Full of Grace Read Free

linen jacket refilled drinks at a makeshift bar in the brick courtyard and his companion moved in the background in a waltz of service, through the throng, offering pickled shrimp speared with little toothpicks. At the other end of the garden, on an oversize grill, skewers of pork, chicken, onions and pineapple sizzled, filling the air with glorious, mouthwatering fragrances. They would be served from the buffet over steamed rice, with salad and rolls. It was Lowcountry civility and propriety in tandem and completely irresistible.
    Anyway, there was Michael leaning over the banister of the veranda, surveying the crowd, and I caught his eye. He was wearing a cream-colored linen jacket over a navy T-shirt with navy lightweight gabardine trousers. By coincidence, so was I. But my navy T-shirt was actually a camisole and my jacket hung from the crook of my finger over my shoulder. I gave him a small smile and a slight nod.
    Just to clarify the varying degrees of “small smile and slight nod” and what they meant, this one meant The drawbridge is lowered. You may approach . At the far end of the spectrum, there was the jaw-dropper, in which your face was agog and you looked like a total ass with zero odds to recoup your cool. And at the opposite end there’s the vacant stare as your eyes slide elsewhere that says Don’t even think about it . Well seasoned in reading social signals, the smiling and self-assured Michael came down from the porch and made his way to my side.
    “Don’t I know you from someplace?” he said.
    “Good grief. Is that the best you can do?” I said. And I fell like a fool into the endless blue of his eyes.
    “Do you want to live together? My apartment is over-air-conditioned,” he said with a grin and dimples that were beyond adorable and irresistible. He reached in his pocket and pulled out his keys. “It’s freezing there.”
    “So is my place, and you’re pretty optimistic,” I said. “Shouldn’t we start with something like, I don’t know, dinner ?”
    “I don’t know. Sure. Hey, do you like baseball?”
    “What red-blooded American doesn’t?”
    “Well, want to come see me play?”
    “What’s up with you and baseball? You play for the Yankees?”
    “No, no. I play for the MUSC team to benefit the terminal patients in the children’s wing. My friend Larry works there with critical-care kids. Got me involved.”
    Well, that stopped me in my lustful tracks. I mean, any man eager to play ball for a good cause in that heat had to be a great guy. I looked at him and said, “Sure. I’d love to.”
    What ensued over the next few weeks were many baseball games, too many romantic fattening dinners, lots of sweaty hooking-up and me holding out on the deed. Rule one: If you want a man to take you seriously, keep your britches on. Besides, there were so many things about him I didn’t know. Like, was he a pathological liar? A philanderer? In huge debt? Did he have a drinking problem? An ex-wife with anger issues? Twenty children? A drug problem?
    Did any of these things matter? Not really. No, they didn’t really matter at all because for the first time in my life I was dumbstruck, absolutely flattened by the stupefying, powerful all-consuming feelings I had for a member of the opposite sex.
    Eventually our bloomers hit the floor and I gave him keys. He put his stuff in storage and moved in. I had never been as happy as I was then, and in my head I was doing the hippie dance of stoned-out love every waking minute. Ah, yes, life was pretty darn near perfection in the domestic arena. Until I talked to my mother or my father or any member of the clan. Little by little my parents wheedled the facts about Michael from me. They were aghast that he was Irish, but the fact that he was doing stem-cell research in a project to repair heart-wall muscle sent them over the moon. He became the Irish Baby Butcher .
    What happened over the next ten months was this widening of the distance between us