Love, Greater Than Infinity (Book 1: New Adult Romance)

by Avondale, Cora

  When Mr. Harris failed to return after ten minutes, then twenty, then thirty, Mrs. Harris paced around the house, wondering if she should drive Gracie to school herself. But after an hour of waiting, Gracie refused to go to school without knowing what had happened to her father. She could see her mother’s anxiety, deepening the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. It was an expression that Gracie would recognize again and again—an expression she would soon see more often than her mother’s smile. And it was an expression that soon became a permanent scar of grief, starting on that first day, when the police patrol car rolled solemnly up their driveway.

  Chapter Four

  A keeper may not prematurely abandon her assignment

  Maybe Bruno knew from the beginning about Mr. Harris’ tragic fate. Maybe that’s why he never bothered to chat it up with either Teddy or Evelyn, Mrs. Harris’ keeper. Evelyn always had a nervous energy, which grew more and more anxious after the death of Mr. Harris, especially when things got tough for the Harris women. Those first few days after Mr. Harris’ death, Mrs. Harris went into shock, repeating a ghostly routine of washing her dead husband’s clean clothes, drying them, folding them, putting them away in his drawers like she had done for fifteen years, then recovering them the next morning to start the whole process again. For two whole weeks, Mrs. Harris refused to let Gracie go outside past the driveway. It was a mother’s instinct to protect what was left of her family. Meanwhile, Evelyn, Mrs. Harris’ keeper, was starting to unravel, blabbing on and on about how she didn’t have the experience to deal with such a sad assignment.

  “Nobody warned me this was going to happen,” Evelyn complained. “I didn’t know. It wasn’t my fault. So what am I supposed to do with her now? I mean, she just cries and cries at night, and I can’t stand it. How am I supposed to handle an assignment who just cries all the time? I mean, it wasn’t my fault, and now, I’m just supposed to deal with it?”

  Evelyn didn’t deal with it. A month after the accident, she quit her assignment as Mrs. Harris’ keeper, abandoning Mrs. Harris’ future to the precarious whims of Fate and Chance. When a keeper prematurely abandons her assignment, the entire predetermined equilibrium of the universe is disrupted. Sometimes, the Dimension Council quells the disruption by assigning a new keeper. Sometimes, the chaos and disorder simply ripples endlessly throughout the universe. In the end, Mrs. Harris never coped with the loss of her husband because Evelyn didn’t stick around long enough to help her pick up the emotional pieces and move on with her life. And the Council never assigned a replacement, which left Mrs. Harris alone to clean up the aftermath of her husband’s death with only the benefit of her own inner strength. And although Teddy tried to help Mrs. Harris when he could, he already had his hands full with Gracie.

  When Gracie learned the news of her Dad’s death, everything unfolded the way you’d expect: the wake, the funeral, the shock of it all. But it was Gracie’s first day back to school after the accident that Teddy would remember most. Gracie didn’t go to her classes. Instead, she hid in the school chapel, curled up in a dim corner of the carpeted floor, shaded by the kaleidoscope patterns of the stained glass. She sat there, crying the whole day, cradling herself from dawn until dusk, until the slow decay of winter twilight obscured her sullen body in premature darkness. It was the only time Gracie allowed herself to feel the pain. Until that moment, she never showed anyone how much she was hurting, not even her mother, not even if it meant burying her own grief. Somewhere around nine or ten, kids learn that crying is a bad thing, and by the time they’re teenagers, they figure out inventive ways to hide their pain.

  But that day in the chapel was the first day that Gracie escaped from the world and wished never to return. And although she didn’t know how or why, she knew in a strange way that she wasn’t alone. Teddy was there with her, holding her hand, promising her that it would all turn out okay. It was a promise he intended to keep because for the first time in a long time he understood what it meant to watch over her.

  * * * *

  In the year after Mr. Harris’s death, Gracie and her mom struggled to make ends meet. Mr. Harris died without life insurance, so Mrs. Harris could barely afford to keep Gracie in the same private high school her junior and senior years. And soon, Mrs. Harris was forced to give up their Evanston house—the only home Gracie had ever known, and the first house that Patty Harris had bought with her husband shortly after they got married and moved to Chicago. Mrs. Harris needed the cash from the sale of her home to cover their mounting debt until she found a way to generate an income. Mrs. Harris finally came to the heart-breaking realization that she had to sell her Evanston home and move into a two-bedroom rental house in Niles. But she refused to give up her need for a yard, even if it was only a patch of grass along the fence where she could raise tomato vines and sunflowers.

  Mrs. Harris mourned deeply after her husband’s death, simply passing through the motions of life, absently picking at the food on her plate during silent dinners, and sitting in front of the television for hours with listless interest. For several months after the accident, it seemed to Gracie as if she had lost both her parents. It wasn’t until Teddy came upon Mrs. Harris, weeping in the middle of the night, that he took matters into his own hands and whispered a message across the dimensions, hoping for Gracie’s sake, it would find its way into Mrs. Harris’ subconscious.

  You still have a sixteen-year-old daughter to raise…

  The next morning, Mrs. Harris awoke with a new, determined attitude. She spent the next four hours cleaning out her bedroom closet, struggling to find at least one article of her husband’s clothing she was willing to donate. It was a fruitless effort, but in the end, she uncovered an old picture of herself in her nurse’s graduation uniform that Teddy had hid inside the pocket of her husband’s college jersey. Mrs. Harris took it as a sign, a sign from her husband that she needed to find a way to get a job and take care of their family, even if it meant moving on without him.

  Mrs. Harris dusted off her old RN license, and applied for an open medical assistant position at a nearby doctor’s office. She soon got the job, allowing her to walk to work, so Gracie could use their only car to drive into the city for her after-school job. To help pay for her tuition, Gracie told her mother that she was baby-sitting every night for Jesse and Jeremiah, her biology teacher’s nine-year-old twin boys. In reality, Gracie had lied about her age to the bar manager of O’Connell’s Bar & Grill, a Wrigleyville sports bar, because waitressing paid twice as much as her biology teacher, even though the work was about the same. Gracie was still baby-sitting unruly, obnoxious brats—they were just twenty years older than Mrs. Miller’s twins, and a lot less sober. Gracie used her sassy quips and Irish charm to make extra tips, and she actually liked being around the incessant, blinking TV sets that rotated broadcasts of basketball, baseball, and football. It reminded her of her dad, who always used to take her to Wrigley Field every summer. Mr. Harris would try to teach Gracie how to appreciate the game of baseball, regardless of the fact that the Cubs never won. Gracie never did “get it”—all those rules and regulations, pop flies and foul balls. And nine innings always seemed more than necessary for such a simple game. But waitressing in those bars after her dad was gone made Gracie wish she had tried harder to understand the game when she still had a chance, especially on the nights when the Cubs played a home game in Wrigley Field and nine innings just never seemed enough time to play out all the memories in her head.

  It was at O’Connell’s where Gracie met Luke Ellington, her fiancé. Of course, Gracie didn’t know Luke would become her fiancé when she served him and his obnoxious jock friends those first appetizers. She just knew he was trouble, the kind that threatens to interrupt the steady orbit of an unassuming shooting star.

  After high school, Gracie had decided to attend a nearby college in order to save money by living at home and keeping her job as a waitress at O’Connell’s to help pay for the tuition. Besides, Gracie couldn’t bring her
self to go away for school and leave her mother alone in Chicago without even a family dog to keep her company. She whipped up another white lie about not being accepted anywhere but Northwestern University in Evanston. The truth was that Gracie never even applied to Brown, or Yale, or Harvard. The last thing Gracie wanted was to force a choice between New England or her mother. Two years after her father’s death, Gracie still witnessed her mother’s vacant stares over dinner and empty nights of aimlessness. Gracie feared the emotional avalanche her mother might experience if she was abandoned a second time—first by her husband, and now by her daughter—even if it was for the sake of Gracie’s college education. And even though Gracie yearned to trade all the painful reminders and routine grief for a fresh start at a school in a distant city, she had accepted long ago that Destiny had put her life on a path, and it was better to submit than resist. So when Luke swaggered into the bar with his star-athlete smile and three of his Neanderthal buddies, Gracie had already resigned herself to the forces of the universe that governed her cosmic collision with the wealthy economics senior from the Northshore.

  “What will it be, boys?” Gracie asked, as she lay down napkins and water glasses on their table.

  “It’s my twenty-first birthday today,” said Billy, one of Luke’s friends with an Army crew cut and a Southern drawl. “And I’m aiming to get me plastered.”

  “That’s nice,” said Gracie with a dismissive glance at the clock.

  “Aren’t you gonna sing to me?” Billy asked her. “You know, sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ like Marilyn Monroe did for Jack?”

  Gracie rolled her eyes. It was going to be a long shift. “No,” she replied.

  Fortunately, Gracie was no naïve sapling when it came to dealing with sophomoric drunken jerk-offs. She had dealt with obnoxious, grabby patrons ever since she was sixteen. They were usually middle-aged, blue-collar alcoholics who assumed Gracie’s henna brown hair and sweet Irish face made her an easy target for their crude jokes and inappropriate advances. One time, a construction worker actually tried to slap Gracie’s backside after she served his beer. Gracie turned back towards him, smiled with coquettish endearment, then whisked back his middle finger with such lightning bolt pain that the two hundred pound construction worker wobbled off his stool and onto his knees, wailing like a school boy for his mommy. Pete Biagi, O’Connell’s bar manager, had to physically pry open Gracie’s hand just long enough for the two-hundred pound ape to tip her sixty-percent before escorting him and his monkey friends out of the bar. Teddy witnessed the whole event on the sidelines with a shake of his head, and said cheers to Bryan Black and his left nut—wherever they were—for being the first one to teach Gracie never to wait around for the second offense.

  “That ain’t nice,” Billy insisted with tipsy conviction, “It’s my birthday. You oughta be nice to me on my birthday.”

  “I’ll try hard not to spit in your drink. How ’bout that?”

  “Dahhhhhhhhhhhhh,” his friends collectively chided Billy. “Dissed, man, dissed.”

  Gracie turned to a third guy at the far corner of the table.

  “What can I get you?”

  “I’ll have a smooth wet glass of whatever you’re serving, sweetness,” said Conrad, who thought his glossy magazine looks gave him permission to call any girl, “sweetness”.

  “Absinthe on the rocks?”

  Only Luke got the joke, choking on his drink of water in the process.

  “I don’t know,” Conrad stared at her blankly. “Is that some kind of beer or something?”

  “No, Ass-wipe,” Luke said, slapping him on the shoulder. “She’s trying to kill you. Or at least, trying to give you the worst hangover of your life.”

  Gracie cracked a smile, and turned to Jake. “What about for you?”

  “How about a chocolate milk.”

  “We don’t serve chocolate milk?”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, what about an ice cream float?”

  Gracie cracked her gum. She wasn’t impressed.

  “Look, I need something sweet and frothy,” Jake said. The guys bubbled over.

  “That’s because you’re really a five-year-old trapped inside the body of a twenty-one-year old,” Billy replied.

  “Explains why there are no women at this table,” Gracie zinged.

  “Whoooooooooooooooooooooooo,” they all rippled with reactions, but Billy didn’t want to give her the last word.

  “You roar like a lioness,” Billy surveyed her with a toothpick dangling from his lips, “but I bet you’re really just a kitty cat waiting for the right man to make you purrrrrrrrr.”

  Teddy didn’t hesitate. He walked over to Billy’s stool and punted its back legs. Billy suddenly jilted forward, throwing both hands against the table for balance.

  The guys threw up their hands to stabilize the shuttering table, but the jolt toppled over the full water glasses, creating a wet domino chain reaction that cascaded straight into Billy’s lap.

  “Ahhhhh, craaaaap—” Billy jumped up from the table, crossing his knees and dancing a jig as the cool water soaked his genitals.

  The guys heaved like hyenas. “Serves you damn right,” Luke said with amusement.

  Gracie dumped a mound of napkins in the center of the table. “Rounds of Heineken for the whole table,” she muttered, and glanced down at Billy’s stained pants. “Oh, and I don’t do clean up.”

  Luke slouched back in his chair, clapping his hands at the spectacle of Billy being shown up by the sassy waitress. Luke was a playboy athlete who could date any girl on campus, and did. But most of those girls were eager little puppy dogs whose fawning attention grew stale and annoying within weeks. So it was no surprise that Luke took notice of Gracie, a black cat whose bewitching green eyes and callous apathy made him want to touch her, even though she clearly didn’t want to be touched. Luke Ellington was captivated by Gracie’s unaffected demeanor and unwavering confidence, and he guessed there was more to like than just sassy quips and catfight attitude under her tough exterior. And since particles with opposite charges attract, there was no altering Luke’s pursuit of Gracie.

  As she started away from the table, Luke called after her.

  “You didn’t ask me if I wanted something.”

  Gracie reluctantly turned back to face him.

  “Would you like something?”

  “Yeah, I’d like to know your name?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d like to officially apologize for my sophomoric friends and their rude behavior, and it would be easier to apologize if I knew your name.”

  Gracie narrowed her eyes and considered his sincerity. “I don’t need your apology. I can handle myself.” Gracie turned away, uninterested in Luke’s response.

  “Dahhhhhhhhhhh, dissed, dissed,” Luke’s crew hissed.

  Pretty-Boy Luke Ellington had just been sizzzzzzled, and he knew it. Luke crumpled up his napkin and threw it onto the table. Crash and burn right in front of his friends. Luke feigned cool, calm, and collected, but his eyes tracked Gracie as she disappeared behind the bar. Five minutes later, she brought a beer pitcher to an empty table, and found a fifty dollar bill and a bar napkin with a note scrawled across its center: Sorry, Sassy. Here’s a nice tip for putting up with not-so-nice jarheads.

  That night, when she clocked out at one o’clock in the morning, Gracie gave away the fifty dollar bill to a begging old lady outside the bar, even though she had only made thirty dollars in tips that whole night. Gracie drove home to her mother’s house, crawled into bed, and fell fast asleep without changing her clothes or thinking twice about Luke Ellington. And though Gracie didn’t know it, it was the first time that Luke himself had ever stayed up all night thinking about a girl.

  * * * *

  The next week, Luke Ellington returned to the bar without his jarhead friends. Luke was smart enough to come back on the same day and time to ensure that Gracie would be working, but dumb enough to si
t at the same table like a love sick puppy waiting for a doggie bone. It was both endearing and pathetic, especially considering that Gracie flat out ignored him. Gracie moved into action when she first caught sight of Luke’s varsity double-fingered wave, flagging her attention. She acknowledged his presence with a resolute glare, but did not wave back. Instead, Gracie conspired with the hostess, Misty Winters, to reroute all her customers into Bebe’s waitressing zone. Gracie had helped Misty get a job at O’Connell’s. They had become friends in high school, soon after Gracie’s dad died because Misty knew what it was like to be without a father. Misty’s own father had died of a heart attack when she was only seven. And while all their other friends were getting brand new Jettas as graduation gifts, Gracie and Misty were busy slaving away in the Wrigleyville bar, earning cash just to pay their way through high school.

  But that night, Gracie would gladly give up her customers and tips if it meant isolating smarmy Luke Ellington in the back of the bar. With no customers, Gracie never had a reason to travel into her section, and Luke quickly became the loneliest guy in O’Connell’s. It was a calculated act of social sabotage and a strategic shut-out of an otherwise champion athlete playboy.

  Luke Ellington was no fool, and he was only willing to look like a chump for an hour. He got the message—Sassy was shafting him. Luke switched gears and moved from his table to the bar. He chatted it up with Mitch, the bartender, and occasionally tossed a sly wink at Misty, who lingered at the hostess pedestal like a desperate puppy. Luke flashed his smile and lured Misty over to the bar where he sipped his beer for the next hour and showered Misty with attention. Luke had gathered that Misty and Gracie were friends, and so, he set about implementing his own draconian reconnaissance.

  “He’s got a nickname for you, you know,” Misty boasted later that night while the girls changed out of their uniforms in the storage room. “He calls you, ‘Sassy.’” Misty grinned proudly, as if she was the one receiving the new nickname.