“Never for long.”
Grace knew she would never slip, but she worried that Alls would. She wished she knew what he was thinking, if his mind sloshed with the same cocktail of guilt and stinging desire that hers did. That night flickered in her mind, without permission, like the flashing lights of the vision test at the DMV: there, then there, there, there, persistent, peripheral. Some nights she lay in bed, unsleeping, knowing that he was in the room just below them, doing the same. Worst of all were nights when she was on top of Riley, looking down through him, through the bed, through the floor, and into Alls, and almost cried out his name instead. She hated him for this.
She took up jogging. She jogged all of Garland, looking for help-wanted signs, for any sign that she could use to change her life. She jogged until she knew he would be gone. Then she went home to the safely empty house to shower before heading out to T.J.Maxx.
She was jogging around the Wynne estate one morning and she stopped at the water spigot by the office for a drink. She stared at the four-columned white mansion surrounded by cottonwood trees while she caught her breath. She hadn’t been inside the house in years. The Wynne House had been so normal, so boring to her as a child. Now she realized that the house was full of newly interesting antiques. She touched her forehead and sniffed under her arms. She was fine to go in. It was just Garland.
An old woman was sitting just inside the front door reading a large-print Thomas Friedman book. Grace startled her. “Oh, hello there!” the woman said. “Did you want to take the tour?”
“Yes,” Grace said. “But I was just out running and I don’t have any money—”
“It’s a suggested donation,” she said. “You can make it up next time you come.”
“Thanks,” Grace said. “I will do that.”
The woman got to her feet. She came up only to Grace’s chin. She wore dark blue polyester pants and a sweater with pears on it. “Well,” she began, clasping her hands. “First I’d like to welcome you to the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate. Is this your first time here?”
Grace shook her head.
“Well, the estate was built in 1804 and renovated by the family in 1824 and 1868. It has been owned by the Wynne Trust since 1951, and in 1960 it was renovated slightly for public viewing. That’s when the velvet ropes went up, et cetera. Josephus Wynne was one of the most important figures in Tennessee history, and the most important in the whole history of Garland. He was a judge, politician, and skilled orator, and he was a member of the Whig Par—” She began to cough. “Excuse me. He was a Whig.”
She led Grace through the rooms, telling her about the Mexican-American War, nineteenth-century table manners, the Tariff of Abominations, and tuberculosis, but Grace’s attention was on the stuff. The furniture was mostly American Empire and Sheraton style with some Hepplewhite mixed in, though she didn’t know all that yet. She wanted information about what she saw, but the docent knew little about the pieces themselves. Grace asked her about the bird’s-eye maple secretary, and the docent only nodded and said, “Yes, all the pieces are original to the period, though not necessarily to the family, except for the wax fruit.”
Grace took in the mahogany pier table with acorn feet, the trumeau mirror with the carved wreath relief, the needlepoint footstool. The docent chattered on: Two thousand people came through the Wynne home each year, and the tours were entirely guided by community volunteers, and the estate housed one of the most important collections of nineteenth-century French porcelain clocks in the southeastern United States.
Two thousand people in a year? That was less than half of the people who entered MoMA in a day.
Even years later, when Grace looked back on that first visit to the Wynne House, she was sure she had meant no harm. But she went back three days later, with a camera.
There were four other people on the tour this time, a couple and their teenage children. They had stopped in Garland on their way to Memphis to see family, a visit they evidently wished to delay. Grace took pictures of every room from every angle, and the docent, this time a yellow-sweatered man in his seventies, was delighted by Grace’s knowledgeable questions, and Grace was grateful for his reaction. She had learned a lot working for Donald. Looking through the photos that night, she felt excited for the first time since she’d come home. It would take her months to identify everything in the Wynne House.
“But why?” Riley asked her when she’d been at her research for three nights. “What are you going to do with this?”
Grace shrugged. “Show them a report, I guess.” Maybe the Wynne people would give her a job. Maybe they wanted a researcher. Did they know, for instance, that the silver bowl that held the wax fruit was a John Wendt, probably from his early Boston years, and that Wendt identified himself as a “silver chaser,” which sounded like a burglar but was actually a term for a metalsmith who used the techniques of repoussé and embossing? Did anyone want to know that? Or that even the wax fruit was kind of important, and not quite contemporary? That the apples’ curly stems indicated that they’d come from Rayhorne Table-Effex, a decor manufacturer from the mid-1970s that supplied all the wax fruit for the Four Seasons hotels? And that the company dissolved in 1981 when the EPA discovered they had dumped tons and tons of DDE waste into a local river? And that the wax fruit, which had originally sold for eighty cents apiece, now brought more than thirty dollars per dingy banana?
Who would ever care?
? ? ?
For a few weeks after Anne Findlay cut his check, Riley had felt special, above the other art students. He was a local celebrity who wouldn’t be local for much longer. But in January, Findlay had a new artist up in her gallery, and Riley was a student again. Grace, usually adept at consoling him, was too unmoored herself to hold his ego together. He had started a new piece, this one of the courthouse, to Grace’s silent dismay. Yet, her recent convictions about the ideas and experiments of artwork seemed both hysterical and snobbish now. She looked at the watercolor portrait he had painted of her, delicately taped onto the wall of their bedroom, and felt impotent.
Riley puttered among his canvases the way he always had. He sat in the basement amid the party detritus and abandoned half-built bicycles with lamps aimed at him from four directions. He listened to Les Claypool and leaned forward in his chair, muttering to himself or to his canvas, carrying on a long, low-stakes conversation that always ended in agreement. Grace would sneak downstairs under the pretense of looking for something and watch him as he smoked and talked to himself. She watched him paint the highlights on a sunny patch of sidewalk and tried to believe.
She made him sandwiches.
She cleaned his brushes.
She repeated these exercises of love, desperate for a sign of divine clemency.
? ? ?
One evening in February, Grace drove home from T.J.Maxx, where she had stayed late cleaning up the sticky chocolate milk that a toddler had spilled in the handbag racks, and found a black Jaguar sitting in the driveway. Riley had bought the car from a Knoxville dealer on a whim and Greg’s you-only-live-once advice. The Jaguar was six years old and had 140,000 miles on it. She and Riley had had a dozen joking conversations about what he might buy with the Findlay money (a pontoon boat, a show dog), but she had not realized how susceptible to shitty ideas he really was.
Thus caught by surprise, that was unfortunately exactly how she put it to Riley.