Blessing in Disguise (4 page)

I can’t even do
takeout
right, she thought.

Grace caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored wall opposite the kitchen counter wearing the ruffled apron she’d hastily thrown on just before Jack arrived. She began to laugh. This is ridiculous, she thought. This isn’t me. What is going
on
here?

But she knew. Oh my, yes, she knew exactly what she was doing.

Instead of catching that new play Lila had an extra ticket for, you’re running around in circles, hoping to impress the hell out of some guy, show him what a great wife you’d make.

Not some
guy,
Jack. Jack Gold, who loved her at three in the morning, hunched over in front of her computer screen, wearing her oldest terry robe with Wheat Thins crumbs caught in its folds.

And after she’d won the Pulitzer for
Bridge over Troubled Waters,
and felt that if one more person phoned supposedly to congratulate her and then tried to sell her something or offer her some kind of deal she’d lose what was left of her shell-shocked mind, who but Jack had materialized on her doorstep with a bottle of chilled Moët and two tickets to Bermuda?

Now, watching Jack unearth a Pyrex dish from a cupboard, into which he began deftly transferring the lasagne from three aluminum-foil containers, she thought,
I could be happy with this man.

“Have I told you lately that I love you?” she asked.

“Not for at least eight hours. I was beginning to feel deprived.”

Expertly, as if he did this for a living, he sprinkled extra cheese over the top and popped the lasagne into the oven. While it was heating, he came over and wrapped his arms around her, nearly engulfing her with the sheer solidness of him—like a tree that appears tallest when you’re standing directly underneath it, looking straight up. Her head resting against his collarbone, she caught the smell of his sweat and felt the dampness of his shirt—he must have run all the way to Cesare’s and back. A deep tenderness welled up in her.

“How did it go today?” he asked cautiously.

“You mean, in between phone calls from reporters? All I can say is, thank heaven for answering machines.”

“A couple of days ago you were wishing they’d never been invented.”

“That was
before
I got through to Nola.”

“You talked to her?” Jack’s eyes widened.

“This afternoon. I would have told you sooner if you hadn’t gone flying out the door practically the minute you got here, but, yes—would you believe it?—Nola Emory actually picked up what must have been my sixteenth call.” Grace sighed. “She was so impersonal. Jack. Like I’d dialed the wrong number. She said she had nothing more to say about her father’s suicide than what had been in the newspapers.
Suicide.
Jack, that’s
not
what happened.”

“What did you expect her to say?”

“The truth. That it was an accident. Jack, she was
there,
and so was I. We saw them struggle. The gun ...” She shut her eyes, feeling a sharp pain behind her forehead. All those years ago. Daddy—Margaret, too—had suppressed the truth for the sake of his political career. And hadn’t Mother, after Grace had sobbed out the whole story to her, made sure she kept silent, too? Still, it wouldn’t let go of her. Maybe that was the reason she’d finally gotten up the courage to put it all down on paper, to wrest those rattling bones out of the closet and into the light. “My father was simply
protecting
Margaret. What I want to know now is, who does Nola think she’s protecting?”

“Herself probably. Look at what’s happened already—the press is having a field day with this story. Those calls you’ve been getting, that could be exactly the kind of thing this Nola Emory wants to avoid.”

As if on cue, the phone rang. Grace heard her machine, behind the wall of bookcases that enclosed her office space, pick up. “Nancy Wyman from Associated Press ...” came the tinny response to her own message. Though promising to call back later, Nancy left both her office and home phone numbers.

Grace looked at Jack, who offered her a grim smile.

“Looks like you’ve opened a Pandora’s box,” he commented.

“I just want to set the record straight! Of course I knew there would be questions raised, but once people have read the book ...”

“You were nine and a half,” he reminded her. “Are you certain of what you saw? Memory sometimes exaggerates. And even if it happened the way you say it did, why did your father tell the police he arrived on the scene
after
Ned was shot? And why was his good friend Mulhaney put in charge of the investigation? Grace,
those
are the questions people will be asking. They’ll want to know just what your father was hiding.”

“He wasn’t hiding anything,” she protested. “He was just protecting himself. His position, his whole career, was at stake. And he was so close to pulling a majority his way on the Civil Rights Act. A thing like this would have ...”

Grace pulled free of Jack and went over to her desk, snugged in behind a high bookcase crammed with books and magazines. She found what she was looking for atop a pile of pages from a transcribed interview, and brought it over to Jack.

It was a newspaper photo of her father standing behind Lyndon Johnson as he sat at a table, pen in hand. The caption underneath read:
LBJ Signs Civil Rights Act.

“It was Daddy who made it happen, who pushed it through,” Grace said, her voice rising. “He risked his career, the favor of his constituency, for what he believed in.” She thought of the stories Daddy used to tell, about the years before his family moved to New York, growing up in Tennessee, where blacks were treated like farm animals, sometimes worse. And about when he was stationed in Okinawa during the war, captain of an all-black quartermaster company, how the system that made heroes of white soldiers only served to crush and humiliate men of color. Daddy had sworn he would never stop trying to right those injustices. “Do you know what my father told me once? He said he thought it was
luck
that he’d ruined his lungs fighting fires. Otherwise he might never have run for office.”

Jack put his arms around her. “Grace, you don’t have to convince me your father was a great man. But even more than it loves its heroes, the public loves a scandal. Look at Chappaquiddick. Who knows what really happened? All we can be sure of is that it ruined any chance Teddy Kennedy might have had to become president.”

“That’s why I need Nola to back me up.”

“But she’s not talking.”

“She will,” Grace said with more conviction than she actually felt. She couldn’t help remembering the hostile little girl who’d tried to prevent her from going inside Margaret’s house that day.

“I hope you’re right.” Jack looked thoughtful. “It would certainly strengthen our position from a legal point of view.”

“Jack, you’re not afraid of some kind of libel suit! Who would—?” She stopped, realizing at once what he was getting at. “Oh, Jack, you
can’t
think my mother would do such a thing. What would she have to gain from it?” Then Grace remembered Mother’s current crusade, for which she’d been soliciting funds since God knows when: the Eugene Truscott Memorial Library.

Mother could move mountains if she had to ... or
become
one.

Like after Daddy died, transplanting the three of them to Blessing so she could take care of impossible, bedridden Grandma Clayborn, then raising two daughters alone in that big old house.

One whiff of scandal concerning Daddy and she
would
put up a fight. No one had ever been able even to
disagree
with him without Mother’s jumping to his defense.

Wasn’t that what her mother had done with Win, too? Closing her ears to the truth about her precious son-in-law. Even, in her own charming way, trying to bully Grace into staying with him. Pushing and prodding until Grace finally had blown up at her. Since then she and Mother hadn’t spoken except to exchange forced pleasantries over the phone.

“Talk to her,” Jack urged softly, as if echoing her thoughts. “Explain why you’re doing this, and see if you can get her on your side.”

“I’ll try,” she told him, placing her palms against his chest, hoping some of his calm and sureness would somehow flow through to her. “But after all this time, she’s probably convinced herself that
her
version—the one she and Daddy cooked up—is the true one.”

“I’ll bet she hasn’t forgotten that you’re her daughter.”

“Maybe, but I’m not exactly high on Mother’s list right now.”

“Nobody could ever accuse you of being a quitter,” Jack said with a teasing smile. “Anything you want, you go after with a howitzer.”

Including you? Is that what it’ll take to pin you down, Jack?

But she didn’t say the words; they remained lumped in her throat as she went about tearing apart lettuce leaves and tossing them into the monkey-pod bowl that had been Sissy’s wedding present to her when she married Win.

Sissy—with her husband of nearly ten years, and her two boys—who had once gushed that
nothing
could be more fulfilling for a woman than marriage and motherhood. At the time, Grace had been in the midst of a divorce, with an eleven-year-old son who was barely speaking to her, a grand total of four hundred dollars and eighteen cents in her savings account to tide her over until Win’s settlement check arrived, a beat-up Honda with eighty thousand miles on it, and four silver chafing dishes, wedding presents she’d never gotten around to exchanging, going black in her closet.

The last thing she’d wanted then—and she’d vowed to herself that it would be forever—was to get married again.

So what happened?
Grace wondered now.

“Delicious,” Hannah said, delicately bringing her fork to her lips. “Honestly, Grace, it’s the best lasagne I’ve ever tasted.”

Grace glowed, feeling a surge of gratitude that she knew had to be vastly out of proportion to what had been merely a polite remark ... and certainly no reflection on her talent as a cook. Then she noticed the tiny smirk prying at the corners of Hannah’s mouth as she chewed, and her heart lurched. Could Hannah have guessed somehow ... or had Chris spilled the beans?

She glanced over at Chris, head down, shoveling food in like there was no tomorrow. No, Chris probably hadn’t even noticed that the stuff on his plate wasn’t what she’d cooked.

Grace wanted to feel kindly toward Hannah. It was hard to picture this lanky girl with her heavy black hair tied back in a loose ponytail, wearing a baggy sweatshirt over even baggier jeans, as the enemy. At sixteen, Hannah still carried herself with the round-shouldered awkwardness of a young woman not yet accustomed to her height. But, like the breasts Grace could just barely make out beneath the folds of her oversized sweatshirt, there was more to Hannah than what was on the surface.

I’m exaggerating this whole thing,
Grace thought.
She just needs time to get used to me.
In a rosy flush of sentimentality, Grace imagined what it would be like having a daughter, if only a borrowed one, arranging that marvelous hair of Hannah’s, and having Hannah come to her for advice about boys and clothes and schoolwork.

She looked across the table at Jack, who sat beaming at her. Just for a moment, she allowed some of his optimism to rub off on her. Maybe everything
would
be okay after all.

“... So I told Conrad, if you’re going to
act
like a Republican, the least you can do is
dress
like a Democrat,” Hannah was saying. “Daddy, you should see the way he dresses, it’s practically obscene. I mean, whoever heard of argyle socks in
high school?
It’s not even as if he’s president of the debating team or anything.”

“It’s not his clothes, we’ve established that. ...” Jack met Grace’s eyes. “... So what is it about the guy you’re so crazy about?”

“Daddy!” Hannah, blushing furiously, rolled her expressive eyes.

“You men are so literal,” Grace said, feeling allied with Hannah at that moment, despite her having monopolized the conversation so far this evening. “You think that, just because some woman pays attention to the way you look, or how you’re dressed, she must be head over heels.”

Jack smiled at her. “Oh? Just what
would
it take?”

“A man who can cook,” she told him with a laugh.

Jack chuckled, raising his wineglass. “On that note, I’d like to offer a toast ... to our hostess. And to a memorable meal.”

Grace cringed inwardly, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. She watched Hannah join in, but for once Hannah didn’t appear to be mocking her. She sipped her wine, and then surprised Grace by picking up the bottle and pouring an inch or so into Chris’s empty water glass. Chris looked up at her, startled. Clearly, he hadn’t expected to be included among the adults, but was pleased that Hannah, at least, thought of him that way. Grace, touched by the unexpected thoughtfulness of Hannah’s gesture, began to feel that maybe there was hope of Hannah’s warming to her as well.

“More wine for you, Ben?” Jack turned to his son, seated on his left, between Chris and Grace.

“Thanks, no, Dad. I’m driving, remember?”

Grace looked over at the tall, strikingly handsome young man seated beside her. There was some resemblance to his father, sure, but mostly it was hard to believe that someone as vital and youthful as Jack could be old enough to have fathered someone almost thirty—only seven years younger than she. Never mind that Jack had married young, while still in college, with a son in kindergarten by the time he’d been made editor at Cadogan. When she looked at Ben, who had followed in his father’s footsteps and was himself an editor at Cadogan the arithmetic didn’t seem possible.

Ben had Jack’s height and his curly dark-brown hair, worn long, brushing the collar of his navy blazer. But his features were more refined—the high forehead, tapered nose, and chiseled mouth of a nineteenth-century aristocrat. Grace imagined the unmarried editorial assistants up at Cadogan growing weak-kneed at a warm glance from those sea-green eyes. It was a wonder that Ben didn’t have a girlfriend.

“Ben is nuts,” Hannah commented to no one in particular. “He parks his stupid Beamer on the
street
and doesn’t care if it gets ripped off or not.”