The Rejected Writers' Book Club (Southlea Bay) (23 page)

“You can take my seat,” I whispered to her sarcastically.

“How’s Momma?” asked Doris.

“She’s okay,” said Lavinia quietly. “She’s resting right now, and Lottie’s with her. This thing sure knocked the wind out of her sails, that’s for sure.”

Lavinia dropped off the other ladies, and we said our good-byes and then made our way to my house. I was so happy to see my little cottage. Lavinia helped me into the house with my bags, and I looked around with joy. It had that “my husband’s been living alone” look. It wasn’t that it wasn’t tidy, just not cozy. I would enjoy spending the next day or so making my house my home again.

I was just surveying my kitchen when something brushed up against my leg. I screamed.

Lavinia came to my rescue. “It’s a cat,” she said laughing. “I didn’t know you had one.”

“I don’t,” I said, picking it up. Instantly, the cat snuggled down in my arms and started to purr contentedly.

“I think you do now,” Lavinia said, ruffling the fur on the top of its head.

Chapter Twenty-Three

GRACIE’S STORY

As I lay in the rapturous comfort of my own bed a week later, I found myself feeling nothing but grateful. Grateful for my cottage, my family, and all the gifts I’d been blessed with in my life. It was Saturday morning, and I had absolutely nowhere to be.

Our cat, Raccoon (short for “Raccoon Bait”), jumped up onto the bed and nestled in close to me as the smell of strong coffee being brewed found its way up the stairs and swirled around my senses. I was home.

Martin was whistling in the kitchen, preparing a drink, and I enjoyed the simple pleasure of listening to him until the telephone ringing jarred me from my sweet reverie. I leaned up on one elbow, wondering if it was Stacy again. She had called nearly every day this week to update me on her progress; she really seemed to be enjoying her pregnancy now. It was wonderful that she seemed to want to include us in it.

Martin picked it up, and I heard him have a muffled conversation before he came into the bedroom and looked in on me.

“It’s Doris. Do you want to speak to her? I could tell her you’re still asleep.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said as I yawned myself awake. “I’m coming.”

As I pulled the covers from the side of the bed, I noticed that I didn’t feel the usual sense of dread. In fact, when I looked back at the road trip now, it was with fondness. This group was much different than the world I’d known before in my prepackaged life in California. Days that had been filled with “doing lunch” and cocktail parties had been replaced by desperate phone calls on a Saturday morning, but there was something endearing about it all.

I pushed my feet into my slippers and pulled on my robe, saying to my husband as I passed him in the hallway, “I wonder what the crisis is today.”

I picked up the phone and was greeted on the other end by a very calm and subdued Doris with none of her usual brashness.

“Janet, it’s me. I have something very important I need to ask you.”

Doris’s dogs greeted me with their usual excitement, but this time I was prepared. I had on my full beach-walking coat that covered me completely and was washable. Ruffling their soft heads and stroking their sweet ears, I made my way up to the door.

Ethel opened it and just huffed when she saw it was me. Putting my hand in my pocket, I pulled out a gift-wrapped package and handed it to her. She looked taken aback.

“It’s for you, to say thank you for all your help with the group.”

She blinked twice and then opened it. It was a little pin I’d made for her. It said “Rejected Writers’ Book Club Helper.”

She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was touched because she didn’t flank me up the hallway as usual. She just took the pin and pinned it onto her scarf.

Once inside the living room, I noticed all the other ladies were there, and the atmosphere was hushed and expectant, not unlike the final minutes before a theater show is about to start, a feeling of anticipated excitement. The cake of the day was apparently carrot, but before Doris could push me down into a chair, I curled up in the orange bucket chair next to Lavinia, who greeted me like a long-lost friend.

“Oh my, Janet,” she said, gingerly touching my arm. “How are you holding up, honey?”

I smiled. “It’s not too bad. At least I can drive. How’s Gracie doing?”

Lavinia smiled. “Better, much better. This is the best thing that could have happened to her. She’s been holding all this in way too long.”

Doris handed us both a piece of carrot cake, and I placed mine next to Lavinia’s on the side table.

Everybody was now seated, except Gracie and Lottie.

Doris started the meeting. “As you know, this is a special meeting of the Rejected Writers’ Book Club. Thank you all for coming. Because of the circumstances, I would like us to keep other business till the end and get straight to the reason we’re here.”

Everybody nodded in agreement.

“This has been hard for Momma, but since she decided to do this, there has been a lightness in her that I haven’t seen in days. So let’s begin. Ethel, could you go and tell Lottie that we’re ready?”

Ethel disappeared, and two minutes later Gracie came into the room on Lottie’s arm.

“I’m okay,” she said buoyantly. “This is the best day of my life.”

Her eyes shone with tears of relief, and it was hard not to tear up myself. Soft, rippled laughter filtered through the group, more of relief than joy.

“I’ll take my usual place,” she said, pointing her finger toward her wicker chair. “But I would be so happy, Lottie dear, if you might sit right here in case I need the support.” She sat down and patted the empty chair next to her.

“That’s exactly where I was planning to sit,” said Lottie, finding her spot.

Gracie settled herself between the twins as they both took a hand and squeezed it. As if she had been strengthened by that one small gesture, she straightened up in her chair like a tiny teacher about to tell her class something very important. She cleared her throat and started to speak.

“Thank you all for coming. What I am about to tell you is a true story, a story about me. It has taken me seventy-one years to have the courage to tell it, so I plan to tell this only once, and I would appreciate it if it never, ever leaves this room.”

Everyone nodded their heads in agreement that that would be the case.

“You can count on us, honey,” cooed Lavinia.

“Lips are sealed,” echoed Ruby.

Gracie took in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “This is the story I have always wanted to tell in my memoirs ever since I started writing them down, but I never had the courage. But now, because the sordid details of my sister’s story have come to light, I feel I need to set the record straight. And in doing so, I will honor someone, someone who meant a great deal to me, someone I should have honored a long time ago before now.”

A single tear found its way down one of her porcelain cheeks. Lottie offered her a lacy hankie as tears seemed to find their way to all of us.

She giggled then and shook her head. “No, I’m not going to cry, because this is not a sad story. It’s a very happy one. And it starts when I was just a little girl.

“I was born and grew up in a small village in England, which, in a lot of ways, wasn’t that much different from Southlea Bay. Tucked in a hamlet on the south coast, I lived with my sister and my mother and father, who ran the local post office. It was the 1930s, and life was so much simpler then. My days were filled with climbing trees and catching sticklebacks in the stream. Books didn’t come on computers, and food didn’t make you sick. We worked hard, and we respected our elders.

“Our little village was so tiny that my school was located in one large room in the back of our local church. There were a set of desks for each of the years, and there were no more than five or six pupils for each of those.”

She started to giggle again.

“So that gives you an idea of how big our little town was. Our school had a heavy oak door and thick, smooth slabs of polished gray limestone that made up the walls and floor. It was a drafty old place, but I loved it. I loved the history of it; I loved walking up the hill at the far end of our village just to get to it every day. I was always fascinated by all the figures depicted in the tall, arched stained-glass windows. Back then, I believed they had all been painted there just to welcome me to school every day. Walking into the building, I would feel delighted by the smell of wax and dust that greeted me in the morning. Every Wednesday, the local choir rehearsed in the front of the church, and their angelic sounds would find their way back to us in our schoolroom. I would often close my eyes and listen to them as I worked on a story or my sums, believing that the filtered voices drifting from the sanctuary were singing just for me. But I have to admit, my most favorite part of my church/school was the steeple. My desk was positioned right underneath it, and if I looked straight up, I could just catch a glimpse into the bell tower.

“I would gaze up there and constantly fantasize about coming to school early one day when no one was about. Then I would race up the stone spiral staircase that sloped all the way to the top and ring the bells with all my might. I think I would still do that if I got the chance,” she added with a mischievous twinkle and then took a deep, easy breath.

“Well, it was the summer of 1933, and I’d just turned twelve years old. My mum had made me a new blue cotton dress for my birthday, and I was in love with it. It was such a treat to have new clothes, and normally I kept them only for best. Sundays and special occasions, Mum would say. But I loved the blue of this dress so much that, once she’d finished making it, I carried on something terrible. I pleaded with her to let me wear it, just this once to school, and eventually, exasperated, she’d given in.

“The day this story starts, I was staring down at this dress when the big wooden door with its heavy iron latch into the church opened, and he arrived . . . Douglas . . .”

She said his name slowly, savoring it, as if she liked the sound of it, as if she’d wanted to say that name for a very long time.

“Now, I didn’t see him come in because I was looking at that dress, and I didn’t even know he was there until he sat down next to me. My best friend, Mary, was sick that day and that was normally her seat, so I do remember that when he sat down, I felt angry that someone was now sitting in Mary’s place. But the teacher told him to sit there, so he did.

“The first thing I noticed about him was his hair. He had the blackest hair I’d ever seen. Not mousey-brown like so many of the other boys, but thick and black, like a raven. I watched him curiously as he settled himself at his desk. He was strange to me. We didn’t get many new people in our village, and so he fascinated me. He pulled his pencil case out of his satchel and looked around the classroom. As he looked up, he had the most striking blue eyes. They reminded me of a marble I’d once owned that had come all the way from Germany for one of my birthdays from a distant relative. I was thinking about that marble when the teacher introduced him to the class. ‘This is Douglas McKenna. He said he has come from a long way away in Scotland, so we will treat him kindly, as he is new and doesn’t know anyone here.’ When the teacher spoke Douglas’s name, his face reddened, and his quick blue eyes flashed around the classroom, as if he was trying to figure out whom he could trust.

“The teacher then went on to say that one of us would be assigned to take care of Douglas for the day and show him where to go for lunch and help him find the playground. Then, before anyone could even volunteer, our teacher was saying my name and saying I would have to take care of him. I remember thinking I didn’t want to take care of a boy, not one that was sitting in Mary’s seat and was going to want to follow me around all day. I didn’t know any boy games, and I didn’t want to start playing them.

“I got up from my desk then, as we had to go out on the field for recess, and he followed me. Turning to him, I said, ‘I’ve got you, and I wish I didn’t, but I’ve got you all the same.’

“The minute I said it, I regretted it because I saw the hurt in those lovely blue eyes, and I realized I was just angry because he’d taken Mary’s seat. So after that I tried to be nicer to him and showed him the bathroom and the playground and the place we went to for lunch. He hardly spoke, but when he did, he would just say, ‘Thank you, Gracie,’ in his thick Scottish accent, and I found I liked the way that he said my name. It sounded so different to me. I wanted to tell him that my name was really just ‘Grace,’ but I found I liked the way he rolled the
r
and over-pronounced the
e
. It made my name sound exotic somehow, as if I was a person you would read about in a book, so I never corrected him.

“Eventually, he found a group of lads to play with, and when Mary came back, the teacher moved him to a different spot. I was glad to have Mary where she belonged, next to me. And that was that for a while.

“Then, as we all grew up, there were so few of us our age in the village that we would often all do things together as a group, like play table tennis or watch a movie. Sometimes Douglas would hang around with us. He had a hearing problem, so you had to look straight at him to talk, but he never let it hold him back. He was fun and charming, always kidding around and boisterous. He was very dashing too, and Mary liked him a lot.

“One day the guys had wanted to go out on little boats that were moored up at the village pond. Silly, really. We were about sixteen, maybe seventeen, and we had one of those mad adolescent moments. We all just grabbed a boat and jumped in. Mary and I found one, and she pulled Douglas into ours to be our rower. He obliged, and we all had a merry time playing around. That was, until Mary stood up and for fun started rocking the boat. It turned over and in we all went.

“The pond wasn’t very large, but it was deep, so Mary just swam to the bank. But I couldn’t swim and I hadn’t wanted to tell anybody, as I was too embarrassed to admit it. So when the boat tipped, I panicked, trying desperately to keep my head above the water. I went under a couple of times. I thought no one had seen me and that I was going to drown right there and then, when suddenly I felt an arm around me, an arm around my waist, pulling me up toward the surface. And then I could see the light again. I was so grateful that I clung to my hero as hard as I could. It was Douglas. He lifted my head above the water with his hand under my chin, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Gracie, I’ve got you.’ Then he added with a chuckle, ‘And I wish I didn’t, but I’ve got you all the same.’ I didn’t really think about it till later, but when I did, I felt ashamed because those were the first words I’d said to him all those years ago when we’d first met.