Grace clenched her fists around the steering wheel, then loosened them. She repeated the motion several times. Gripped it—then let it go. Gripped it—then let it go. “Come to dinner, Grace.” Just when she was about to have them over, they beat her to it. Hell, it wasn’t a contest. And would she tell them? Would she mention the word cancer?
When I was nursing him, he’d look up at me, his dark eyes filled with gratitude. Even as an infant, he had a grateful heart.
He learned to say gracias and my name on the same day—when he was two. For weeks everything was “Gracias” and “Grace.”
When he was three, he’d wake each day at dawn and sneak into our room. He’d climb the rocking chair and watch us sleep. When we would stir, he’d laugh, climb down from that old chair, and jump into our bed.
I thought Sam’s heart would break from all that morning joy.
When bad dreams came, he’d wake up screaming. Sam and I would rush into the room. We’d kiss him back to sleep.
When he was eight, I thought we’d lost him. Wandering the neighborhood, looking for his best friend’s dog. Sam and I spent hours walking up and down the streets, until we found him. “We can’t find the dog!” he wailed. We didn’t have the heart to lecture him. Sam woke each hour that night. To make sure he was safe.
The doctor says that there’s a chance—that I should fight. I don’t mind dying. I don’t know why. I am a mystery to myself. I wonder. Should I fight? And if I lose?
I pray, in death, a mother’s heart forgets the son she loved.
Memory is the cruelest of God’s gifts.
After a few times around the block, she parked the car, got out, and walked up to the front door. She rang the doorbell, and felt the beating of her heart. Like a wave about to crash into the rocky shoreline.
Mister opened the door and stood there, smiling. Nervous, she could tell, but happy. He looked so young and unscarred, and she wanted him always to look like that. She had the urge to reach over and touch him, this man, this beautiful man who was her son. He had her eyes. And Sam’s face. And Sam’s smirk. “Hi, Grace,” he said as if the words were the first lines of a poem.
She reached over and kissed him on the cheek.
They smiled at each other.
“That was very sweet, Grace.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” she said. And then they laughed. And then he led her into his house.
The house was neat. Rows of books on one wall, a painting on the other, wood floors that shone. “Nothing’s out of place,” she said. “Except for me.”
“That’s not true, Grace.” She looked up and found herself staring at Liz. She wasn’t the wild-haired girl she’d remembered. She was wearing a deep blue sundress and makeup. She was much prettier than she’d remembered. Of course, she hadn’t seen her in over a year—and that had been outside a movie theater in the dark. Grace smiled.
“What will you have to drink, Grace?”
“I want to say scotch. But I’ll settle for a glass of red wine.”
“Why settle? On the rocks or neat?”
“On the rocks.”
Mister watched his wife and his mother. They both seemed to be in such perfect control. He was the only one in the room who didn’t know what the hell to do or say. He watched Liz leave the room, then heard the sound of ice on glass.
“Who does the cleaning, you or Liz?”
“We both do.”
“That’s nice. Sam was always something of a slob.”
“Yes, I remember. I must take after you in that category.”
“Or maybe I just pushed you too hard.”
Mister nodded. “Well, I came out just the way you and Sam raised me.”
“You’re not a stalk of corn.” She sat down on the rocker she’d given him as a gift when he’d first moved out of the house.
“I’m a Sam-Grace hybrid. An All-American, left-of-center bilingual Mexican who’s addicted to coffee, work—and to reading poetry in Spanish.”
“You sound schizophrenic.”
“He is, Grace. He really is.”
They both watched Liz as she walked into the room, carrying a small tray with three drinks and a small bowl full of salted peanuts. She lowered the tray and let Grace take her drink, then turned to Mister, who took his glass of wine. She set the tray down, took her drink, then placed the peanuts in the middle of the table. Her movements were steady and sure, a woman completely at home in her own skin.
Grace took a sip from her scotch and nodded. She noticed Mister was watching her. She looked at him. “Still watching people, huh?”
Liz nodded.
Mister shrugged. “I used to watch you when I was a kid. You’d be sitting at the table or in the yard, and you’d be lost in thought. And I knew you were thinking about one of the people who’d come to you. They were written all over you. Sometimes I felt like our house was inhabited by all the people you were counseling. You know, I was a greedy little kid. I was a sponge for affection.”
“I never thought of you as being that needy, Mister.”
“I kept my own counsel.”
“You still do.” Liz’s comment wasn’t so much an accusation as a statement of fact. Mister said something to her, and she laughed. And she said something else. Only Grace didn’t hear them—or didn’t really care what they’d said. She only knew that she’d stayed away too long, and she felt stupid and silly, and as she took a sip of scotch she thought it was all very good, the scotch and Mister and Liz and her. It had all been a big joke, the kind that took a long time to tell, the kind that went on and on forever, and when you got to the punch line, the joke was all on you. All this time she’d thought they were strangers—but they weren’t. She wanted to break out laughing. She looked at Liz. Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t she?
She could hear them in the kitchen, knew that they were tasting his red sauce, deciding what it needed. But it would be perfect. Good cook, her son. She heard the pop of a cork. She noticed a piece of folk art hanging on the wall. It was a painting on clay, the figures almost childlike. God’s torso broke through the clouds in the sky. He was the center of all light as he held a small globe in his hand. The earth, his toy. And in the garden, the usual suspects, a serpent wrapped around a tree, smiling in that particularly sinister way that serpents in the garden always smiled. A bitten apple littered the otherwise pristine lawn. Adam and Eve were walking away from the garden, both of them covering themselves with a cloth. Eve wore her requisite and predictable look of guilt, and there was a look of pain and stunned disbelief on Adam’s face.
Grace was mesmerized by the drama. It dawned on her that death was a kind of exile. Exile from your body, from your home, from the garden you had maintained for a lifetime.
Mister walked into the room and saw his mother studying his new piece. “You like it?”
She nodded. “It’s very good. The serpent’s always in the shadows.”
“Yes, he is. Serpents are sneaky. They’re—Grace?”
“What?”
“You’re smelling something?”
“Yes, I am. Fresh paint.”
“Oh, I’ve been painting Vicente’s room.”
“You really are going to make me a grandmother.”
“Yes. He’s beautiful, isn’t he, Grace?”
“He is, Mister. He’s very beautiful.”
“I’m happy, Grace.”
Grace nodded. He was happy, and he was more graceful and at home with himself in that instant than she had ever remembered. And she didn’t feel sick. And she didn’t feel like dying. And she wondered if she had enough fight to send the cancer away.