Tender Grace Read Free

good conversationalist. When open-ended questions need a rest, Animal Planet (et al.) comes to the rescue. There you have it: Someone who was once borderline gregarious has no desire to speak. None. I haven’t even carried on an interior monologue. I’ve been close to comatose within.
    Is that why I opened my laptop the evening of July tenth?
    To speak?
    July 30
    I sat beside Rita in church today and felt like crying when a girl sang a song I hadn’t heard in some time, since long before Tom died. The refrain is all I remember, all I heard after the first few lines: “Jesus will still be there.” Not that I don’t know that. “I am with you always” runs through my mind most days, even as I sigh. But as she sang I saw the image of massive hands extending from strong arms reaching over a cliff and grasping my forearms. I remained suspended in midair throughout the song, but I didn’t fall.
    I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of such an optimistic image.
    July 31
    An idea came to me in the middle of the night.
    Even when I was sane I tended to roll my eyes at ideas conceived under such circumstances, so I’ll probably deem this one stupid too when I ponder it in the light of day.
    The kids called to check on me. Today would have been our thirty-second anniversary.
    A Tennyson line comes to me: “O death in life, the days that are no more.”
    August 1
    Twenty-four hours later, the idea seems feasible. The wildness of this late-night thought trumps the desperation of my days.
    I’m leaving here.

three
    August 3
    I’ve “summoned” the children. They’ll come Saturday and go to church with me on Sunday. It will be nice not to go alone, nice to have friends gather around our pew to greet the kids and marvel at how cute the grandkids are.
    I took the car in for an oil change and asked them to check the tires, lights, and anything else that needs checking when one is taking off on a long trip. I sat in the waiting room watching Dr. Phil when a man I’d never seen before started talking to me.
    “Hot,” he said.
    I glanced away from Phil for a minute to see if the man was really talking to me. We were the only two people in the room, so I shook my head in agreement.
    “It is,” I said.
    “A hundred three degrees.”
    “Whew,” I replied.
    “It is” and “whew” were all he needed.
    He told me he laid tile for new construction, but it was just getting too hot for it; he told me about a new invention he’d come up with to take the ambiance of a tiled floor up a notch (I didn’t quite follow this); he told me in detail about the design he was doing for the kitchen he was currently working on, which featured little diamond-shaped insets made of colored glass.
    At some point in all this, I told him my husband laid the tile for the bathrooms in our new home.
    Driving away, I thought about my conversation with Chatty Man. (Generally speaking, that might be a prize-winning oxymoron.) It struck me as interesting that I called our house new . Most things are relative, I suppose; nevertheless, we didn’t move in last month, or last year—Tom laid those tiles eleven years ago.
    Still, I like the present tense sound of “our new home.” I can see why I chose it. I can see why I let it stand.
    August 5
    After we cleared the dinner table and settled the babies in the bonus room to watch Cars (an appropriate choice in retrospect), I asked the kids to sit with me in the living room.
    “I don’t mean to be mysterious,” I told them, “but I’m going on a road trip, destination and time frame undetermined.”
    The four of them looked at me as if I’d suggested a game of strip poker.
    Molly finally said, “What do you mean?”
    Then everyone was talking at once.
    They began to calm down somewhat when they realized I had been carefully preparing for this trip. Even in the fog of my existence, I knew if I didn’t give them an explanation of what I am planning and convince them I will be okay, they’d send