Circle of Grace Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue The Promise

  Part 1 Grace

  1 The Persistence of Memory

  2 Pilate’s Question

  3 The Dump

  4 The Storm

  5 The Morning After

  6 Unraveling

  7 Transformations

  8 Shadow of Doubt

  9 The Face of Truth

  10 Lovey’s Challenge

  11 In Touch with Yesterday

  12 Second Thoughts

  13 Michael’s Gift

  14 Web of Deceit

  Part 2 Lovey

  15 The Invitation

  16 The Cheerleader

  17 Lifeline

  18 The Thing at the Bottom of the Box

  19 In Another Life

  20 Where the Heart Is

  Part 3 Liz

  21 Grace’s Gift

  22 Rebel Without a Cause

  23 A Meeting of Minds

  24 Tim’s Secret

  25 Lies, Betrayals, and Unclaimed Baggage

  Part 4 Tess

  26 Invisible Creator

  27 Rachel’s Wilderness

  28 The Birth of C. J. Kenning

  29 The Chosen Child

  30 The Best Prize of All

  Part 5 The Circle

  31 Touchdown

  32 Table for Five

  33 Shrinking Big Bo

  34 In the Grotto

  35 The Confessional

  36 Gifts and Graces

  37 Closing the Circle

  38 On a Clear Day

  39 Pilate’s Answer

  40 Final Forgiveness

  Epilogue The Last Good-Bye

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Also by Penelope J. Stokes

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With grateful appreciation to:

  My agent, Claudia Cross,

  My editor, Michelle Rapkin,

  and

  My own dear Circle of Grace—

  Cindy, Kay, and Kirstin.

  You have challenged my preconceived notions, walked with me through the dark night of the soul, opened my heart to new hope, and inspired this novel.

  Good friends and noble women all,

  Thank you.

  PROLOGUE

  THE PROMISE

  Asheville, North Carolina

  Thirty years ago

  In a dim-lit corner of Kelso’s Restaurant, four young women sat around a large circular table littered with the remains of dinner, half-filled coffee cups, and a couple of empty wine bottles. Diplomas in cardboard folders were propped open against one of the bottles, and black graduation gowns lay haphazardly across the back of an empty chair. The animated laughter and conversation from the table drew narrow-eyed glares from surrounding patrons.

  “Ladies,” the waiter interrupted with a half-smile. “Forgive the intrusion.” He produced a bottle of inexpensive champagne and a silver-plated bucket from behind his back as if by sleight-of-hand. “Compliments of the manager, with our congratulations.”

  The cork released with a pop, three of the women cheered, and the waiter vanished.

  A long-limbed, tanned blonde in a flowered sundress rose to her feet. “A toast!” she said, raising a glass.

  “Come on, Lovey, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

  The blonde looked down her nose. “Don’t be a party pooper, Grace. I know you don’t normally drink, but you’ve lived with the three of us for almost four years now. I’d think by now you’d learned to whoop it up a little.” She glanced at the other two. “Liz? Tess? Help me out here.”

  Liz and Tess exchanged a glance. “It is our graduation,” Tess said.

  “Yeah,” Liz agreed, louder. “And given the state of the world, we might as well enjoy ourselves while we have the chance. Kennedy’s dead. King’s dead. Nixon’s in the White House. We could all be blown to kingdom come before our first reunion.”

  “On that cheerful note—” Lovey made a face in Liz’s direction. “Can we forget the politics just for tonight? Now, how about that toast?”

  Grace relented with a shrug and a half-smile. “All right, all right.” She eyed the champagne bottle. “Maybe just a little.”

  They stood and raised their glasses. “To all of us,” Lovey said, her hand a bit unsteady as she lifted the bubbling flute. “First, to Liz Chandler, a woman destined to change the world.”

  Liz grinned and nodded. “For the better, I hope. It sure needs changing.”

  Lovey turned toward Tess. “And to Tess Riley, future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

  Tess laughed. “Well, maybe just a puny little Pulitzer.”

  Liz pointed her champagne flute in Tess’s direction. “Don’t forget us when you’re famous.”

  “Last, but not least, to Grace Benedict,” Lovey went on. “Our resident Truth Teller. The one who has kept us honest. You’ve shown us the way—even when we haven’t followed it.”

  “Wait. We’re not done yet,” Liz interrupted. “To Amanda Love. Beauty queen. Cheerleader. Most Likely to Succeed—”

  “Cut it out, Liz.” Lovey ducked her head.

  “And the best friend anyone could have,” Liz finished.

  Lovey smiled. “Thank you.” Her glass sparkled in the light of the candle. “To us. To friendship. To the future.”

  They clinked glasses, drank to one another, and resumed their seats around the table. Tess reached into her bag and pulled out a small square package wrapped in gold paper. “I have a present for all of us.”

  “We said no gifts,” they protested in unison.

  “This is different.” Tess handed the gift to Grace. “You do the honors.”

  “Are you sure?” Grace looked around the table.

  “Open it,” Lovey insisted.

  Grace pulled the ribbon off the corners and carefully slit the paper at the back.

  Liz rolled her eyes. “For pity’s sake, Grace. We’re not keeping the paper for posterity.”

  “You don’t know.” Grace pulled a face and adopted her drama-queen voice. “This could be a historic occasion. This paper could be worth money someday, as a memento of our last night together. Why, at auction it could—”

  “Just open it.”

  At last she got the wrapping off, opened the box, and held the gift up for all to see. It was a small leather-bound book, dark green, with a line drawing in gold on the front—a small park bench flanked by a lamppost and a bubbling fountain. “It’s a journal.”

  “It’s a circle journal,” Tess corrected. “We’re all going different directions now that graduation’s over. I wanted us to have a way to stay in touch. Everybody writes in it, you see, about what’s going on in their lives, and then we send it around the circle so we can all read what the others have written. It becomes an ongoing record of our lives, and keeps us connected.”

  Silence fell over the group, as if Tess’s words had brought to the surface what all of them were thinking. For nearly four years they had lived together, sharing each other’s tragedies and victories. They had fought and made up, pulled all-nighters, read each other’s term papers, evaluated each other’s boyfriends. Together they had grown from insecure teenage girls to independent young women.

  Four golden years. And now it was over.

  “I want us to promise,” Tess said, “that we’ll all write in the journal and send it on. Promise that we won’t lose touch.”

  “And promise that no matter what happens,” Grace added, “we’ll always be honest with each other. That we’ll always be best friends.”

  Lovey refilled their glasses from the last of the bottle the waiter had
brought. “Friendship like ours comes once in a lifetime,” she said. “We’ll never lose it.”

  Again they raised their glasses to each other, to the bond that held them together.

  And this time Grace didn’t sip at the golden bubbles. She drank the champagne down, right to the bottom of the glass.

  GRACE

  Whatever Truth may be, she does not dwell in dreams, in fabrications of a longing heart or burning fables from a fevered mind.

  What has been is a mist upon the mountains. What might have been swirls just beyond our reach, mirage within the mist.

  What is and what is yet to come may bruise our souls, but holding to the grand illusion shatters us beyond all hope of healing.

  -1-

  THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

  Present Day

  Grace Benedict was fifty-two years old, and she still hated going to the doctor. Avoided it at all costs. But this time she had no choice. Two weeks ago a long-overdue mammogram had revealed a suspicious spot on her right breast. Probably nothing, the doctor assured her. Most likely just a cyst; women got them all the time. After a needle biopsy and a battery of other tests, they had called her back in to discuss the results.

  No, they couldn’t talk about it on the telephone, the nurse had said. Better for her to come in and see the doctor personally. They scheduled the appointment for her lunch hour, promising it wouldn’t take more than thirty minutes.

  “Have a seat, Mrs. Benedict,” said the young woman behind the glass-paneled counter. “The doctor will be with you shortly.”

  Not Mrs., Grace thought. But she didn’t bother to correct the receptionist. Instead, she left the counter and parked herself in a cracked vinyl chair in the corner of the waiting room. To her right, a bubbling aquarium, its back wall lined with a garish shade of blue, housed several brightly colored tropical fish.

  Grace picked up a dated, dog-eared copy of U.S. News from the coffee table and tried to ignore the whining child a few seats away. ELECTION RESULTS STILL IN DOUBT, the cover proclaimed, the words superimposed over photographs of George W. Bush and Al Gore. And in smaller letters underneath: What went wrong in Florida?

  Grace tossed the old magazine back onto the table, but her eyes continued to fix on the words: What went wrong?

  She pondered the question—one that had haunted her for nearly three decades. And there was only one answer, which was no answer at all: Everything.

  Thirty years ago, she could never have envisioned the future that awaited her. A future riddled with mistakes and heartbreak and—

  Well, better not to think about that.

  She shifted in her chair and watched out of the corner of her eye as the frazzled young mother tried in vain to comfort her daughter. The little girl, who was perhaps five or six years old, curled up on her mother’s lap and whimpered fretfully. “It’ll be all right,” the mother shushed, pushing back a damp strand of hair from her daughter’s forehead. “The doctor will give you some medicine to make it all better.”

  Grace bit her lip and averted her eyes. If only there were such a medication, something that would “make it all better.” But no wonder drug could fix a life, and even if such a miracle had existed, she wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

  A nurse wearing pink scrubs with Beatrix Potter bunnies printed on them came to the door with a clipboard and looked around the waiting room. “Mrs. Bennett?”

  “Benedict,” Grace corrected, then turned to the young mother. “Unless your name is Bennett?”

  The woman shook her head. “Whitlock,” she said.

  Grace got up and went toward the nurse. “I guess you must mean me, then. Grace Benedict.” She forced a smile. “Like the traitor.”

  “Whatever.” The nurse looked at her blankly and shrugged. “Follow me.”

  Grace followed to Examining Room 3. “Have a seat,” the nurse said. “The doctor will—”

  “I know. The doctor will be with me shortly.”

  The second attempt at humor fell as flat as the first. The nurse shoved the clipboard into a plastic holder on the wall and pulled the door closed.

  Almost as soon as the door clicked shut, a soft knock sounded. The doorknob turned, and a man entered. He was small and dark, with dense, close-cropped black hair and deep-set eyes. The name Sangi was embroidered in red over the pocket of his white lab coat. Grace had never seen him before, but a lot of physicians served the clinic, and it wasn’t unusual to get a different one every time.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Benedict,” he said, his words clipped and precise. “I am Dr. Butahali Sangi.” He flipped through her chart. “We have your test results.”

  “Grace. Please call me Grace.”

  He smiled. “Grace, then. Kindly sit, if you will, upon the table.”

  Grace complied, scooting onto the high examining table. The protective paper made a crinkling sound under her thighs.

  Dr. Sangi eased down onto a rolling stool and drew up close. For a moment or two he said nothing, concentrating instead upon reading the records in front of him. At last he raised his eyes—large, dark, liquid eyes that reminded Grace of some vulnerable little forest creature.

  “You recently had a mammogram, that is correct? February 15th?”

  Grace nodded. “Yes.” Something in her stomach fluttered, a caged bird beating the bars. “Is anything wrong?”

  Sangi gazed at her for a full minute. “There is no easy way to tell such news.” He shook his head.

  She exhaled heavily. “The lump. It wasn’t just a cyst.”

  The doctor laid the medical chart aside and touched her wrist with squared-off brown fingers. “There is no one I should call, perhaps? A husband? A friend?”

  The contact was brief, gentle, but Grace felt as if she had been brushed by a live electrical wire. “No one.” She drew in a breath and raised her head. “Just give it to me straight, Doctor. All of it.”

  “As you wish.” He pulled back and ran his hand through his hair, then retrieved the chart and read: “You have what we believe to be a stage IV metastatic tumor with intrusion into the chest wall and intercostal muscles. We suspect significant lymph node involvement as well, but cannot know for certain until surgery is accomplished.”

  Grace’s hand went instinctively, protectively, to her chest. She looked down at her fingers cupping her breast, and an image rose to her mind—a dark and menacing squid, its body lodged inside her, its inky tentacles spreading out to invade her torso, slithering toward her internal organs. She shuddered.

  Dr. Sangi waited while she composed herself.

  “Stage IV,” she said at last. “How high do the stages go?”

  “Four.”

  “What about treatment?”

  “I have already taken the liberty of speaking with a specialist. We can indeed attempt to remove the major portion of the tumor,” he said. “At this stage it is unlikely, however, that surgery would be successful in a total removal of the cancerous cells. There are additional options. Intensive chemotherapy. Radiation, perhaps. Bone marrow or stem cell transplants.”

  The squid tightened its grasp, and for a moment Grace felt as if her lungs had collapsed. “But you can cure me,” she said when she could breathe again.

  “In such cases as yours we do not speak of cure,” Sangi responded with a sigh. “We speak of containment. We speak of time gained.”

  “How much time?”

  “You wished me to be direct,” Dr. Sangi said. At Grace’s nod, he went on. “At best, a year. Perhaps two. Perhaps not so much. We cannot know for certain until more tests are done.” He turned his hands palm upward in a gesture of surrender. Grace noticed that although the tops of his hands were brown, his palms were pale pink. For a moment she felt as if she had glimpsed some private part of him, and she flushed with embarrassment.

  “And what would that year—if I had a year—involve?”

  “Radical chemotherapy, certainly. If we could shrink the tumor a bit, then surgery. Additional chemo aft
erward. As well as the other options I mentioned.”

  “A mastectomy, months of chemo and radiation, in and out of the hospital,” Grace translated. She had seen it before. She knew the symptoms all too well. “Constant nausea. Hair loss. Depleted energy. And no guarantees.”

  “I fear you are correct.” Sangi nodded.

  “And if I elect to have no treatment?”

  The physician’s face went blank. “I beg your pardon?”

  “If I walk out of here and don’t treat this—no surgery, no chemo, no radiation. How long would I have then?”

  A look of comprehension sparked in his eyes, an expression akin to respect. “It is impossible to determine. A few months, perhaps less.”

  “A few months without pain, without being turned into a voodoo doll, cut and poked and prodded and filled with drugs.”

  The doctor nodded. “You would likely have little pain until the very end. As a physician, certainly, I could not recommend—”

  “Of course you couldn’t.” Grace slid down from the examining table and put a hand on Dr. Sangi’s shoulder. “Thank you for your candor, Doctor. I appreciate it more than you know.”

  “You are indeed welcome.” He smiled then, showing even white teeth against dark skin.

  “I need a little time to think,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

  “Soon,” the doctor warned. “We have no time to waste.”

  Somehow Grace managed to get through the rest of the day on autopilot—sorting through the return bin, shelving, cataloguing new books that had just come in—without thought or intention. No one at the library knew she had skipped lunch to go to the clinic. No one had a clue that anything might be wrong. Grace Benedict, the faithful stereotype, the unobtrusive librarian gliding through the stacks in silence, like an apparition.

  But driving home at five-fifteen, Grace couldn’t keep her mind from spiraling around the question Dr. Sangi had asked: “Is there no one I should call?”

  Curiously, she felt no sense of imminent loss at the news that she was dying. On that count, she floated above the scene like the soul of a patient hovering between this world and the next, watching it all with a dispassionate eye. For the first time in years, she experienced a clarity of vision and an infusion of strength, a flood of adrenaline to the veins and endorphins to the brain. She knew without question that she would not submit to the “procedures” Dr. Sangi had described.