Just in Time by Marie Bostwick (22)

Chapter 22

Grace

When Monica left, I sat down on the floor and opened the box. It was filled with books.

Maisie trotted over and lay down next to me, resting her tiny head on her even tinier paws, her big brown eyes shifting from the box, to my face, and back again as I pulled out book after book, used my sleeve to dust off the covers, and read the titles, one by one:

“Oh, Jamie,” I murmured, smiling to myself as I leafed through the pages, spotting passages underlined, sometimes twice, some with stars and exclamation points.

A tear came to my eye. I wiped it away, thinking about the day we’d packed that box.

I could see why my mother thought we were going off half-cocked, moving halfway across the country to a city we’d never even visited, putting a bid on a condo we’d never actually seen, but she didn’t understand how much you could do on the Internet, and we really did have a plan.

We’d arranged for three months temporary housing and storage of our stuff until we could close on the condo. As soon as we arrived in Portland, I would get a job and Jamie would go to school full-time, finishing his paramedic training in a year. Then it would be my turn. For what, I honestly didn’t know. I wanted to start a family; we both did. But beyond that? I had no clue. But even though the condo was smaller than our garage apartment, after all those years of scrimping and saving, I was thrilled about finally having a home of our own.

Our furniture was mostly borrowed or made of particle board, so we left it behind. Even so, we needed to weed out some possessions. Since both of us had pack-rat tendencies, it wasn’t easy—especially when it came to books. When we got to the sixth box, Jamie gave me a look and said, “Come on, Grace. Do you really need the entire Little House on the Prairie series?”

“Grammy gave me those for my ninth birthday.”

“Okay, fine. But do you still read them?”

“Do you still read the Hardy Boys?” I asked, picking up a tattered copy of The Haunted Fort.

“Hey, those were my dad’s books. I can’t throw them away. Besides,” he said, grabbing the book before I could toss it into the giveaway pile, “this book has everything—a stolen art collection, death threats, and ghosts. The Hardy Boys are going to Portland. All of them.”

“Then so are Laura and the rest of the Ingalls family.”

Jamie picked another book out of the box. “What about this? You’ve read it so many times you must have the story memorized by now.”

“No way. Jo March is the sister I never had.” I held up another volume. “What about this one?”

Jamie’s eyes bugged out of his head. “Are you crazy? Dune is like the greatest book of all time. A classic! Dune insists that magic and fact are knit together in everything. It urges us to examine the miraculous alongside the mundane and see they are all of a piece. Plus, it has sandworms!”

“Okay, fine. So we’ll bring that one too. And all the Harry Potters,” I said. “We both love those.”

In the end, we packed them all.

To make up for the weight, I left behind a lot of the dishes. They were mostly mismatches anyway, things I’d picked up cheap at yard sales. It was a good thing I’d never been much of a cook.

That entire box was packed with books that Jamie and I had read and loved, familiar titles we just couldn’t leave behind. However, at the very bottom of the box was a pristine, unread volume given to me by my cousin Melody not long before we moved, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. I set it on top of the stack of books before flattening the box for recycling.

Later that night, I picked it up and brought it to my bed—a mattress and box spring on the floor—planning to read just a few pages before falling asleep. At 2:38 after Maisie opened one eye and let out an irritated snuffle to let me know I was disturbing her beauty sleep, I finally turned out the lights.

The next day, I woke up at noon, pulled on some yoga pants, and took Maisie for a walk. I didn’t even bother to brush my hair, still frizzed and frightening from my trek through the rain. Returning home, I climbed back into bed with my dog, a bowl of Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch, and the book.

That was pretty much the agenda for the next two days—I hid under the covers with Maisie snuggled up beside me, ate stuff that was salty-sugary-crunchy-creamy and devoid of all nutritional value, and read the heart-wrenching tale of Louisa Clark and Will Traynor.

Upon closing the cover, I sobbed and shook my fist at the universe, cursing its cruelty to star-crossed lovers whose love is cut short. But mostly, I cried. For another three days, between trips to the bathroom and walks for the dog, I lay in my bed, a tangle of sheets and blankets sanded with crumbs from carelessly consumed snacks, and in a way I had never allowed myself to do in those whole two years since Jamie’s fall, I mourned, finally letting the truth of Jamie’s death sink into my soul.

When I woke on the third day I had no more tears but a strange sense of being . . . grounded, reattached to the earth and my life upon it. But what did that life look like if Jamie wasn’t in it? What was I going to do now?

I had no idea. But I decided to begin by taking Maisie for a walk.

* * *

Come June, Washington Park would be a riot of roses. That was one of the first sights Jamie and I saw upon moving to Portland, because everyone said you should, and they were right. Mid-April was too soon for flowers, but the subtle rise of temperature and lengthening of days had roused the rosebushes from sleep. The branches were as high as my waist and lush with leaves. While Maisie snuffled the grass and pranced along the edge of the flowerbeds, yipping at lackadaisical, utterly unimpressed squirrels, I leaned close and studied the green rosebuds, closed but plump, edged with delicate, almost imperceptibly thin ribbons of red, yellow, pink, and white, a whispered clue, a promise of summer and longer, warmer, better days to come.

All that snuffling, prancing, and yipping wore Maisie out, so I picked her up and carried her home, down Twenty-third Street with the trendy boutiques and shops I still couldn’t afford to enter, especially when I considered the limits of a two-month severance and how far I could stretch it.

To avoid temptation, I altered my route and took a street that was new to me. The church that I passed, a turn-of-the-century cut stone structure with heavy oak doors and a squat, square bell tower, housed a thrift shop, open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays.

The shop was dusty and the aisles were narrow. The shelves were disorganized and filled with bric-a-brac, musty books, and painted portraits of other people’s relatives. Far in the back, shoved up against a wall and partially hidden under a faded flower sheet, I spied a glimpse of blue. Pulling the sheet aside, I discovered a love seat with rolled arms and weirdly oversized ball feet. The lines were pleasing, but the light was dim so it was hard to judge the exact color or condition of the upholstery.

“Excuse me,” I called to the white-haired woman who had cooed over Maisie’s “sweet little face” a few minutes before, saying it was fine to bring her inside. “Are there any more lights back here? I’d like to get a better look at this love seat.”

“Well, let me see,” she said, making her way toward me, navigating a labyrinth of old upright vacuums, dressers with missing handles, and children’s toys. “I only just started volunteering, so I’m not sure where everything . . . Oh, wait. Here’s a switch.”

The room flooded with fluorescent light, harsh but bright. I thumped my palm against the armrest. The love seat coughed up a cloud of dust. It was dirty, no question, and those ball feet were absurd, but the velvet upholstery was untouched by moths and was a surprisingly beautiful sapphire blue.

“How much is it?” I asked.

“Well, let me see,” she said again, craning her neck up, down, and sideways, searching for a price tag, finding none. “My goodness, I really don’t know. But I think they’d be glad to let it go, it takes up so much space. Let me think . . .” She did for a full minute, then cautiously asked, “Would fifty dollars be too much?”

In the end, I paid $122.50. But for that price I got the love seat, a chair with a cushion and a curved wicker back, a generic floor lamp, a bedframe with a fake brass headboard, some battered floating shelves, a small pine desk, and an eight-place setting box of dinnerware that was missing only two salad plates. The dishes were so cute and cheery—raspberry pink with turquoise circles and a band of white dots along the edge.

The woman agreed to hold everything for a few days, so I’d have time to unpack more boxes, and called the church secretary, who called the youth group leader, who arranged for a pickup truck to deliver everything I’d bought.

It started so simply, with a half-hidden glimpse of velvet, blue bright and brilliant, that roused my craving for color and need to nest, hungers long silenced by the urgency of caregiving and the single-minded focus on simple survival.

When I got back to the condo, I tore into the boxes, sorting and stacking the contents, figuring out what to toss, what to keep, and where it all should go.

Some choices were easy.

Opening the door to my closet, I spread my arms as wide as I could, corralled every item in my black-gray-charcoal-brown-navy work wardrobe, and stuffed them all in the trunk of my car, along with every pair of toe-pinching pumps, before depositing them at the drive-through donation center of the nearest Goodwill store. When I opened a big plastic bin with yard after yard after yard of bright cotton dress goods, fabrics I’d bought on sale and stowed away, and then found the box containing my sewing machine, notions, scissors, and thread, I immediately carted them over to the “keep corner” with the rest of the stuff I couldn’t live without.

Other decisions were harder to make.

No matter how much I loved them, there simply wasn’t room for all those books. I weeded out a few of my own and quite a few of Jamie’s, holding on to his Hardy Boys collection and, of course, his copy of Dune, before donating most of them to the downtown library for their annual used book sale. But I slipped one of each of our favorites, including much-read but well-preserved copies of Pride and Prejudice and The Great Santini, onto the shelf of a “Little Free Library” I spotted on my way back from the thrift shop. Though I thought I’d been pretty ruthless when sorting through and weeding out our possessions when packing the boxes in Minnesota, I was amazed by the number of knickknacks, minor memorabilia, and just plain junk we had transported clear across the country.

Why did I think we would need six bud vases? Five boxes of rubber bands? A broken VHS player? A yogurt maker?

Well, that one I did understand. Sort of. It had been a birthday present from my mother, one of her constant and not particularly subtle reminders to watch my weight. I had no intention of using it, but since it was brand new and she’d only given it to me a couple weeks before the move, I felt guilty getting rid of it.

But two years had passed since I’d opened it, which, I was pretty sure, was beyond the gift guilt statute of limitations. And my mother was almost two thousand miles away, so I put it in the Goodwill pile.

Some choices were close to impossible.

A medium-sized box sporting the ubiquitous “Miscellaneous” label contained a mélange of papers, folders, flyers, a kitchen towel, picture frames, and a blue plastic water bottle—and that was just the stuff I saw from the top. It was just too much to deal with at that moment, so I closed the lid and shoved it into the front coat closet, promising myself I’d sort through it all later.

Another, much larger box labeled with a big question mark, because it had apparently been taped shut before I had a chance to list the contents, was filled with Jamie’s winter clothes, things we hadn’t thought he’d need until after we closed on the condo. The moment I opened the lid, the air filled with a scent both strange and familiar—a mixture of ripe grain, sandalwood soap, detergent, and strong coffee. Familiar because, the instant I breathed it in, I knew it was Jamie’s smell, and strange because, until then, I’d never been aware of its existence. But there it was, Jamie’s smell. Packed away for all that time, still it clung to every article of his clothing, permeating every thread.

I lowered my head, breathing deep. I wanted to dive in headfirst, burrow into sweatshirts, sweaters, and flannel shirts, immersing myself in the last vestiges of his particular perfume. For a moment, I considered hanging them up in the too-cramped closet, next to my things. But I stopped myself, imagining what Jamie would have said on the subject, something like, “Don’t be so sentimental. There’s a lot of good wear in those clothes. I don’t need them anymore, but somebody else does. If Z was still living with Sunny, think how happy he’d be to get that warm sweater, or that shirt. They’re practically new.”

Jamie always had more than his share of practical, Midwestern good sense. I made another drive-through donation, but not before sorting through the box and picking out a few items to include in my quilt.

In the morning, I called Monica to tell her I wouldn’t be at our support group.

“Are you depressed? Should I bring more cannoli?”

“No, it’s okay. I’m just busy. I’m painting.”

“Painting what?”

“My bedroom wall. And some shelves. Maybe a chair. I haven’t decided for sure, but I’m kind of on a roll. I don’t want to lose my momentum.”

“Do you want help? I can come over and give you a hand. I bet Nan would too. We could have support group at your place this week.”

“How about next week? I should have everything finished by then.”

“Sounds good. I’ll tell Nan. Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

“Not right now. I’m okay,” I said.

And I was.

I still missed Jamie. In the days that followed, I experienced moments of sadness and even tears. In time, I came to realize I always would. That was okay and so was I. Just okay. But it was a start.

Monica would have approved. So, I realized, would Jamie.