoke from a fire and burned Ben's face. He steadied himself, stepped down, and stared right past me.

  "Ready now?" Julie didn't wait for my answer. She walked off.

  I sludged through the muck of "I told you so" she left behind.

  7

  On the way home, I told Julie about the weekly meal idea for teachers. Michelle had mentioned at book club that school starting meant her family would be subjected to microwaved meals and take-out. I figured I could help her. What was one meal a week?

  "Did you think this all the way through?"

  "Seriously, Julie. It's me you're talking to. How much do I think anything ‘all the way through'?"

  If I did, I would have understood another one of David's phone calls, the one that came the day our lives turned inside out all those years ago.

  I remembered feeling cranky and exhausted that day. Ben, however, had slept between stops at the pediatrician's office, the cleaners, the pharmacy, and the supermarket, and home.

  Car seat designer engineers made the top of my hit list that morning. When it was time to do a test run on car seat exit procedures, I was certain said engineer didn't have a squirming one-year-old, hands coated with banana paste, swinging an empty juice bottle, and wearing a diaper suspiciously heavier than it should be. Excited by the pending freedom from his straps and buckles, Ben kicked his little Niked feet against the hard plastic shell of the seat and, unfortunately, my forehead when I couldn't duck in time. So when my cell phone demanded my attention, I yelled, "Not now," and wished I had set those two words in my voice program to stop the insistent shrill.

  Before I could finish disentangling Ben's legs from the twisted straps, there was yet another call. "I'm busy," I shouted over the front seat in the direction of my purse. A few less shrills. I hoped the call went to voice mail so I could explain later to mystery caller the logistics of removing a child from a car seat without causing either one of us a major brain injury.

  When I lifted Ben out of the seat, the banana peel he'd been flattening with his bottom tagged along with him, but it did nothing to mask the smell emanating from his diaper region. "Ewww, Ben," I held my breath for a moment and hoisted him onto my hip. For some reason, that amused him, and he continued to remind me of the contents of his diaper with chants of "Poo, poo, poo . . ." sprinkled with motorboat sounds with his lips.

  I grabbed my purse off the front seat and opened the side door into our kitchen. I threw my purse on the nearest chair, kicked the door closed, and had just released Ben when the house phone started ringing. People we knew rarely called that number. "Get out the vote" pleas, telemarketers, and the occasional wrong number accounted for a majority of the calls. We always let the call go to the answering machine first.

  Ben found a Cheerio on the floor under his high chair and almost popped it in his mouth before I scooped him up again and pried it out of his fingers. I pulled off his shoes and socks and set them on the kitchen counter while our recording played in the background. "Hello, you've reached our house. Please leave a message." Generic worked for us. Julie and Trey's was a production number. Background music with voiceovers (theirs), and Nick cooing.

  "Caryn? If you're the
re, please pick up." David's voice. And it sounded un-Davidlike.

  Something happened to Dad. The thought pinched my heart. I grabbed the receiver and, with the even stinkier Ben still in my arms, headed to the nursery.

  "David. What's going on?" I pulled a clean diaper out of the bag hanging on the closet doorknob and handed it to Ben who waved it in front of my face like he was Second Lining down Bourbon St. I trapped the receiver between my ear and shoulder and switched Ben to my other hip. I really needed a different system. I'd been asking Harrison about getting a BlueTooth device, but we both wondered if it would be just one more thing we'd have to dig out of Ben's mouth.

  "I'm on my way to your house. I should be there in a few minutes. I'll explain when I see you."

  Then no David. Just the white noise of the dial tone.

  Still holding the receiver, I lowered both of us to the floor, pushed by the weight of unanswered questions. I sat Ben on the throw rug next to the crib. He dropped the diaper and pointed to one of the sailboats making its way around the blue wool circle. "Ben, boat!"

  The boats never changed and neither did the surprise in his voice each time he noticed one. "Yes, sweetie. Boat. And Mommy wishes she could be sailing far, far away right now." He grinned and raked the rug with his little pudgy fingers.

  I cradled his head in my hands and tilted him backwards. Hands attached to arms attached to shoulders moved instinctively changing Ben's diaper as my brain tapped its anxious foot. Waiting. Where was David? What happened? What happened? I should have answered the phone. I should have answered the phone.

  If only there was some armor, something to shield myself from whatever news David would soon deliver. Even hurricanes had warnings. You could prepare. Bottled water. Generator. An ax in every attic.