Chapter 24
Grace
For the first time in my life, I entertained friends in a home of my own.
Monica supplied a pan of spinach and ricotta stuffed shells with marinara for the main course, and Nan brought cold grilled asparagus and a salad of baby lettuce, the first fruits of her spring garden. Over Monica’s objections, I handled the appetizers and dessert. Maybe I couldn’t cook, but anybody can shop, and in Portland, home of artisan everything, finding fresh, delicious, gourmet food is as easy as taking a walk in the park.
On Saturday, Maisie and I went downtown to the Farmers’ Market in the Park Blocks. After wandering through the stalls, admiring piles of artfully arranged produce that was so fresh and bright and beautiful it seemed almost too pretty to eat, I bought a box of artisan crackers sprinkled with sesame and poppy seeds, three slivers of delicious, locally made cheese, and ingredients for a strawberry-rhubarb sangria recipe I’d found online. On the way home, I stopped by Salt & Straw and picked up two quarts of ice cream for dessert—Almond Brittle with Salted Chocolate Ganache and Strawberry Honey Balsamic with Black Pepper.
The evening was a great success. The meal was delicious and the sangria started things off on a festive note. I was very gratified when both Nan and Monica asked for the recipe. But most gratifying was the way they kept oohing and aahing over what I’d done to the place. It was the first time Nan had ever been to my condo, but Monica made sure she was able to appreciate the full nature of the transformation by providing a vivid description of what the place had been like before.
When she described my bedroom as looking like “a cheap dorm in a badly run youth hostel,” I said, “Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad.” Monica laid her hand on my arm and said, “Yes, it was, Grace. It really, really was.”
The ice cream was almost as big a hit as the decorating.
“Salt and Straw!” Monica exclaimed. “I love that place!”
Nan, who was sitting at the counter on my single stool, said, “I usually get the Honey Lavender, but this strawberry is delicious.” She put down her spoon and looked around the room. “And, really, Grace, the whole place looks fabulous.”
“Thanks,” I said, sitting down next to Monica on the love seat. “It’s still a work in progress. I’d like to find the perfect table, a nice rug, and make some fabric shades for the windows, but I should hold off on doing anything else until I find a job.
“Oh wait!” I cried, springing to my feet and quickly putting my ice cream down on the coffee table. “I forgot to show you my other project!”
I ran into the bedroom closet and pulled out the second dress I’d made, same pattern but a different fabric—pale blue background printed with pen-and-ink style drawings of the Eiffel Tower and bright red and blue suitcases. Showing it off to my friends, I explained about the owl dress I’d made for Sunny and how her reaction had inspired me to run right home and make another dress that I intended to donate to a nearby homeless shelter.
“It’s only a dress,” I said, when I realized I’d been gushing. “It’s not like it’s going to change her life or anything. In fact, she hasn’t been around since yesterday, so I’m sure she’s off on some kind of bender. She does that sometimes. But the look on Sunny’s face . . . I’ll never forget it. Is it crazy to hope that getting a new dress might not just help her feel seen, but actually convince her she’s worth something?”
“It’s never crazy to hope,” Nan replied. “Whoever gets this dress will love it just as much as Sunny did.”
I folded the dress over my arm. “I hope so. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve done in a long time. I hope my new job, whatever it is, leaves me enough spare time to make a few more. I’ve got yards and yards of fabric stowed in my closet. It’d be nice to put it to good use.”
Nan, who was only halfway done with her ice cream, put down her spoon. She stared at me for such a long time that it started to feel uncomfortable, like when somebody sees you’ve got spinach in your teeth and can’t look away but doesn’t tell you either.
“What?” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. Those stuffed shells did have a lot of spinach.
“The dresses. Don’t you see?” she asked, turning from me to Monica and back again, her expression suddenly bright. “That should be your job!”
My heart beat a bit faster when Nan said that, but it didn’t take long for me to start thinking of reasons it couldn’t work. I mean, I would have had to sell a lot of dresses to actually make a living doing it. Those dresses took me half a day each to sew. And, as Monica pointed out, opening a business from scratch was risky; it required capital and experience. I had neither.
“She’d need to hire employees,” Monica said. “Open some kind of workshop or factory. She can’t mass-produce dresses with one used sewing machine, cutting them out one by one on her kitchen counter. Besides, the reason Grace found this so satisfying is because she was giving the dresses away, not selling them. It could end up being a nice hobby, but”—Monica shook her head—“I just don’t see how this could be a business.”
Neither could I.
And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t sleep either. Around three in the morning, I finally gave up trying and got out of bed. Maisie gave me a bemused look, then scooted herself onto the warm spot I’d left on the mattress.
I went into the living room, got out my sewing basket, and stitched a couple of seams in the Lemoyne Star block I was working on, made from Jamie’s red flannel shirts. Sewing normally relaxes me, but that night I just couldn’t settle into it. I kept thinking about the conviction in Nan’s voice when she said that dressmaking should be my business and then Monica’s voice, equally insistent, saying there was no way it could work. Since Monica is the only one of us who’d ever run a business, she was probably right.
After a few minutes, I put my stitching aside and opened the coat closet, thinking I’d sort through the miscellaneous box I’d shoved in there earlier. Now was as good a time as any.
Like so many of the other boxes I had unpacked in the previous days, this one contained a lot of junk, stuff I couldn’t believe we’d bothered to pack and ship halfway across the country. But there were some things that mattered, a copy of our marriage certificate, some pictures I was glad to find, including one of Jamie in the orchard when he was about nine years old, sitting in the top branches of one of the apple trees. I put that aside, deciding to get a copy made to send to Penny.
Near the bottom of the box I found a sealed envelope with my name on it. Seeing Jamie’s handwriting, that jagged, cramped script only I could decipher, my heart beat faster.
The card had three watercolor hearts in shades of blue and green on a white background and a printed inscription inside that read, You’re the woman I love, making life beautiful, filling my years with joy, and the world with light. Opposite the inscription, he had written a note.
My beautiful Grace,
Ten years is a pretty long time, more than a third of our lives, but the only regret I have in life is that I wasn’t able to marry you even sooner. Although, if I had, I guess we’d probably have been breaking the law—
Feeling my throat tighten, I stopped reading to wipe my eyes, remembering our tenth anniversary, the camping trip, that magical day, our last full day together. So many people, after losing someone they love, look back and think if they’d known that day was the last day, they’d have done or said something different. But when I think of my final day with Jamie, I have no regrets. It was perfect.
We’d closed on the condo the day before. Leaving the boxes unpacked, we went on an anniversary camping trip to the North Cascades of Washington State. Sitting on a boulder at the top of Mt. Pilchuck, panting from the effort of the ascent, I held Jamie’s hand and was awestruck by the beauty of the world at our feet, a carpet of green and granite that stretched to the edge of everything and felt like it belonged to us alone.
I turned to look at Jamie. His square jaw was peppered with the stubble of a missed morning shave. His lips were red and chapped from the chill wind but smiling still.
“God, it’s beautiful,” he’d said, his voice a clear and reverent whisper. “The edge of heaven. Even the air is just . . . Can you smell that?”
I could—juniper and ice, sunlight and pine, and the mineral-flavored bite of dust in a cold and freshening wind—the clean perfume of life above the tree line. I squeezed his hand.
A fringe of brown brows peeked out over the top of Jamie’s sunglasses. He lifted his arm, inviting me to move closer. I did and put my head on his shoulder.
“I’ve got an idea,” he’d said. “Let’s stay here forever.”
“Okay. Let’s.”
We sat there, not forever but for a long time, until the sun started to dip toward the horizon.
At our trailside camp, after a dinner of freeze-dried stew and wine, Jamie gave me my anniversary present, the beautiful watch, silver and gold with a mother-of-pearl and three small, sparkling diamonds floating behind the glass.
“Do you like it?” he’d asked, laughing when I’d gasped and threw my arms around his neck in answer. “I bought it months ago. I wrote you a card, too, but I can’t find it now. I think I might have accidentally packed it into one of the boxes.”
I hadn’t really heard that part, not then. All I’d said was, “I love it, Jamie. I love you. And I am never taking this off.”
And now, after all this time, here it was in my hand, the message he’d written to me. Jamie was bothered that he’d mislaid it. I remembered him saying something about it as we were starting off the next morning, on our last hike. But his message to me, hidden from view for so long, was more precious to me now than it could possibly have been back then because his words came to me fresh and at the moment I most needed to hear them.
Ten months after we got married, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t live until our first anniversary, so I wrote you another note and gave it to my mom to give to you if I died. I wrote to say how much I loved you, and how I didn’t want you to be sad after I was gone, because you made me happy and my life amazing, and how I wanted you to find someone else to love after I was gone, someone who would love you the way I did—one hundred percent, all-in, forever and ever.
I’m so grateful that you never had to read that note. In spite of all my brave talk back then about beating the odds, I didn’t really believe we’d get to this day. But you gave me a reason to keep going when I thought I couldn’t. You made me want to live and, because of you, I did. Every extra day I’ve had with you has been a gift, like opening a great surprise package every day for ten years.
The great thing about almost dying is that you are constantly aware of how incredibly priceless and completely uncertain every moment is and that, when you find what you really want out of life, you’ve got to go for it because you might not get another chance.
But, come to think of it, maybe I knew that even before I got sick. From that first day we talked, I also realized we were supposed to be together. But you were so shy and self-conscious, and it seemed kind of crazy, even to me. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to convince you, but I’m glad I didn’t talk myself out of trying. You’ve made me so happy and I love you so much. Every mile I walked to make you mine was worth it a thousand times over.
If tomorrow were my last day, I’d have no regrets. That’s the gift I really wish I could give you, a life with no regrets. But that’s something you have to do for yourself, so I’m giving you this watch instead, to remind you of all the good things I want for you and that I love you—
“One hundred percent, all-in, forever and ever. Jamie,” I said, reading the last lines aloud. I clutched the card to my heart and looked up. “Thank you, babe. Message received.”
A few minutes later and more awake than ever, I climbed back into bed, bringing my laptop with me. The sound of the computer booting disturbed Maisie. She opened one eye and glared at me.
“Sorry, punkin. I just had an idea,” I said, typing the words “business plans” into the search bar. “Go back to sleep. This shouldn’t take long.”
Twenty-seven hours later—only five of them spent sleeping—I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to tell somebody, somebody who actually knew something about running a business. It took six rings for her to answer.
“Monica? Are you up?”
“That depends,” she said groggily. “What time is it?”
“Six o’clock.”
“I would have been, in about half an hour. Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just . . . I had an idea.”
“An idea? You woke me out of a dead sleep to tell me about an idea?” Monica groaned. “This better be good, Grace.”
“It is,” I said. “I really think it is.”