Grace
The next time Grace walked upstairs to try to talk to Mr. Lafferty, there was some man she didn’t know standing out in the hall. He was very tall and fat, and he was wearing coveralls, and holding a cigar in his teeth, but it wasn’t even burning. Thank God, Grace thought, because she hated the smell of burning cigars worse than anything. The man was talking to Felipe, who was leaning in the open doorway of his own apartment.
Grace could hear part of what he was telling Felipe as she walked down the hall.
“…and the floorboards might even have to come up, or maybe we could just cut out some of the boards and put in a patch, because we’re gonna have to slap a new carpet over it anyway, so it doesn’t really matter what it looks like. And one wall’ll have to be professionally cleaned and then repainted.”
“Hi,” Grace said, now standing about two steps from the man’s knee.
“Well, hello, little lady,” he said.
So, that was kind of weird, Grace thought. I mean, who talks like that?
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m the building super,” he said, which didn’t sound like a thing that made sense in any way.
Felipe, who knew her well enough to know she needed help, said, “Casper is the man who comes and fixes things in our building. The landlord sends him over when something needs fixing.”
Grace narrowed her eyes and looked up at Casper.
“Then how come I’ve never once seen you here?”
Casper laughed in one big, rude snort, and then said, “Guess nothing needed fixing.”
“Are you kidding me? Everything in this place needs fixing.”
Casper stopped smiling.
That was the moment Grace noticed that Mr. Lafferty’s door was standing open just a crack.
“He’s home! Mr. Lafferty is finally home! I have to go tell him thank you.”
A split second later she found herself in Felipe’s arms, her feet dangling and swinging two feet off the ground.
“No,” was all Felipe said.
“Get her,” the super said, though Felipe pretty much already had. “Don’t let her go in there. My God, she’ll have nightmares for a month. Besides, it’s not even sanitary. It’s a biohazard. It’ll have to be professionally cleaned by one of those bio teams that cost a fortune. Owner’ll be pissed.”
Grace relaxed slightly into Felipe’s arms.
“Why can’t I go in?” Grace whispered in his ear.
“Because Mr. Lafferty passed away,” Felipe said.
“Does that mean died?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
Just at that moment Rayleen’s voice came booming up the stairs, calling for Grace, because Grace hadn’t actually bothered to mention that she was going.
“Grace? Where’d you go, honey?”
“Yeah, come up and get the kid,” Casper shouted back, startling Grace. “She’s got no business up here. Take her downstairs.”
Grace looked up to see Rayleen standing at the end of the hall, looking uncomfortable.
“Oh,” Casper said. “I thought it was her mother.”
Rayleen didn’t seem to like that, and she didn’t answer it, either. She just marched down the hall and took Grace from Felipe and held her tightly.
“It was just like you thought,” Casper said. “The…situation…you know, with Lafferty. So thanks for phoning it in. Because, you know, if nobody had noticed for a week, it would’ve been an even bigger mess than it is now. Although, considering how much of a mess it is now, that’s pretty hard to imagine.”
“Come on, Grace,” Rayleen said. “Let’s just go downstairs now.”
? ? ?
“So you knew,” Grace said.
She was sitting at Rayleen’s kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk and occasionally glancing up at the ceiling.
“No,” Rayleen said. “I didn’t know. I wondered. There’s a difference.”
“But you didn’t tell me.”
“Because it might not have been true. And then I would’ve just been getting you all upset over nothing.”
“Well, I’m sure upset now,” Grace said.
“I know you are, honey. I know. We all are.”
“But you didn’t even like him.”
“No. But I didn’t wish anything like that for him.”
“Why did he do it?”
“I don’t know. I really didn’t know him very well.”
“Why do you think?”
Rayleen sighed. “I guess he was unhappy. When people are mean, it usually tells you they’re unhappy.”
“He wasn’t mean to me,” Grace said.
But she never got an answer from Rayleen about that. Maybe no answer was even necessary. It was just true, and it was too late for anybody to explain it to her now. Or even to themselves.
“He was nice to me three times, all just in the last few days or so. So that’s a lot of times, right?”
Rayleen seemed to be lost in thought, but then she came to, just a little bit, like something woke her up from a nap.
“Three?” she asked.
But Grace’s train of thought had moved along by then. “We need to have a meeting.”
“Who?”
“All of us. You and me and Billy and Felipe.”
“What kind of meeting? About what?”
“Well, that’s why you have a meeting,” Grace said. “To tell everybody what the meeting’s about. I’ll go get Felipe.”
She ran for the door, but Rayleen called after her, saying, “Don’t go up there, Grace. Just call him from the bottom of the stairs.”
“Right, right, I know,” Grace said, because it made her a little impatient to be treated like she wouldn’t know a thing like that already.
“Wait,” Rayleen said. “Before you go. You said Mr. Lafferty did three nice things for you. But I only know about two.”
Grace sighed deeply, thinking it should be perfectly self-explanatory.
“The dance floor,” she said, holding up one finger. “The tap shoes,” she said, adding a second. “And he told me what we’re doing wrong with my mom. So that’s three. So now can I go get Felipe?”
But she didn’t even wait for an answer.
She ran to the bottom of the stairs and called up in her very loudest voice, which was louder than anybody else’s loudest voice — at least, anybody she knew. Most of the time Grace had to sit hard on her loud voice and feel shamed for it, but every now and then a loud voice was called for, and that was Grace’s moment to shine.
“Felipe! Come down a minute, OK? We’re having a meeting!”
Then she ran and knocked on Billy’s door, saying, as she did, “It’s me, Grace.”
He answered right away. No safety chain, either.
“Did you hear about Mr. Lafferty?” she asked him.
And he said, “No, but I was worried about it.”
“You, too? How come nobody told me?”
“Because we weren’t sure. Just worried.”
“Yeah, that’s the same as Rayleen said. Anyway, we’re having a meeting.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Grace. The way you just announced it, people walking by on the street know. Hell, people driving by on the street probably know. Are we supposed to have this meeting in my apartment? Without anybody asking my permission first?”
“I don’t know. We can have it anywhere you want. Oh. Wait. Right. I forgot,” Rayleen said from across the hall.
“Right. You forgot. Have it anywhere you want. Unless you want yours truly in attendance, and then your options narrow.”
Grace said, “Huh?”
Rayleen, now standing right behind Grace, said, “It means if you want him to be there it has to be at his place.”
“Well, of course, we have to have you there.”
“Then I guess I’m the venue of choice,” he said. Grace rolled her eyes, so he added, “That means it’s my place or nothing.”
“Right. I already knew that when she said it.”
By that time Felipe had arrived, so Billy had to open the door wider and let everybody in. Well, almost everybody. Just as she was headed in the door, Grace turned to see Mrs. Hinman standing in the hall, just a few steps away, watching them.
Grace said, “Hi, Mrs. Hinman,” and started to close the door.
But Mrs. Hinman said, “Wait. What’s all this about a meeting?”
“Oh, no. Not a meeting for you, Mrs. Hinman. This is a meeting for us. Just us. You know. The people who take care of me.”
“All those people take care of you?” Mrs. Hinman asked, coming a step or two closer and peering through the door.
“Yeah. Everybody except you.”
Then Grace closed the door. But, as she did, she noticed that Mrs. Hinman looked a little hurt. But she couldn’t stop to think too much about it, at least, not right then, because this was a very important meeting.
Billy was sitting so close to the edge of the couch that it looked like he might be about to fall on his butt on the rug, and Felipe was standing near the door with his arms folded over his chest. Only Rayleen looked even the tiniest bit comfortable, sitting in Billy’s big stuffed chair with her legs crossed, but with her face still plenty curious.
“OK,” Grace said, standing in the middle of the living room and feeling very grown-up and ready to take charge of things. “This is why we’re here. We’re having a meeting to talk about how we can…not…oh, no…now I forgot the word. What’s that word Mr. Lafferty said? About what we’re doing with my mom?”
“Enabling,” Billy said.
“Right! We’re here to talk about how to stop enabling my mom, because, you know, she’s not getting better. And I need her to get better. Don’t get me wrong, you guys have been great and all, but, well, she’s my mom.”
Billy and Rayleen and Felipe all looked at each other, one set of them at a time.
“I don’t know,” Rayleen said. “I mean, what can we do?”
“Well, why do you think we’re having a meeting?” Grace said, not bothering to hide her exasperation.
“I think what Rayleen means,” Billy said, “is that there may not be anything we can do.”
A long, bad silence hung around the room after that, but while it was hanging, Grace decided she’d just have to think harder, because, after all, this was her mom.
“But Mr. Lafferty said if she was about to lose me, she might get better.”
Rayleen’s face changed, in a scary sort of way. Like she’d just seen a big hairy monster standing right behind Grace with its teeth and claws out.
“Oh, my God, Grace,” she said, “you can’t want that. You have no idea what that’s like, when the county comes and takes a kid away.”
“No, of course I don’t want that,” Grace said, though, truthfully, she hadn’t specifically known what she’d meant when she’d said it. “But why can’t we take me away from her?”
More of that silence.
Billy said, “We’re not sure what you mean.”
“Why can’t we just tell her that she never gets to see me again until she stops using all the drugs?”
More silence, this time punctuated by one clearing throat and a couple of uncomfortable sighs.
“There might be a couple of flaws in that plan,” Rayleen said.
“Like what?”
“Like she only sees you maybe an hour a day as it is, and that doesn’t seem to be enough to motivate her to make a change, and, more to the point, the police might call it kidnapping.”
“I can’t go to jail,” Billy said. “Period. It’s out of the question.”
“And I’m more likely to go to jail for a thing like that than the both of you two put together,” Felipe added.
“Yeah, like the cops just love my skin tone,” Rayleen shot back.
“Guys! Will you please just listen? It’s my idea, not yours. You didn’t take me away. You just took care of me because my mom wouldn’t. She’s not gonna call the cops, because they’d know she was on drugs. Before she could call the cops she’d have to get clean, and get rid of all her drugs, because she knows we’d tell the cops about the drugs she’s been using, and if she gets clean, she doesn’t have to call the cops at all, because then I could just go home.”
“Hmm,” Rayleen said.
“But what if she does anyway,” Billy asked, “just because she’s irrational?”
“Well, the cops’ll ask me, right? They’ll say, did these people take you away from your mom? And I’ll say, no, not at all, I just can’t stand to be around my mom when she’s loaded, which she always is right now, because, really, that’s true, you know. And I’ll just say I asked you guys if I could stay with you, and you said I could for just a little while, until things got better at my home with my mom, and that’s not against the law, right?”
“I don’t know about this,” Billy said, chewing on the nail of his middle finger.
“Me neither,” Felipe said.
But Rayleen said, “I think it’s a great idea. I’m willing to risk it. I’m already on record as her babysitter, as far as the county is concerned. I’ll leave you guys out of it completely. I’m willing to just go down there and tell Grace’s mom she has three choices. Lose Grace to the county. Lose her to us. Or get her act together. If she goes to the cops, which she’s in no position to do, I’ll just say Grace refused to go home and I let her stay with me. And Grace will back me up.”
“Wow,” Billy said. “I was never part of a kidnapping plot before.”
“It’s not kidnapping,” Grace said, much too loudly. “It was my idea!”
“OK, enough!” Rayleen snapped. “Enough talking about this thing. I’m going down there.”
And she marched out.
Grace sat on the couch with Billy, who was biting his thumbnail, and she slapped his wrist.
“Ow!” he said.
“Stop biting your nails!”
“That hurt.”
“I didn’t hurt you any worse than you’re hurting you.”
They heard the knock on the door of Grace’s apartment, and they went silent.
Nothing happened.
Another knock, louder this time.
Still nothing.
“Great,” Billy said. “Her only daughter’s been kidnapped, and she’ll never even know it.”
Grace punched him on the arm, but not very hard at all, and said, “She’ll find out, Billy. She wakes up a little bit every day. Well. Most days.”
Then Rayleen let herself back into Billy’s apartment, looking kind of worn out, and saying, “I guess I’ll just have to keep trying till I get her.”
? ? ?
After the meeting, Grace went upstairs to the attic apartment to talk to Mrs. Hinman, because she still had a nagging feeling that Mrs. Hinman was feeling hurt or left out or both.
She knocked on the door, saying, at the same time, “It’s only me, Mrs. Hinman, Grace.”
She’d learned that you had to do that with all the grown-ups in this building, because they were all pretty much scared of everybody and everything, all the time. Grace wondered if that was just this building, or if it was all the grown-ups in all the buildings in the world, but she only lived in this one, so there was really no way to know.
“All right, dear. Just a minute.”
It always took Mrs. Hinman a long time to undo the locks.
When she finally did, she opened the door, of course, but she still seemed a little worried, as if Grace might have brought a team of thugs and bandits along for the visit.
“Can I come in?”
“Well, of course, dear.”
Grace walked into Mrs. Hinman’s living room and watched her redo all those locks.
“Did you hear about Mr. Lafferty?”
Mrs. Hinman shook her head and made a disapproving sound with her tongue. A kind of “tsk” noise.
“Such a tragedy. Such a shame. Only fifty-six years old. And he had no one. No one. Even his grown children wouldn’t talk to him. Of course, everybody always feels sorry for the person who has no one, but usually it’s for a reason. There’s a reason why nobody talked to Mr. Lafferty.”
“I talked to him.”
“Good. I’m glad you did. I’m glad he had that before he died. Now, me, I have nobody, but it really isn’t my fault. It’s just that I’m eighty-nine, and I’ve outlived my husband and all of my friends.”
Mrs. Hinman had finished the locks by that time, so she waddled into the kitchen, saying, “Can I fix you a glass of juice or something? I don’t have any soda.”
“That’s OK. I’m really not supposed to drink soda.”
She’d actually been about to say, “That’s OK, I can’t stay.” But then she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Because Mrs. Hinman had nobody, just like Mr. Lafferty, and it wasn’t even her fault, because she wasn’t even mean. Well, not mean compared to Mr. Lafferty. Then again, nobody was mean compared to Mr. Lafferty.
“Here, how about a glass of apple juice, then?”
So Grace said, “Sure, OK,” and sat down at her kitchen table. “I came to say I’m sorry if you felt left out when we had our meeting. I just never thought you’d want to come to it, because you’re not one of the ones who take care of me. I didn’t mean you couldn’t be one of the ones who take care of me, you know, if you wanted to be. It’s just that you said you didn’t want to, and all.”
“It’s not so much that I didn’t want to,” Mrs. Hinman said, setting a glass of juice on the table in front of Grace. “It’s more that I didn’t think I was up to the task. But I was thinking…Oh, where did I put that? Wait, let me find that little catalogue, and I’ll show you what I was thinking.”
Grace sipped the apple juice and was shocked by how good it was.
“Wow,” she said. “I never get apple juice. I should drink this more.”
“Well, you can always come up here for juice,” Mrs. Hinman said. “Oh. Here it is. Let me just show you. I have an old Singer sewing machine. Haven’t had it out in years. Not since my husband died. But I used to be very handy with it.”
She sat down at the table across from Grace.
Grace asked, “What did you used to sew?”
“Clothes. I used to make my own clothes. And Marv’s as well. Here, look at some of these patterns.”
“What’s a pattern?” Grace asked, looking, but not sure how to interpret what she saw. It just looked like drawings of clothes, mostly ladies’ dresses.
“A pattern is something you buy to help you make a dress. You cut out the pattern and pin it to the fabric, and then you know where to cut, and where to stitch, and where the darts and zippers go.”
“Oh. OK. Why am I looking at this again?”
“I just thought you might want to look through it and pick out a couple of dresses, and then I could dust off my old sewing machine and make them for you.”
“Oh, I get it,” Grace said. “So that way you won’t feel left out any more.”
Mrs. Hinman reddened, and she seemed flustered.
“I was just thinking you probably don’t have a lot of nice clothes, and you’re growing fast, and it might be a good thing for your situation to have a few nice dresses, that’s all. It was you I was wanting to help, not myself.”
“I can pick my own dresses?”
“Of course.”
“What about pants?”
“I can do pants.”
“What about tops to go with jeans? Because I mostly wear jeans.”
“There are all kinds of clothes in there,” Mrs. Hinman said. “Why not just look through it?”
So Grace stayed through that glass of apple juice and one-and-a-half refills, and picked out some new clothes.