Why do you ask?”
“Gee, Mom. Maybe it’s because you don’t do this.” She gestured with hands spanning the kitchen.
The spatula her mom was using to flip pancakes hovered over the griddle as she stood unmoving. “Grace… you know I love you.”
“Do I?” she asked. She’d known all she’d ever needed to know from every touch her mother gave her. Grace knew love had been a very small part of what her mother had felt toward her since the day her father walked out on them fifteen years before.
“I hope you do.” Her mother slid several pancakes on a plate. “Here,” she said, placing the plate on the table. “You should eat something. You didn’t eat much yesterday.”
Grace couldn’t help but wonder if breakfast was a ploy. The sting of her mother’s ambivalence for her over the years was too entrenched in her forethought for her to give her the benefit of the doubt. She’d given up trying to earn her mother’s love years before, and had built a wall of distrust and resentment around her heart to protect herself from the pain. Out of habit, she braced herself for the hurt that was inevitably coming.
“The estate attorney called last night after you went to bed. He’s requesting we be at a meeting set for tomorrow afternoon,” her mother said through a mouthful of food.
Grace knew better than to break the safety glass surrounding her heart. She was thankful the sting wasn’t as bad as last time. She was done trying to will her mother to love her. “What time?”
“Two o’clock. It’s in downtown Bountiful at the attorney’s office.”
“I’ll leave school early then and meet you there.”
“School?” her mother asked in surprise. “I thought you’d take a couple more days off.”
Originally, she hadn’t planned on going to school much this week. Knowing her mother had an agenda pushed her toward changing her mind. “I’m fine. This way, I’ve only missed a few days. I won’t get behind now.”
“I could always go to the school and get your homework.”
“I’m fine. I want to go to school.”
“If you change your mind,” she started, but Grace’s hand lifted in a voiceless rebuttal, cutting her mother off. You just did change my mind, she thought, as she finished her breakfast.
Just outside her bedroom door, she heard the chime of her cell phone. Hurrying to her nightstand, she slid her finger across the screen. “Hello?”
“How are you doing?”
The caring, familiar voice of her best friend was almost enough to make her start crying again. “I’m alright, Em. Did you guys just get home?”
“Yeah, about ten minutes ago. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you, Grace.” Emily’s voice hitched with emotion, her compassion evident in the silence that followed.
“It’s okay, honest. How were you supposed to know what was going to happen?” Grace asked, flopping backward on her bed, and stared at the blank white palette of her ceiling.
“True, but I still feel bad.” Emily’s voice cracked. “I wasn’t even here for your grandfather’s funeral and it makes me sick to think you had to deal with your family alone.”
“Well, actually, I wasn’t exactly alone.” Her toe tapped anxiously on the floor just thinking of Quentin.
“Oh?”
“Apparently my grandfather had a good friend I never met. An insanely hot friend. He showed up at the reception yesterday.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?” Emily asked, pursuing her usual you-need-a-boyfriend agenda. Grace needed a boyfriend like she needed another pain-in-the-butt relative. No, thank you.
Grace sat up on her bed, following the stitching of her comforter with a finger. “It’s not like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
Her finger stopped its tracing. “Seriously. I have no clue if he has a girlfriend. He wasn’t there for me, he was there for my grandfather.”
“Uh, okay…” Before Grace could speak up again in her own defense, Emily added, “So, what are you doing now? You up for some company and an iced coffee?”
“I could definitely use some of both,” Grace said, reaching for the bag of candy that was still on her nightstand, then poured six candy-coated chocolates in the palm of her hand. “Do you want me to pick you up?”
“Sure. Give me fifteen minutes. I have to wash the travel sludge off.”
Grace tossed her head back and dropped the candy in her mouth. “In that case,” she said around the candy. “I’ll give you thirty.”
“Gee, thanks, pig,” Emily said sarcastically.
Evidently Mother Nature didn’t know one of the greatest men who ever lived had died. The weather was perfectly beautiful. The sky was a cloudless cerulean blue,