Hadley & Grace(68)

Grace gives the thinnest smile, and for a long minute, they sit silent as the idea continues to take shape, growing larger and rounder until it fills the whole room and takes on a warm, dangerous glow that terrifyingly feels like hope.





45





HADLEY


Mattie sits on the bed, a towel wrapped around her head. Her face is drawn and her eyes swollen and red from her emotions. On her lap is her book, and though she is staring at it, she doesn’t appear to be reading.

Skipper sits on the other bed, looking at nothing, his eyes blank. All of this has been too much for him.

“Baby,” Hadley says to Mattie.

Mattie looks up, her sadness radiating across the room, unable to forgive herself for her role in last night’s events. A victim. Helpless. Hadley is too familiar with the feeling, and she prays her daughter isn’t destined to follow in her footsteps.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says, the words as pathetic as they sound, and Mattie looks back down at her book.

Hadley’s head throbs, like a grenade has blown up in her skull. Tentatively she touches her fingers to her scalp, surprised to find it still feels hard and not soft and mushy like a cantaloupe smashed open. She can’t believe she drank like that. Daggers of regret pierce her brain as she thinks of what might have happened had she and Grace not walked from the restaurant when they had. Then another stab of pain as she thinks about the gun and firing it.

Mattie will be better off with Grace. Skipper too. Grace will be a good example for Mattie. She’s tough and brave and would never let anything happen to them. Her heart hurts almost as much as her head.

She sits on the edge of the bed beside Skipper and puts her hand on his knee. “Champ, you okay?”

He turns slowly, his eyes so clear they are flat of depth. “I’m not going to live with my mom?” he says. Somehow he must have figured this out during the disjointed events and outbursts of last night.

Hadley shakes her head, concerned how he will take this latest disappointment from his mom. His whole life, Hadley has tried her best to protect him from Vanessa’s slights and unreliability, not promising him things unless she was certain of them and softening the blows by making excuses and telling lies. The way she explained him needing to go back to live with her was in baseball terms.

“You were the best pickup of my life,” she said the day after Vanessa called with the news that she wanted Skipper back. “A first-round draft pick rookie.”

“That was when I was a baby?” he asked.

“Yep, your rookie year, straight out of training camp. Your mom’s team lost their coach, so her team was suspended until they could find a new one, and I swooped in and signed you.”

He smiled.

“But,” she said, “there was this thing called a ‘contingency clause’ in your contract, and it said that, if your mom’s team got a new coach and the team was reinstated, she had the option to sign you back.”

“Contingency clause,” he repeated. Skipper likes certain words. He doesn’t always understand them, but his remarkable mind holds on to them.

“And that’s what happened,” Hadley went on. “Her team is back in business, and she needs her star player.”

She knew Skipper didn’t completely understand, but he accepted it. He knows players get traded all the time and that, even though sometimes they don’t like it, it’s not always up to them, and they don’t have a say in the matter.

But now he says, “That’s good. She’s my mom, but she’s not my family.” He doesn’t say it meanly but rather matter-of-factly, stating it in the straightforward way he has when he’s made his mind up about something.

He returns to looking at the wall, and Hadley pats his leg, then, with a heavy sigh, walks toward the door.

As she waits for the elevator to take her to the parking garage, she wonders how she got to this place in her life. She thinks about the gun in her hand and the feeling that came over her as she fired it, such raw rage it was as if she was possessed by it. She thinks of the man’s face when it went off: no longer cocky but rather shocked and then scared, his mouth open in panic as he dived to the ground to cower with his hands over his head.

The elevator dings, and the image shifts, and she imagines her aim true, his eyes wide as he looks down to see the hole in his chest. When he looks up, he is Frank, and she fires again, then again and again—bang. Bang, bang, bang, the shots ripping across his chest and slicing his body in two.

She blinks her eyes, her heart pounding, then steps onto the elevator and hits the button for the garage.





46





GRACE


Miles is eating, sort of. He sucks on his bottle and chews on the nipple at the same time, a halfhearted effort that’s making the process painfully slow. Grace tries not to be impatient, but it is impossible. Yes, he’s cute, but these sorts of things do not enamor her the way they do other moms, and it’s all she can do not to scream at him to finish already so they can get on with it.

She closes her eyes and focuses on her breathing to keep the sickness that still roils in her gut at bay. One foot in front of the other, her grandmother’s voice coaxes. Just keep moving forward, and eventually you get where you’re going.

The idea works in theory but has never actually worked in Grace’s life. One foot in front of the other has landed her in a heap of trouble more than once. She squeezes her eyes tighter, all her efforts concentrated on not throwing up.