Tender Grace Read Free Page B

saved a good deal of money by staying at Mom’s, but I simply wasn’t up for going there without Tom. My room here has a microwave and a refrigerator, and I picked up a Weight Watchers meal for dinner. I also purchased a twelve-pack carton of Diet Coke and hope it will last until morning.
    One of these days, I may stay at a hotel and use room service. I did that once when Tom took me with him to a principals’ conference in Orlando. I rather liked it. I really don’t mind eating alone, but I don’t want to eat alone in public. Who cares, I’m sure. But “know thyself,” and I’m just not up to that.
    My plan is to run down to the complimentary breakfast room tomorrow, should I wake up before breakfast is cleared away, and get a pastry and three pieces of fruit, two of them for my lunch. I’ve never done that before, but Rita does it all the time. I hope an alarm doesn’t go off when I walk through the doors with contraband fruit stashed in my purse.
    I saw Tom’s Bible sitting in the passenger seat when I was unloading the car. I put it there this morning after I made one last walk through the house and noticed it resting on the table by Tom’s chair, neglected for such a long time now. In the last fifteen months I’ve picked it up only on the rare occasions I’ve been compelled to dust the table it was sitting on. The morning I found Tom, that black leather Bible, worn from years of study, was in his lap, open to John 4 in preparation for a lesson he expected to teach the next Sunday. I had opened the door to the garage before I decided to go back and retrieve it. That Bible is the only thing of Tom’s I brought with me.
    That—and what’s left of my heart.
    It’s eight thirty and still pretty light outside. I went over and pulled the curtains, and now it’s as black as a moonless midnight in here. And it’s quiet, very quiet. I like that.
    It’s been a long day. This is the first motel room I’ve checked into by myself. I stood at the counter while the clerk processed my credit card and prepared my key envelope and felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. Yet while this all seems very strange, I think I can sleep. Sleeping is one of my gifts. I’m consistently among the twenty-six percent of Americans who get enough sleep at night. But if I’m wide awake when Law and Order is over, I’ll take the Excedrin PM I brought along for emergencies.
    I ran into a problem on the drive to Tulsa today. I’m surprised the potential for it eluded me while I planned.
    The problem? Hours to think. I about panicked. My diversion was gone: You cannot watch television while driving. But then I remembered I have satellite radio with two or three thousand talk radio channels. I’ve paid for it all these months without using it.
    Before I turned on the radio, I had been thinking about the time Tom and I visited Mom and Dad in Broken Arrow and went into Tulsa to spend an afternoon walking through the galleries of the Gilcrease Museum. There was a sculpture there that very nearly mesmerized me. Each time Tom and I became separated, he found me standing in front of it.
    “It’s captivating, don’t you think, Tom?” I said the first time he found me there. It became our designated meeting place.
    I’ve laid out clothes for tomorrow, even ironed the skirt. I changed it up a bit—white skirt, brown sweater set, and brown slides. I don’t want to flip-flop or freeze my way through the museum. I’ve stayed an extra day in Tulsa to find my bronze sculpture and see if it’s as lovely as I remember.
    August 10
    I made it to the museum by eleven. For me, that was pretty good.
    I picked out a painting for Tom: Morning in Aspen Grove. He would have loved it, and I would have spent as much time as he would allow searching through prints trying to find it for him.
    I found a painting for me too: Homer’s Watching the Breakers. Two women stand at the edge of the sea watching the waves break on the boulders near their