Later, while Grayson watched cartoons, Rebecca heard the phone ringing from her post on the porch. She got up, went inside, and grabbed it. “Hello?”
“Rebecca . . .” His hoarse voice cut through her like a knife. “Rebecca, listen—”
No. She clicked the phone off and laid it on the kitchen counter. The time for talking had come and gone—she was done. She numbly walked into the great room where Grayson was. He turned to look at her. “Come on, sweetie. There is some stuff we need to do,” she said, and Grayson followed her to his room.
In his room, she slowly turned in a circle, taking it all in with a grimace. There were no toys out, because Grayson had been trained from an early age to put them all away. She walked to the closet, pulled open the doors, and glared at the contents. His shirts were on the top rack, hung together by primary color and level of dressiness. Beneath them, shorts on one side, pants on the other, all hung by color. His shoes were in a shoe tree, formal on top, casual on bottom.
Grayson stood by the door watching as Rebecca reached into the closet and removed all the shirts and turned, dumping them on the floor. His jaw dropped as she did the same with his pants and shorts.
“Mom!” he cried, looking at the lump of clothing as Bean wandered in, sniffed the clothes, circled three times on top of them, then dropped down. “What are you doing?”
“Let me ask you something, Gray,” she said, walking across to his bureau and opening the first drawer where all his little boxer briefs were ironed and put away. “When Lucy used to hang up your clothes, how did she do it?”
“She just hanged ‘em up.”
“By color?”
“No,” he said instantly. “She didn’t care about colors.”
“Well, guess what. Neither do we. You pick out what you want to hang up, and I’ll hang them any way you want.”
Grayson didn’t say anything for a moment, just watched her closely, assessing her. At last, he walked to the middle of the pile of clothing she had made, squatted down, pulled a red Yu-Gi-Oh! T-shirt and a pair of blue-green Jams from beneath Bean, and held them up to her. “Can I wear this today?”
“You can wear whatever you like.” Together, they shooed Bean away, then bent over the pile of clothing and started, working for an hour or more, carefully choosing different shirts to go with pants and shorts.
But in the end, in spite of Rebecca’s best intentions, as she stood back and looked at the first effort to dismantle her perfection, she was dismayed to see that they had somehow rearranged the clothes back in the closet by color. Shirts were mixed with pants and shorts—at least that was one small concession—but, the two of them had unwittingly stuck with what was ingrained in their heads.
By now, Grayson had lost interest, had returned to the great room to watch cartoons. Only Bean remained with Rebecca, looking up at the contents of the closet along with her.
“What do I do now, Bean?” she whispered. “Try again?”
Bean wasn’t listening; he rambled toward the closet, just barely missing the door, and lifted his huge head and snout to have a good sniff of a shirt.
That was when Rebecca saw it—Bean was sniffing a purple shirt. A purple T-shirt, in the middle of the yellow and khaki dress clothes, completely out of color scheme and character.
“Oh, Bean, thank you!” she cried, landing on her knees and scratching Bean behind the ears. She beamed up at that purple shirt—there it was, her first real step toward imperfection. A baby step, okay, but a step all the same.
And as she hugged Bean, the phone began to ring again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line . . .
THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY
It was a couple of days before Matt could admit to himself that what he had done at the Four Seasons was remarkably callous and reprehensible—he’d been a jerk to the one person he would never want to treat reprehensibly. Rebecca wasn’t empty; she was full of vibrant life. But he’d been very determined and very angry, and really, at the time, his cutting remark had not seemed that cutting.
Fool.