Yes, I know, Megan thought. She knew how kids were. She knew they needed to be taught that kindness mattered more than popularity, and that they ought to include the outcast even if they preferred not to, simply because it was right, because inviting every boy but one was cruel. Megan couldn’t bear the thought of Robby watching out the windows as the other boys’ parents dropped them off next door for a night of wild Halloween fun.
She wouldn’t have hesitated to accept Vinnie’s invitation—except for Adam. Vinnie had to be the least subtle matchmaker in the history of romance, and Megan cringed when she pictured Adam’s embarrassment when Vinnie nudged them together, beaming and dropping hints. Then again, he would have to be a total idiot not to see what his grandmother was doing, and since he was still willing to attend, he must not mind all that much.
He had been rather nice at the diner.
“Robby,” she called out, returning the letter to its envelope. “Do you want to go to a Halloween party?”
Seven
Grace hoped to channel her anger into the creation of a new quilt so that at least some good would come of her argument with Justine. In the past she had been able to work out her frustrations by slicing through fabric and pounding the pedal on her sewing machine, but like so much of her pre-MS life, that ability, too, had apparently been lost. Thwarted, she flung her rotary cutter aside, switched on her computer, and vented her frustrations in an email to Donna and Megan instead.
TO:[email protected],[email protected]
FROM: Grace Daniels
DATE: 9:27 AM 18 Oct
SUBJECT: May I start my quilt block now?
I wish I were asking because I’ve broken through my quilter’s block, but unfortunately, that’s not so. However, I have made progress on the other aspect of my challenge … if you can call it progress. It turns out my daughter isn’t dating an older man after all. The man my friend saw with Justine and Joshua was her father.
Should I be happy that Justine wasn’t keeping a boyfriend secret from me, or outraged that she’s been in contact with my ex-husband of twenty years and didn’t see fit to tell me? It’s not much of a consolation that I’m halfway to fulfilling my promise to the Cross-Country Quilters. What do you think: Although I haven’t started a new quilt yet, am I allowed to begin working on my Challenge Quilt block?
Donna must have been online, because she wrote back almost immediately:
TO: Grace Daniels
FROM: Donna Jorgenson
DATE: 18 Oct 11:35 AM CDTSUBJECT: Re: May I start my quilt block now?
CC:[email protected]
Good grief. I don’t know whether to congratulate you or not. At least Justine wasn’t hiding a secret romance from you, but it sounds like you have a bigger problem on your hands. Have you talked to the Ex yet?
As for the Challenge Quilt, I don’t think you should be allowed to start until you have at least a plan for a new project. Sorry, but the motivation will be good for you. Good luck.
Megan didn’t respond until later that afternoon, and when she did, Grace could almost feel the computer screen steaming from her indignation:
TO: Grace Daniels
FROM:[email protected]
DATE: 2:00 PM 10÷18
SUBJECT: Re: May I start my quilt block now?
CC:[email protected]
So where’s he been all this time? Did he only just remember he had a daughter?
Grace wondered about that herself, but in order to get an answer, she would have to talk to Gabriel, and she was not ready to do that. She doubted she’d ever be. Twice Justine had invited Grace to join them for outings with Joshua, but Grace had refused. She had nothing to say to Gabriel that silence wouldn’t communicate just as well.
“Don’t you even want him to apologize?” Justine persisted. Grace wanted that very much, but she wasn’t willing to admit it. “How do you know he will?”
“I just know.”
Grace let out a scoffing laugh and shook her head. “I think I know him better than you do. He was never good at regret.”
“He’s changed. Give him a chance.”
“I’ve given him more than twenty years’ worth of chances,” Grace said. “In all that time, did he ever come to see you? Did he ever send so much as a letter to let us know he was still alive?”
Justine watched her in silence for a long moment. “If you talk to him, he’ll explain.”
“I don’t need his explanations now. Anything he could say would be too little, too late.”
After that, Justine did not mention him for weeks. Grace tried to put him out of her mind, as she had done so well for so long, but her anger smoldered. She knew Justine was seeing him every week and that Joshua called him Grandpa, as if Gabriel had been there all along, as if he hadn’t abandoned his family as easily as sloughing off soiled clothing.
As the weeks passed, it became clear Gabriel intended to remain a part of Justine’s life. Just that morning, Justine had asked her if they could invite him to Thanksgiving dinner. The request left Grace speechless. “Thanksgiving is for family,” she finally managed to say.
“He’s family. He doesn’t have anyone else.”
“That’s his own fault.”
“Mom—”
“You know I’m supposed to minimize the stress in my life. Believe me, inviting him to your aunt’s for Thanksgiving will not help.”
“Don’t use your MS as an excuse.”
Anger and humiliation surged so intensely that tears came to her eyes. “I told you, do not mention that in front of Joshua,” she gritted out, her voice shaking.
“He’s my father, Mom,” Justine pleaded. “He’s Joshua’s grandfather. Don’t shut him out.”
Grace couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Since when was Gabriel’s estrangement her fault? “You are a disloyal and ungrateful child.”
“You’re jealous and holding a grudge.”
Her words stung. “He left us, Justine. Did you forget that?”
“He says you kicked him out.”
“Only to force him to get help,” Grace snapped. “Did he tell you that part? His drinking was destroying our family.”
“He’s sober now, Mom. He’s been sober for ten years.”
“Then he should have contacted us ten years ago.”
“Why bother, for this kind of welcome?” Justine scooped up Joshua and stormed out.
Grace and Justine had often disagreed and sometimes even argued, but never before had they fought with such fury. Alone in her loft, Grace tried meditating to calm herself, but her thoughts were churning too strongly. The truth was, she was jealous. Grace had been there for Justine and Joshua all their lives, and now Gabriel could waltz in, the prodigal father, and Justine was willing for him to step right back into the family as if he had never left, as if she cared nothing for her mother’s pain. Gabriel had done nothing to earn such a welcome, and Grace couldn’t bear it.
If Justine knew the whole story, she would never attribute Grace’s feelings to something as simple as holding a grudge.
She and Gabriel had met as students at Berkeley, in a time of turmoil and hope, when their unjust society seemed more malleable than at any time in history. An art history major, Grace had noticed the tall, strikingly handsome man in several of her classes but had never spoken to him, although campus was not yet so integrated that most African-American students did not have at least a nodding acquaintance. It wasn’t until her junior year—while both were part of a group picketing against a local chain restaurant that had repeatedly demonstrated racism against black students and faculty—that he approached her and introduced himself. They struck up a friendship based on mutual interests and attraction, which soon blossomed into romance.
After graduation, Gabriel entered graduate school with the goal of becoming a professor of history. Grace turned down other, more lucrative oppor
tunities and accepted a position at an art museum on campus in order to remain near him. They married a year later.
Gabriel had always drunk at parties and other social gatherings, no more than anyone else and less than most, and since he didn’t care for marijuana, it never occurred to Grace that he might have a problem. Only after they began living together did she realize how much, and how often, he drank. At first it was merely a few beers after classes had ended for the day, and possibly another as he unwound before bed. Then he began drinking at lunchtime, joking that he needed the fortification to deal with the class of brainless freshmen whose papers he was obligated to grade as a part of his teaching assistantship. When Grace expressed her concern that his graduate advisor would probably disapprove, Gabriel retorted, “He disapproves of everything I do anyway. The only way I could please him would be if I turned white overnight.”
When his professors evaluated him at the end of the semester, his advisor called him in to talk. Gabriel came home in a rage. Somehow—Gabriel insisted he had no idea how—he had developed a reputation as argumentative, undisciplined, and unreliable. No one in the department questioned his intellect and passion, his advisor explained, but they needed him to make a more obvious commitment to the profession if he wished to continue in the program. Gabriel blamed his advisor for blackballing him. Grace blamed the alcohol.
When she realized she was pregnant, she doubled her efforts to get him to stop drinking, but he turned his anger on her instead. Somehow he managed to scrape his way through school, earning his master’s in history when Justine was a year old. To Grace’s relieved astonishment, he was accepted into the Ph.D. program. Now, she told herself, he would have no choice but to give up the drinking and concentrate on his work and family. Instead, the increased pressures of the more rigorous academic program augmented his need for drink, and he left school after three months.
He found a job teaching history at a local high school, and for a while, the bitter disappointment of losing his long-held dream shocked him into sobriety. For two years he limited his drinking to the home and would drink only in the evenings, when he would play with Justine for a little while after supper and then settle in front of the television set, sipping one drink after another until he passed out. In the mornings he would get up, shave, and head to work on time, so Grace decided to count her blessings. She loved him deeply and learned to accept that he was not the husband she had once thought he would be.
Then one day, the principal of his school phoned her at work and told her in a stiff voice that Gabriel had fallen ill and needed to be picked up immediately. Grace arrived to find him in an empty classroom, nearly unconscious and reeking of alcohol. The principal said nothing as he helped her walk her husband to the car, but his anger was unmistakable. Grace was so ashamed she could barely look at him.
The principal expedited the paperwork, and when Gabriel was fired a few days later, he blamed a racist school board for his dismissal.
“It’s always someone else’s fault, isn’t it?” Grace shot back. “It’s never you. It’s never your drinking.”
He glared at her balefully and rolled over onto his side on the sofa. In another moment, he was snoring.
Gabriel didn’t even attempt to look for a new job. Sometimes he left in the mornings before Grace took Justine to the sitter’s and went to her own work, but he was always home by the time she returned, passed out on the sofa. They hardly spoke anymore, and Grace was afraid to leave Justine alone with him. Gabriel stopped coming to their bedroom at night, which was more of a relief than she ever would have thought possible. His loving touch had long since given way to awkward gropings in the dark, resulting in failure most of the time, and leaving her angry and confused even when they didn’t. She felt desperately alone but was too loyal to talk about the situation with anyone, even her sisters, whose disapproving expressions suggested they knew something was wrong but respected Grace’s pride too much to confront her.
Then something happened to shake Grace from her complacency.
One night she woke to the acrid stench of burning. Her heart pounding, she scrambled from bed to find the living room in flames.
“Gabriel,” she screamed at the motionless lump on the sofa. Choking on smoke, she stumbled to his side and shook him, screaming his name over and over until she managed to rouse him. She helped him stagger outside and let him fall uncomprehending on the front lawn. Her heart racing with fear, she turned back inside, only to find that the fire had spread. The hallway to the room where Justine lay sleeping was impassable.
Frantic, Grace ran outside and raced around the backyard to Justine’s window. Her eyes burned and streamed tears; her ears were full of the menacing roar of the fire as it consumed her home. She struggled to open the window, but it wouldn’t budge. She searched around blindly until she stumbled upon a lawn chair. Without a thought, she lifted it over her head and smashed it through the glass.
She didn’t remember climbing past the broken shards and hauling Justine to safety, only sitting on the front lawn with her daughter in her arms and a neighbor’s blanket over her shoulders. She stared at the house unblinking as the firefighters struggled to extinguish the blaze. Justine sobbed and buried her face in Grace’s shoulder.
When the house was nothing more than a smoldering ruin, a paramedic came to inspect Grace’s injuries. Still dazed, at first Grace refused to let go of Justine, but eventually was persuaded to allow a neighbor to take her. She stared at the embers of her life as the paramedic examined her. “We’ll have to take her to the hospital to remove the glass,” she overheard him say. Only then did she feel the sharp stinging in her hands and legs and feel the wet slickness of her own blood on her skin.
Helen, one of her elder sisters, took them in. A few days later, Grace learned that the blaze had started when Gabriel fell asleep holding a lit cigarette. He dropped it and set fire to the drapes. In a way, they had been fortunate. If the cigarette had fallen on the sofa, the investigators said, the foam cushions would have burned much more rapidly than the drapes, almost certainly killing Gabriel and possibly the rest of the family. They were lucky.
“Lucky,” Gabriel mumbled, and left Helen’s house for a drink.
Under Helen’s watchful eye, Grace could no longer maintain the facade of a happy family. She crumbled and tearfully confessed the pain of the past few years. Helen listened without judgment until Grace was spent. Then she said, “If he had killed your baby last night, that would have been his fault. If he kills her tomorrow, it will be yours.”
When Gabriel returned, drunk and stumbling, the house was closed to him. Helen went outside only long enough to tell him to find another place to spend the night. She handed him a letter Grace had written, a painful message of love and resolve in which she told him he could come home to his wife and daughter when he was sober, and not a day before.
Gabriel tried to change her mind, but with Helen to support her, Grace held fast. She had forgotten what it was like to wake up in the morning not dreading the day, how peaceful it was to be able to walk from the hallway to the kitchen without averting her gaze to avoid seeing her husband passed out in the living room. When Justine asked for her daddy, Grace told her he was away but he would be coming home to them soon. She thought she was telling the truth.
The Thursday before Halloween, Robby picked two of the best pumpkins from his grandmother’s garden, one for him to carve and one for Megan. When they reached home, Robby’s description of his carving strategy abruptly broke off. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the front porch.
Megan glimpsed a brown box by the door as she as she pulled into the garage. “Looks like someone sent us a package.”
Robby was out of the car and racing around to the front door almost before she turned off the engine. Carrying the pumpkins, she entered the house through the garage, unlocking the front door for Robby on her way. He met her in the kitchen with the parcel in his hands. “It’s for me,” he exclaimed, showi
ng her his name printed in block letters with a black marker above their address. “Look. It’s from Oregon. It’s from Dad.”
“That’s great,” Megan said, hiding her astonishment. Robby set the box on the table and tore into it, tossing packing materials aside. Then, suddenly, he froze, and his smile faded.
“What’s wrong?” Megan asked. She peered into the box to find ginger-bread and sugar cookies cut into the shapes of ghosts, pumpkins, and black cats, beautifully decorated with frosting. They were carefully packaged and unbroken, and seemed to be arranged several layers deep.
“Dad didn’t make these,” Robby said flatly. “She sent them.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe Dad bought them in a bakery.” Megan indicated an orange envelope. “There’s a card. See what it says.”
Reluctantly, Robby opened the envelope and read the card, which he promptly threw back into the box. “They’re from her,” he said again, sliding down from his chair.
“Robby …” she began, but he left the kitchen with his mouth set in a sullen line. In another moment she heard the door to his room slam shut. Her heart sinking, Megan picked up the card. It had a picture of a haunted house on the front and a simple rhyming poem inside. The signature, in Gina’s handwriting, said, “With love from Dad and Gina.”
Megan sank into the chair Robby had vacated, the card in her hand, wondering what to do. If only Keith had taken the thirty seconds required to sign the card himself. It would have been far better for Gina to send nothing than to go to such trouble to send a present Keith obviously had nothing to do with. Sighing, she returned the card to its envelope, placed it on top of the cookies, and discarded the scattered wrapping. Then she took a gingerbread ghost down the hall and knocked on the door to Robby’s room.
An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler Page 75