Young Writers Society

Four Things That Never Happened to Grace Hampton

1. Fairy Tale

Pale bright autumn sunlight falls lightly from the window. Her niece in the rosebud pink dress is leaning out into the open air, balanced on the balls of her feet and shouting hello to her cousins in the parking lot below. Grace is watching the breeze in the niece’s white-blond hair and she is ignoring the niece’s mother, her sister in law with her sensible cardigan and her busy hands.

“You look like a dream,” says the sister in law as she tugs down her daughter’s dress where it’s begun to ride up, “Like a picture bride.”

Grace thinks she meant to say ‘You look like a picture book bride’ but she can’t help but think of those poor, hopeful women with their foreign languages, going off to marry a man they’d never met. Grace thinks she doesn’t want to look like a dream, she wants to look like a flesh and blood woman because, after all, it was a flesh and blood woman that Michael fell in love with.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that she was the niece in the pink dress, more interested in laughing with her friends than dropping flower petals for a tall woman in white to walk over. She isn’t the sort of woman who thinks her whole life was meant to lead up to this moment. She’s the sort of woman who loves Michael because he wanted the marriage more than she did and that’s why she said yes.

Grace isn’t wearing a veil and isn’t wearing white, but she will wear a ring on her left hand for the rest of her life and that’s what makes her smile.

2. She Went to Nicaragua

The service was informal, for close friends and family only. He wanted to think that was what she wanted but the truth was that they were young and she wasn’t cynical and they never talked about it. He was numb. Her family made all the arrangements.

It was cold and drizzling and the grass under his feet felt overly soft and squishy. His polished black shoes were taking in water and his feet were getting wet. He was glad they didn’t ask him to be a pallbearer, he didn’t want concrete proof that the wooden box wasn’t empty. Her friends, their friends, came up to him and apologized and spit out weary condolences with their eyes determinedly averted from his face. Even her father and brothers came and put a consoling hand on his arm or shoulder like they hadn’t been almost-enemies the week before.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” he admitted to the father, at a loss for what else to say.

“She never should have been over there. I should have said something. Maybe if I had, she might have stayed home,” responded the father, it occurred to Michael that they were having two different conversations at each other.

“She always had such damned good intentions,” said Michael, referring to Grace in the past tense for the first time. It made him feel strange, hollowed out but he supposed he had to get used to it eventually.

3. Optical Illusion

“To Yale Law,” said Jay, raising his glass in a toast, “To Grace Lydell, future supreme court judge.”

I blushed and rolled my eyes. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I admonished.

“Come on, Grace, enjoy it. You graduate tomorrow. You made it. You can’t tell me you don’t feel at least a little bit ambitious,” said Cassandra who sat on my other side. Cassandra was leaning in so close to speak with me that her red hair brushed my bare shoulder. I rested my hands on the dark wood table and didn’t speak.

Law wasn’t my dream. My grandparents had been willing to pay for Yale on the condition that I studied something worthwhile. I didn’t want to make do with the colleges my parents and I could afford on our own, so I worked hard and made the best of it. I know I’m a good speaker, I know I can be persuasive. I’m determined to do something more than contract negotiations and other corporate nothings.

I never told Jay the whole truth. As much as he pretended to shun the conventions of society, he dressed in all the latest clothes, drove a nice car and his parents had always paid for whatever he needed and made no demands. I wasn’t ashamed, I was just concerned that he wouldn’t understand my willingness to compromise my goals. I was concerned that I might loose his respect and that he would stop wanting to touch my body and kiss me. I was also concerned I might learn that he had never respected me in the first place and so wouldn’t make any difference in his love of my body.

The restaurant was loud and crowded and they were playing popular rock, the kind where you can’t tell one band from the next. But this place served the best French fries I’d ever eaten. Jay often dragged me here when he said I needed to unwind and somehow Cassandra always managed to come along. Cassandra seemed to be just as much a part of this relationship as Jay and I are, there even when she’s not. Cassandra is a buffer zone between us and permanence, intimacy. The fact that we need a buffer zone makes me sure that Jay and I won’t last past graduation.

Jay asked me if we were ever going to move in together, or had our relationship already reached it’s full potential. I wanted to ask him if he had ever noticed that we needed a buffer zone and that moving in together would effectively eliminate any such space. I didn’t. I told him no and didn’t give myself any room to change my mind. I told him that both our lives were about to change, and perhaps it was best that we keep all our options open. So he took me out for drinks. I was fairly sure he’d find his way to telling me good-bye sometime in the course of the evening. Maybe he’d even give in and finally go home with Cassandra instead of sending her home alone with this slightly bereft look on her face in a cab that he paid for.

I ate crispy French fries and nodded my head to music that I hated and realized that real life was just outside the door. No more waiting period. If I had been the sort of person who drank I would probably have wanted one then, but I didn’t. I wanted to look up at the stars like I used to do in my back yard when I was ten.

“I’m going to get some air,” I announced, already trying to scoot out of the horseshoe shaped booth.

“Are you feeling okay?” asked Jay, sounding genuinely concerned. I was going to miss that, I realized he was always wanted me to be happy even though he often guessed wrong on how to go about it.

“Yes, Jay, I’m fine.” I didn’t manage to smile at him, but I knew my voice was strong, and he never looked too closely anyway. “Thank you,” I said and it came out sounding like goodbye, which is probably what I meant.

Cassandra scooted out of the booth to let me by and grabbed my hand as I passed. “I’ll come with you,” she said so definitely that didn’t think to question her.

We grabbed our jackets and our purses and left Jay alone at the table with our unfinished drinks and fries and a quietly accepting expression on his face. Cassandra didn’t let go of my hand. I didn’t mind. I didn’t understand it but I didn’t mind.

We stood out on the sidewalk, leaning against my car within the circle of light from a street lamp. I couldn’t see the stars, there was too much light pollution but the moon was full and I felt like it was watching over me. Cassandra was a head shorter than I was and she had this way of tipping her head to the side while she talked to me so she didn’t have look straight up. It made her look inquisitive and inscrutable. I always got the feeling that she was about to ask me something, but she never did. Tonight we didn’t look at each other as we talked.

“I’m fairly certain that Jay and I broke up today,” I told her.

“I’m sorry.”

“It was inevitable. But I’m just saying, if you’re interested, he’s available now.” I tried to sound off-hand, but I was watching her carefully out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t see her face, just her cloud of red hair and her profile in the dim light. I wanted to know, once and for all, if she had only stayed around because she was waiting for me get out of her way with Jay.

“I’m not interested,” she said without hesitation, and I knew she wasn’t lying.

“Really?” I asked, startled.

Cassandra looked at me sharply, “Yes. And frankly, I never understood why you were with him for so long. Did you honestly think I was after Jay Waterston? That that’s why I was hanging out with you all this time?” She didn’t sound insulted, exactly, but she did sound emphatic.

I suddenly felt ashamed and utterly baffled. I knew I was blushing furiously. “You two always seemed to be flirting with each other,” I said in a small voice. I had this feeling growing inside me like I’d made a terrible mistake.

“Jay flirts with everyone,” she said gently, almost apologetically. She caught my gaze and held it. There was a little worried crease between her eyebrows. I felt oddly stretched, like an optical illusion was shifting right before my eyes, or like someone was redefining the map of my world. “For someone so brilliant, you can be dumb sometimes, can’t you,” said Cassandra in that apologetically annoyed tone, “Did it never occur to you that maybe you were the reason? That maybe I wanted to be your friend?”

I couldn’t believe the terrible mistake I’d made. I felt guilty for the resentment I’d built up toward for Cassandra, I’d never told her, but she must have sensed it. I couldn’t even begin to scrape together words to try to explain. “No, that never occurred to me,” I admitted.

“You don’t ever put a very high value on yourself, do you,” said Cassandra sadly. She was still holding my hand, I realized, holding it tightly. Maybe I could still salvage this friendship.

“No, I guess I don’t.” Honesty is what I owed her, I decided.

“We’re gonna have to work on that.” Cassandra smiled at me and it seemed only natural to smile back

“My grandparents paid for Yale, on the condition that I go into law or medicine. Blood makes me faint, so…” I said, just to be sure it wasn’t a deal breaker. Cassandra just kept smiling and shrugged.

“I always kind of guessed trial law wasn’t your big passion. You know, a lot of people with law degrees go into politics.”

“Maybe,” I said, feeling possibilities opening around me. “Do you need a ride someplace?”

“Do you think we should tell Jay we’re leaving?”

“I think he knows already.”

4.

Grace had never liked kid parties. Not when she was a six year old and inviting an overlarge gaggle of friends over to eat cake and ice cream and run through the sprinkler, not at thirteen going to Angie Welsh’s sleepover with the facials, manicures and wasteland of shifting loyalties, and not as an adult chaperone at Michael’s daughter’s eighth birthday bash. She adored Sophie, who was possibly the most intelligent, beautiful, precocious little girl she’d ever known. Not that she knew that many little girls, really, but it was true all the same. Sophie called her Aunt Grace and Grace loved her. It’s just that there’s only so much time a rational adult can spend with ten eight-year-olds, all of whom consumed massive quantities of sugar in the past four hours, before it becomes necessary to find a quiet place and take some aspirin and breathe deeply for a while.

Grace escaped to the upstairs bathroom, Michael and Ally’s bathroom, with two sinks and lots of blond wood cabinets. She drank cold water from a small paper cup. She could hear the party continuing below, little girl laughter and shrieks under her feet.

There were neatly folded powder blue towels on the rack. That must have been Alice’s doing because in all the time Grace had known Michael he hadn’t bothered to do much folding and never neatly. Above the towel rack was a square window with pebbled glass that let in soft light but left only a vague image of the outside world, more undefined than an impressionist painting.

On the counter there were little bits and pieces of a life, coins and other crumpled things emptied out of pockets. A watch sat between the two sinks, Michael’s watch. Grace gave him that watch as a birthday present the year that they lived together. It was elegant and sturdy with the time, the date and the phases of the moon. The leather band was looking a bit worn, but it was still the same one. She’d had the back engraved, ‘to MK, love always, GH’ was all it said. She had wanted to pick some profound line of poetry, or some personal message, but anything short enough to fit on the back of the watch had sounded trite. She was glad she had picked a message that he was still comfortable wearing on his wrist, even though he was now a married man.

There was a gentle knock at the door. Grace jumped, still looking at the watch. “Grace? Are you in there?” it was Ally, she sounded concerned.

“Yep, just a second.” Grace felt odd contemplating the gift she’d given Michael as a lover all those years ago with his wife on the other side of the door. She crumpled the paper cup and tossed it in the wastebasket. She met her own gaze briefly in the mirror and acknowledged that she looked tired. Maybe it was time for a new haircut.

As she walked down stairs she was startled by the sudden quiet in the house. On the living room floor were the wrinkled and shredded remains of wrapping paper. Grace followed the sound of quiet adult voices talking. In the kitchen Michael and Ally were standing next to each other at the counter and eating slices of cake on little pink paper plates with green plastic forks. It was nice to see them laughing together, they had seemed, tense lately.

They were the same height and as they stood in the homey kitchen beside each other, Grace could see an unmistakable togetherness between them. To say that she had never been jealous would be a lie, but that jealousy was a long time back. Michael and Ally were her two best friends. And besides, who could resent a union that had created something as marvelous as Sophia Rose?

“Where did all the girls go?” asked Grace, announcing her presence.

“I sent their tag game outside before they knocked over anything breakable,” said Ally, “Would you like some cake? There’s still a piece with a flower on it.”

Grace laughed. “I think I’ve had too much sugar already today. Is there any coffee left?”

Michael turned and glanced at the coffee maker on the counter behind him and shook his head. Grace noticed there was silver in amongst the dark hair at Michael’s temples, steadily more of it as time went by. Nothing like spending the afternoon with eight-year-olds to make you feel old.

“How are you holding up?” Grace asked in that certain slightly softer tone that meant she was talking only to Michael. Despite everything else, everything that went badly and despite barriers of time and marriage, they never stopped having voices that they used for only each other.

Michael smiled at Grace. “Sophie’s eight today. Eight years ago today, she was born.”

“I know,” grinned Grace. She still remembered the night clearly. She remembers taking Michael out for a drink after Ally fell asleep. She remembers thinking she didn’t know the husband glowed too. “It seems like eight years should have taken longer than it did.”

“I cannot believe the number of root beer floats those girls consumed. We’re out of vanilla ice cream,” said Michael incredulously, “And they had cake. I’m fairly sure Sophie is not going to sleep tonight.”

“Better make that coffee then,” said Grace, “Come on, Alice, I’ll help you pick up the wrapping paper.”

Sometimes, Grace regretted walking away from what she and Michael had, wondered what they could have become if they had made the effort to be a little easier on their relationship. Today was not one of those days, today was a good day, overall.

*if you run in the fan fic circles you might know about the 'Five things that never happened...' challenge that's been going around. If you don't, well, it's a thing where you take a character you know and you write about five alternate universes. this one is about Grace from my In Being Left Standing story which can be found here in the romance section. the fifth thing that didn't happen is still being written, or actually i'm writing several of them becasue i decide I'll post the final one. PLease tell me what you though of these little things. you don't need to have read the other story to understand it, but it kind of makes a more complete picture of Grace if you do. Ha, shameless ploy to get people to read my work. thank you for your time, Sabz.