Save the Date(45)

I looked over at it, at the official-looking ribbon still stretched across the entrance. “Are we allowed?”

Danny just gave me a smile. “Follow me.” He started across the marble lobby toward the exhibit. “Now,” he said, lowering his voice as we passed a guard in a museum blazer who seemed more interested in his phone than in paying attention to what was happening to the priceless art around him. “What did I always tell you about sneaking into places?”

“Frown and walk fast,” I said automatically.

“Exactly.” We picked up our pace, and with a great deal of authority, Danny walked right up to the rope and lifted it for me to duck under, then followed behind.

I took a few steps into the gallery, letting my eyes adjust—it was a little darker in here than in the sun-filled lobby, lights positioned at intervals and shining on the artwork. Danny had walked ahead to where the exhibit started, and I hurried to catch up with him.

“Look,” he said quietly to me, and I turned to face the wall in front of me, feeling my breath catch in my throat. Covering the whole wall, much more than life-size, was a picture of the Grants. It was the most famous picture of the fictional family, the one that still ran as the strip’s header, from when my oldest siblings were teenagers and I was six. It was a family portrait gone wrong—my character tipping nearly upside down over Donny’s arm while Lindsay shoved A.J., and Mark secretly fed cookies to Waffles. Geoff, the character based on my dad, was the only one who didn’t seem to notice the chaos around him and was smiling broadly at the camera.

MEET THE GRANTS, read the sign on the wall, THE FAMILY YOU NEVER HAD.

“Wow,” I said, looking around. There was text on the wall—going through the history of the strip, how my mom had started it when she was still working as a librarian, drawing pictures to entertain toddlers Danny and Linnie. How it had grown in popularity over the years, finding a global readership.

I walked farther into the gallery, looking around, trying to take it all in, even though I knew it wasn’t possible on a first viewing. The whole thing was overwhelming. Because on every wall, there we all were. The exhibit looked like it was presented in chronological order, starting with my mom’s early sketches, the first comics, and then the strip throughout the years, interspersed with other exhibits showing the rise of GCS—the magazine profiles and mentions in pop culture, pictures from late-night hosts’ monologues, the Tshirts and lunch boxes and stuffed Waffles toys, the stills from the very short-lived Grant Central Station cartoon, which had only ever aired in Canada.

As I looked around, at the finished art next to my mom’s concept sketches, at the characters that never quite took off, at the cover of Time with the fictional Grants on it, I felt myself start to breathe easier for the first time all day.

Because looking at these strips, I was home. This was the very best of us, up on the walls of this gallery. The strip, with its four panels and the versions of us my mother had conjured, was the most familiar sight in the world to me. I was back—back in our kitchen, all of us still at home, in the chaos and laughter and busyness that had always been part of our lives when we were all together.

Siobhan had asked me once if it was weird, seeing things that had happened to me in my life translated and fictionalized and presented to strangers for entertainment while they ate their cereal. But Cassie Grant was a character millions of readers had known about before I could even talk, much less understand what a newspaper comic was. Maybe because I’d never known a world without it, it had never seemed strange to me.

We turned the corner and saw a group of comics practically taking over a whole wall, with the reproduced image of Donny, Lindsay, and A.J. climbing a street sign, Donny with a screwdriver clenched between his teeth and A.J. doing a very poor job of being a lookout. SIGN OF CHANGE was printed on the wall above a description of the comics.

“Whoa,” Danny said, looking at the wall of strips depicting highlights of the story that had gone on for nearly two months. “I . . . didn’t realize they’d be featuring these,” he said, sounding a little nervous.

I smiled. “I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has run out by now.”

Hanging next to the comics were the newspaper articles from the Sentinel that covered the hearings and court proceedings with breathless intensity, next to write-ups from Time, Newsweek, and the Times. I turned to Danny to tell him that I’d actually been on Grant Avenue that afternoon, but he’d already wandered away, and I hurried to catch up with him.

“That’s when she was having trouble with Dad’s nose,” Danny said as I joined him, pointing to a comic from when I was in middle school and Cassie Grant had much better hair than I’d had in real life. I looked closer at it and laughed—sure enough, my dad’s nose was completely out of proportion to the rest of him. Danny shrugged as he moved down the gallery, passing a picture of the Eisner Awards, my mother smiling as Mort Walker handed it to her and Bill Amend looked on. “I think she was mad at him for some reason and that’s why she did it.”

“She wouldn’t do that.”

Danny raised an eyebrow as I fell into step next to him. “Why do you think she gave Donny that bad perm when I was in college?”

“What did you do to deserve that?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”