Don’t Let Me Go(26)

“Isn’t this going a little too far?” Grace’s mom said. She sounded pissed.

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

“Don’t you? Look, I appreciate the fact that you’re letting Grace hang around. I do. Especially since I’m not paying you. You do know I’m not paying you, right?”

Rayleen didn’t answer. Just stood there looking stony, and Grace could tell that anything Rayleen said from this point on was going to be something she’d thought out very carefully first.

“But this is a little weird. This is too much. Because, she’s still my daughter. Not yours. You get that, right? I mean, I take a nap, and when I get up, you’ve decided to redesign her.”

A long silence. Stony. Grace was learning that, when Rayleen was mad, the madder she got, the quieter she got.

“Grace got her hair cut three days ago,” Rayleen said. “That’s one long-ass nap.”

A silence that made the little hairs stand up on the nape of Grace’s neck.

“OK. Look. I’m grateful. I’m grateful for…most of this. I am. Really. But for you to decide suddenly Grace should have short hair instead of long hair, like that’s yours to decide—”

Rayleen stopped her there. Cut her off.

“Is that how you think it was? Grace. Tell your mom how it was.”

“Oh. OK,” Grace said. “It was like this, Mom. The hairbrush was up on the dresser and I couldn’t reach it, and I sure wasn’t climbing up there after what happened the last time. You remember that, right? So my hair got so knotted and tangled up that Rayleen had to take me to the hair salon and ask her friend Bella to try to unknot it, but Bella said it was so bad that it would hurt like the devil to brush it out, and I’d lose a bunch of it, too. So then they said it was up to me, and they asked what did I want to do? And you know how much I hate it when I have knots and it pulls, only this was like a hundred times worse, so I said to cut it. Don’t you like it? Everybody else likes it.”

Grace waited through a long silence. While she waited, she watched her mom get smaller — not literally, but in a way — like she just kept taking up less and less room in the hall. But really it was the mad part of her that got small. Not the real part, the body part of her.

“It’s actually a nice cut,” Grace’s mom said.

Then she started to cry. Grace had only seen her mom cry two or three times before, so that was sort of upsetting.

“I’m sorry,” Grace’s mom said to Rayleen, through the crying, which by now was getting pretty big.

Then she took Grace’s hand and led her back down the hall, and Grace waved goodbye to Billy, and he waved back. Then Grace got led down the stairs to her own apartment, and while she was being led, her mom kept saying over and over again how she was sorry.

Well, at least I still get to spend tonight with my mom, Grace thought, even if she is crying. And sorry.

But Grace was mostly wrong about that. She didn’t end up spending much time with her mom at all.

? ? ?

Not an hour later, Grace was back at Rayleen’s door, knocking. She knocked lightly, so it wouldn’t sound like somebody who was mad.

Rayleen answered like she was expecting a tall person on the other side of the door. She had to look down before she saw Grace standing there.

“Can I come in?” Grace asked.

“Yeah. Sure you can. You OK?”

“I guess. Can I stay here tonight?”

“If it’s OK with your mom. What happened with your mom?”

“She’s loaded again.”

“Oh,” Rayleen said. “Sorry. Sure, you can stay here.”

A little later, when Rayleen was pulling out a blanket to make Grace a bed on the couch, she said, “That’s interesting, how you said your mom was loaded. You used to always say she was asleep.”

“Yeah. I got tired of that,” Grace said. “She’s loaded.”





Billy



“You don’t look very happy,” Billy said to her, the minute she walked through his door.

To further underscore her mood, she did not make a beeline for his special tap shoes. Just shook out her sad little umbrella and flopped on the couch.

“Unh,” Grace said.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“Why, Grace Ferguson. I never pegged you as a liar.”

“I’m not a liar! What a mean thing to say! Why would you even…Oh. Right. That. Yeah. I guess maybe there’s a little something up.”

He sat down beside her on the couch.

“Talk to me,” he said.

In a small and guilty way, he found himself grateful for the diversion. He’d expected her to come bounding through the door all ready to dance, forcing him to deliver bad news, in which case the only bucket of ice water to hit that childlike enthusiasm would have been him, and his neuroses.

It was raining. That was the problem. It was raining, and Billy was unwilling to risk letting her dance any place but the front balcony. The uncovered front balcony.

Maybe he would be lucky and it wouldn’t even come up.

Grace sighed theatrically. “It’s just this thing Mr. Lafferty said.”

Billy felt his small daily measure of peace slip away at the mention of that name.