Full of Grace (15 page)

He hung up and I stood there with stinging eyes and a racing pulse. Was Bomze telling me I was no longer his favorite? Had some clients from the Sardinia trip complained that I’d used my grandmother’s illness to be late for the boat trip or not been quite as enthusiastic as they thought I should have been because my personal life was getting in the way of my responsibilities? Did Bomze care if I quit? Did he think, I mean really think, I was just being dramatic or unprofessional? And who was this little twit from Charlotte who could replace me just like that?

I made my way back to the bus and waited for our clients to show up. My cool was in charge. I even concentrated on making sure my jaw wasn’t tight. I didn’t want anyone to see the slightest hint of anything on my face.

Josie and Steven Hughes boarded the bus.

“Hi! That was fabulous!” Josie said. “We got a great Cab reserve and a delicious Pinot!”

“Great,” I said, and sounded like I meant it.

Mark and Julie Jennings showed up next, followed by the rest. I was counting heads when my cell rang. It was Bomze.

“Excuse me for a minute,” I said, and climbed down from the bus. “Hello?”

“Grace? Marilyn Lambert can’t come. She’s in England on a bicycle tour with a group of insurance executives—biking with gourmet Druid cuisine and ritual thrown in or some such itinerary. I don’t have anyone else I like as well.”

“Oh, well, then, I’ll stay.”

“Look, I’ve been thinking. Your trip ends Thursday, right? So come home Wednesday night. Just tell them you have a family emergency. One day won’t kill anyone.”

“Look, Bomze, thanks. Don’t worry. We have a fantastic driver and I’ll just get him to take up the slack for one day.”

“Give him a couple hundred dollars and expense it. Or if he doesn’t feel comfortable leading them around for whatever reason, the concierge might have a thought on this.”

“Thanks, I owe you one.”

“No, you owe me your blood.”

I could hear him smiling through the phone and I relaxed. I got back on the bus and it was clear to the clients that I was much happier than I had been in the morning.

“Haul freight to Yountville, Geraldo! Thomas Keller and Ann Colgin are waiting!”

“And the oysters of my dreams!” said Hampton Greene.

We rolled down the road for the short trip until Geraldo pulled up alongside the French Laundry and I wondered for a moment if this was the right place. It seemed so modest considering its grand reputation. It was just a gentrified farmhouse. But with each step through the courtyard, the place began to cast its spell. Each shrub and tree was perfectly manicured. The enormous old door felt like it could’ve been plucked from Normandy two hundred years ago. Peeking inside, I saw that the low-ceilinged rooms were small but furnished on the scale of the shorter people of another century.

A kind of reverence came over the group as though we were entering a church. In a way we were, because on both coasts Thomas Keller’s kitchen was considered the high altar of contemporary haute cuisine. And all we wanted to do was find our spot as we prepared for the biggest thrill of the trip.

Ann Colgin was there to welcome us, standing alongside one of the assistant chefs, a smart-looking fellow of about thirty whose embroidered jacket sported the nickname of Bob.

“Hey! Thomas is out back, but he’ll be back in a moment. He’s cutting herbs,” Ann Colgin said to me, and extended her hand.

How could anyone that successful in the wine-and-food business be so young? “What a thrill this is for all of us!” I said. It was.

For the next three hours Thomas Keller; Craig Diehl, another member of the group; Hampton Greene; Mark Jennings; and Ann Colgin were lost in a nonstop conversation about the various amounts of galangal to use in curries versus which wine to serve with mussels when they are prepared with mint and Thai chilies. There was a protracted conversation about the ratio of cloves to coriander seeds in preparing brine for pickling oysters (it was about fifty-fifty, taking mass into consideration) and whether or not it was possible to overuse a chinois (your sauce could never be too clean). The rest of us were the happy recipients of some of the most outrageously innovative, stunningly delicious food we had ever tasted.

If you came to Thomas Keller’s table as a bologna-on-white-bread-with-mayonnaise kind of patron, you would never know what hit you, except that it was—yes indeedy—remarkable but probably too much work and too complicated to try to re-create at home. For the rest of us who appreciated a great meal on occasion, we knew we had just been given the ultimate American culinary experience.

“I didn’t even know oysters could taste like that,” I said as the group members climbed on the bus, tired and sleepy.

“Me either. And I’ve been eating oysters all my life!” Mark Jennings said. “Custards in eggshells? Foie gras with cherries? Fabulous!”

“And that artichoke barigoule? I could eat a whole lot of that before I got tired of it,” Leigh Murray said. Her husband, George, nodded.

“Pretty shocking,” I said, my mind spinning from the magic of it all.

The bus was quiet as we made our way back to Meadowood. The group had taken a vote. They wanted a nap. They wanted room service for dinner. Their decision was fine with me.

I tried to sleep. The air was cool and fragrant and the sun was well on the other side of the hill. But no matter what I visualized or how I positioned myself, sleep wouldn’t come. Finally, I got up and walked outside on my small porch that overlooked the sloping woods. The landscape was decorated with the light of broken shadows formed by the shapes of the leaves from the branches above. Somewhere in the near distance, water trickled with a steady rhythm. Every now and then, leaves would rustle as some small creature scurried across the forest floor. Birds sang out to one another as the afternoon began to wind down for them, too.

I thought about nothing for a while. I just stared at the woods—the colors, the textures, the sounds. But after a few minutes it was difficult not to think about the vast and obvious orchestration of all of nature and how it existed in harmony with thousands of layers of the natural world’s complexity. Even if I had earned advanced degrees in environmental studies, I would never, even then, grasp it all. Did anyone? To my sudden comprehension, its probability of being accidental or a matter of mere natural selection was nil.

M
ichael was in the midst of his procedure Thursday morning. Calling the brain biopsy his “procedure” was roughly the equivalent of referring to Nonna’s nursing home and rehab center as “the facility.” I sat in the waiting room. I paced up and down the hall. And then I went looking for my fourth cup of coffee of the day. The wadded tissues in my hand were beginning to dissolve into wet lint. And finally, minute by hour, the afternoon arrived.

I told myself that I should take a meditative approach and imagine that all would be fine in a matter of just a few hours. The doctor who did the “procedure” would appear and tell me that although they didn’t have results yet, everything appeared normal to him and he wasn’t concerned. He would tell me to take Michael home and give him Tylenol, and that as soon as the pathology report was back, he would call us. But, he would say, he was almost a thousand percent certain that there was nothing to worry about. He would say,
Seriously, Grace, I make my living doing this and usually I can tell just from the look of the fluid whether or not there’s a big problem. This looked completely normal to me
.

I would take Michael home and make him a bowl of fettuccine, his favorite, with just some butter and shaved Parmesan and maybe a Coca-Cola over cracked ice with a straw. Maybe I would run over to Simmons Seafood in Mount Pleasant and bring home a key lime pie. Michael loved key lime pie.

That’s what I wanted to happen more than anything in the world.

Hours passed. I asked about Michael. They told me he was in a recovery area sleeping off the anesthesia. Okay. That made sense to me. Sometimes people were very sensitive to any kind of sedative and slept for hours. Fine, I thought, I’ll wait.

And at last Michael was there, seeming as normal as could be. I choked back tears of relief and hurried him to a seat.

“I’ll get the car. Don’t move. How do you feel?”

“It was the best nap I’ve had in years,” he said, and gave me a lopsided smile.

I kissed his cheek. “I’ll be right back.” That smile of his was so heartwarming and reassuring of the just-restored normalcy in our life that I actually stopped worrying then. Why should I fret? Any passerby could see that we were young and in love. An ideal couple. Anyone could see we were fine.

At home I made him that bowl of fettuccine, that Coke over ice, and he draped himself all over the sofa to watch an old movie.

“So how was it?”

“I don’t remember a thing. Good drugs.”

We looked at each other. Every fear, every possible horror, sprinted to the front of my mind and I pushed them back just as quickly as they arrived.

“Quit stressing,” he said. “It won’t change the outcome one iota.”

“Mind reading is an invasion of privacy,” I said. “So listen, gorgeous, I need to talk to you about Nonna.”

I told him the whole story and he said, “Did Marianne’s fudge have nuts in it? I love nuts in fudge.”

“Screw you.”

“Make Nonna some cookies and take them to her. Oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip. Those tollhouse cookies are pretty darn good, too.”

“Why should I make cookies for her? She already weighs a thousand pounds. That’s half her problem. I feel really sorry for her physical therapist. Besides, I hate to bake. You know that.”

“Oh, quit whining. Make them low-fat.”

“I could just make them smaller.”

“Yeah, then you might leave some of them here for a certain somebody else to eat.”

“I’ll be back in an hour,” I said, and picked up my purse.

“What’s for dinner?” he said, clicking through channels.

If he was asking about dinner and asking me to make cookies, he had to be feeling pretty optimistic.

“Don’t know—I’ll shop for inspiration,” I said. “Gotta run. Simmons closes at six.”

I raced over to Simmons Seafood to buy Michael a pie and wound up with flounder fillets, half a pound of shrimp and half a pound of lump crabmeat. And, of course, a pie. My man was having a crabmeat cocktail and a piece of stuffed flounder for dinner and that was that. Then I stopped by Harris Teeter and bought all the other things I needed to make cookies, the rest of dinner and other boring items I needed for the house.

And my anxiety returned. What if something terrible was wrong with Michael? What if this was one of the last dinners I would make for him? What if he died? I couldn’t inherit anything from him. There wasn’t anything to inherit. Minor detail. We weren’t married. It wouldn’t be legal. Who would feel any sympathy for me? How would I pick up the pieces and go on? What would I do? Where would I start?

My little inner voice—the one I usually wanted to strangle because it was constantly reminding me to exercise and not to eat refined sugar, to use moisturizer and write my thank-you notes immediately, to hand-wash panty hose and to floss every day—that little voice was clearing its throat for a speech. Oh fine, I thought, let’s have it.

People don’t have a brain biopsy for no reason. Something is wrong and you had better steel yourself
.

I decided to call Frank and Regina on my cell while I drove home. I was losing my mind and I needed help.

Regina answered the phone.

“Frank’s chaperoning Tony’s swim-team cookout,” she said. “What’s going on?”

I ran through the big parts about my trip to Napa, Nonna’s pre
dictable belligerence and finally got around to Michael and his “procedure.” That was when my voice started cracking.

“Jesus,” Regina said. “Listen to me. I don’t know all that much about brain tumors, okay? But I don’t blame you for being upset. You must be scared out of your mind. But I didn’t marry a philosophy professor for nothing, okay? Here’s what your brother would say and I would agree with him…”

“What?”

“He would say, go home, have a nice dinner, drink some wine, and if Michael’s head isn’t killing him, have sex. Take an OTC sleeping pill tonight, take Nonna some cookies tomorrow morning and keep yourself very busy until you have the report. And look, half the time these things turn out to be nothing. Right?”

“I know. You’re right. That’s what I’ll do.”

“You want me to tell your brother to call you?”

“Nah,” I said. “Tell him I’ll call him after I see Nonna. Give him a kiss for me, okay?”

“You got it,” Regina said. “And, Grace?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll say my special novena for you guys.”

“Thanks,” I said.

My face turned red and my eyes burned with the threat of tears because Regina thought she needed to pray for me. But I also realized that when most people offered prayers on your behalf, they thought there was a real reason why they should. And Regina thought it was time to pull out her big-gun novena.

I just hated the belief that saying certain prayers with the right emphasis or number of repetitions would result in some nebulous God’s mercy. If there was a God out there—and lately I had come to think that there was
something
of a plan to the world—prayer couldn’t hurt. But I would never accept that you had to use exact change to get his phone to ring. To me, that was what rosaries were and what novenas were—prescriptions that promised a higher possibility of heavenly contact to those insiders who knew exactly how to administer the medicine. I rec
ognized then that I had grown from a juvenile, genuflecting, bead-pushing, novena-saying, Friday Fish Fry staunch believer into a lonely, cynical agnostic. A lonely, cynical agnostic. So in my time of need, I turned to what I trusted—the wisdom and love of my brother and sister-in-law.

Regina’s advice was right and that was why I loved her so much. Basically she told me to chill, live in the moment, eat cookies, drink some wine and whatever was going to happen would happen anyway. You couldn’t rush it or prevent it. The truth would arrive not on my schedule but in its own time. My hands began to tremble. I knew the truth was going to be more than I could bear alone. I began to cry. What would I tell Michael when he saw my puffy eyes?

I would tell him the truth. At some point, Michael and I needed to have a serious discussion about his health. I mean, what if he got into an accident and died? Did he want to be an organ donor? Where would he want to be buried? Or did he want to be cremated and spread the ashes…where? And how could I claim to be so in love with someone about whom I knew so little beyond the day-to-day mechanics of our concentric orbits? It made me see how far we had yet to go.

When I got home, Michael was upstairs, sound asleep. All I had to do was glance at his face and I could see that he had been crying, too. His nose was a red knob of betrayal. The deep sighs that came from him began somewhere in the bottom of his own well of terror and my heart sank a little lower.

There was no point in waking him up for dinner and no point in me rushing to prepare it. I kissed him lightly and went downstairs.

The fish was so fresh I decided he could have it Friday or Saturday night in case I stayed over with my parents. I made the stuffing, seasoned the fish, assembled it and covered the small baking pan with plastic wrap. I wrote out the instructions on how to bake it and taped them to the top. The crabmeat cocktail was in a champagne saucer on lettuce with a fresh wedge of lemon, also hermetically sealed against whatever lurked in my refrigerator that might possibly overpower its delicate flavor. Then I made dozens of cookies until midnight, stopping now and then to cry a little and blow my nose.

I went to bed with my head swirling in clouds of brown sugar and butter, curled up next to Michael’s back, more grateful and desperate for his love than I had ever been. The last thought I remember was wondering how I could feel so at peace that night when there was every reason for panic.

In the morning, Michael was snoring but in a quiet way that was rhythmic and lovely. I slipped out of bed, showered and dressed. I made coffee and took him a mug. He was still snoozing, but he had turned over to my side of the bed and was holding my pillows in the crook of his arm. I put the coffee down on his bedside table and pulled the sheets quietly up and over his shoulder.

As discreetly as I could, I was digging around in the closet for my sandals when I heard him mumble in a croaking voice, “What time is it?”

“It’s only just eight. How do you feel?”

“Fine. I think. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“There’s coffee there.”

“Thanks.” He sat up on one elbow and reached for the mug. “You going down to Hilton Head?”

“Yeah. I’ll be back by six, but if I stay over there’s dinner in the fridge.”

“No cookies?”

“There are plenty of cookies, little boy…What? Wait! Michael!”

Michael hooked my thigh and pulled me back onto the bed. Then he climbed on top of me and held the sides of my face with his hands.

“Tell your old man I’m gonna live forever and he’s not.” He had the biggest smirk on his face I had ever seen.

“I’ll tell him.”

“And tell him…tell him to be nice to Connie.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t drive like a lunatic. Only one of us can have a trauma at a time.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Michael was staring at me like he was trying to tell me something else with his eyes. “What?”

“Nothing. I love you. That’s all.”

“I love you, too. Now get off of me before you start something I don’t have time for or I’ll never get there and back in one day!”

“Say, ‘Michael Higgins is the best-looking hunk of burning love in the world and I am his personal property.’”

I started to giggle. “Michael Higgins is the best-looking—”

That was as far as I got. I didn’t get to Hilton Head until noon.

“Ma?” Mom’s car was in the driveway, so I figured she was home. “Ma?”

“I’m in here! Nonna’s room. Where were you? I thought you were coming earlier.”

I went down the hall to my grandmother’s part of the house and there was my mother, up on a ladder, shuffling through the shoe boxes on the top shelves of Nonna’s closet.

“The traffic was terrible,” I lied. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m looking for things Nonna wants—her pictures of Nonno, her number three crochet hook, her holy card of Saint Drugo or somebody, the patron saint of broken bones.”

“Says her. Sounds illegal.”

“Yeah, well, it’s easier to just do what she wants, you know?”

“You would know that better than anybody. Come down. I’ll get up there.”

“Fine, I’ll look for her baby blue bed jacket with the tissue pocket. And her navy terrycloth slippers with the wavy-ridged rubber bottoms. And her…Grace? Can I tell you something?” Mom climbed down and gave me a hug. “Your grandmother is finally seriously driving me crazy.”

“So? This is news? What’s going on?”

Mom sighed and shook her head. “Okay. First, it was that she couldn’t sleep. She said it was like being in a fishbowl. People came and went like it was Macy’s whenever they wanted to. She has no privacy, she says.”

“Well, she’s probably not wrong about that.”

“No, I’m sure she’s not, but, hello? She’s in a hospital, even though it’s not exactly a hospital…”

“Don’t worry. It’s not exactly a nursing home either.”

“Thank you! Okay, then she doesn’t like the sheets. She says they smell like bleach. In fact, she tells everyone who will listen that they smell like bleach.”

“So you took her sheets down there and now you’re running a laundry service?”

“You got it! And I don’t even mind that so much. I mean, it’s nicer to have your own sheets and quilt. And towels. I have no argument with that. But then it’s the food.”

“She hates the food?”

“What do you think? She says she’s starving to death. That she’s lost twenty pounds.”

“Has she? I mean, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?”

My mother made the sign of the cross and said, “God forgive me, Grace. Maybe she’s lost weight, but I can’t see it.”

I came down from the ladder with a box of old photographs and holy cards. I spread everything on the bed. “But she’s got you bringing her all her meals? You’re catering?”

“Italian bread with Fontina cheese and Nutella or honey and fresh fruit for breakfast with orange juice and coffee with half-and-half…”