Blessing in Disguise Read Free Page B

the color of raspberry sherbert, an orchid corsage on her wrist. Some awful country-club affair that Grandma had insisted she attend. By evening’s end, she recalled, the orchid looked as if it had been trampled by Sherman’s army, which, the way people in Blessing talked, you’d have thought had scorched its way through Georgia the week before.
    Staring into her closet, Grace thought of the evening stretching before her like a battlefield. What does it matter what I’m wearing?
    Hannah would probably be thrilled if she showed up at the door in her underwear. All the more reason to find fault with her father’s girlfriend.
    Girlfriend. The word stuck in her mind like something scrawled in her Robert E. Lee High yearbook, adolescent, transitory, inconsequential somehow. My God, she was thirty-seven years old, and someone’s girlfriend.
    It would be different if we were married.
    But was that really what she wanted—to be a wife again, and play stepmother to Ben and Hannah? Didn’t she have enough to handle just being the mother of a teenager? Besides, Jack hadn’t even asked her to marry him. Whenever the subject came up, he adroitly managed to skirt it.
    Grace felt a knot form in her stomach, and along with it came the sudden certainty that nothing about this evening was going to turn out okay. But she quickly filed that thought away, under “Pending” (on the mental shelf below “Maybe It’ll Work Out on Its Own” and just above “You’re Wasting Your Time”). Right. Just because this was their first dinner together, all five of them, was no reason to panic. There would be enough of that after Hannah arrived.
    She peeled her dress over her head, inside out, experiencing the same relief she felt each time she shucked off a pair of pantyhose at the end of a day of talk shows and interviews and book signings. Tossing it onto the floor of her closet, she plucked a pair of Levi’s from a hanger. Softened by many washings, they slid on over her legs and hips like lotion. Next, she pulled on the fifties men’s pajama top she’d bought at Canal Jean—aubergine satin worn to the texture of chamois, with black piping and an unreadable monogram. Tucked in, with its sleeves rolled up four times, it fit her just fine. Now her Navajo conch belt threaded through the loops of her jeans. There.
    Caught in the sepia glow of the late-afternoon sunshine angling down from the loft’s bedroom skylight, she examined herself in the full-length closet mirror as if studying the photograph of someone she had not yet gotten to know. Hazel eyes in a heart-shaped face no longer girlish, but shot with tiny crinkles, like a delicate tissuey valentine that’s been crushed then pressed nearly smooth again. Dark straight hair brushing the knobs of her too-thin shoulders—no gray yet, but maybe she wasn’t looking hard enough.
    Was this the face of a likable person? A woman you would welcome as a friend? A wife? A stepmother?
    Bong.
    In the living area, down the hall, Grandma Clayborn’s pendulum clock marked the hour in what Grace had always thought of as a somewhat ominous tone. She counted six chimes. God, Jack and his kids would be here in less than half an hour, and she hadn’t cleaned up or even put the water on to boil for the rice.
    Briefly, she considered phoning Jack and telling him she was sick, a sudden attack of the flu. No, that wouldn’t work. He’d be over like a shot, toting a plastic tub of chicken soup with matzoh balls from Lou Siegel, like that time when she really was sick with the flu.
    All the stress she’d been under? He’d buy that. He was her publisher after all, he knew how crazy her schedule had been lately with this book—all the shuttles to Washington, the interviews with ex-staff members, friends, legislators and former legislators, longtime bureaucrats, anyone who’d known Eugene Truscott. And as if writing a biography of her famous father wasn’t enough of an undertaking, someone at Cadogan had