Circle of Grace Read online

  She did, however, feel an overwhelming sense of loneliness.

  No, there was no one to call. Not a single friend or lover, no husband or parent or child, no one who might help her bear this moment of crisis.

  How had her life come to this?

  Grace’s heart knew the answer even as her mind formulated the question. In the far reaches of her memory, she could hear the echo of a door slamming and bolts sliding into place—the clang of a vault being locked after the robbers had already come and gone. How absurd, to guard an empty soul with such tenacity. And yet she knew no other way to survive, to keep at bay the onslaughts of life’s inevitable pain.

  It hadn’t always been this way. She’d once had friends, had once been in love, had once harbored wistful dreams of the kind of life other people seemed to live. She had trusted, had laughed, had opened her heart. But that had been a long time ago.

  It had been more than twenty years since Grace Benedict had been in love, and then the fires of passion had brought not warmth and comfort but a raging conflagration that left her scarred and terrified of getting close enough to be burned a second time. On a few occasions in the past she had met someone nice and determined to try once more, only to shy away after the first date or the first kiss.

  But she had had a best friend. Jet. Evelyn Jetterly.

  They had met in the library, liked each other, and began meeting for coffee to discuss books. Gradually their intellectual companionship ripened into something more personal, the kind of friendship and belonging Grace hadn’t known since college. For almost ten years they laughed together, cried together, told each other everything—almost. The two of them were closer than sisters, and Grace was happy.

  Until Jet, too, was snatched out of her life.

  Grace could still feel the frail bones of Jet’s hand gripping hers, see the skeletal face with its wide eyes and dry, cracked lips. In Jet’s case it was cervical cancer, and it took her so quickly that neither of them had time to adjust. She was just…gone.

  Grace tried in vain to push Jet’s dying image out of her mind. She didn’t want to remember her friend that way, but the picture stayed with her. Now it was her turn, and there would be no one sitting by her bedside, holding her hand, when she passed.

  How long had it been, she wondered, since she had gazed at another human face across a dinner table? Months? Years? Sometimes, in the shaded picnic area under the trees beside the library, she shared a brown-bag lunch with the part-time library assistant, Marge. But that hardly counted as socializing. Marge talked nonstop about the weather or quitting smoking or her current diet or her teenage kids, and she rarely let Grace get a word in edgewise. Not that it mattered. Grace never revealed anything personal about her own life anyway, and Marge never seemed to notice—or care—that their conversations were one-sided.

  As she looked back over the years since Jet’s death, Grace was hard pressed to account for how she had spent her time. She worked, took drives up into the mountains, watched TV, read four or five books a week. On weekends she went to bargain matinees and sat alone in the darkened movie theater, eating Wal-Mart popcorn she brought in a plastic bag from home. Sometimes she’d walk through the mall and window-shop. Have coffee at the food court. Chat with people she knew by sight but not by name.

  Now Dr. Sangi had asked the question, and Grace had been forced to face the answer. There was no one to call. She could vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, and no one would know she was missing until someone called the city to complain that their local branch library hadn’t been open for a week.

  Grace pulled into the gravel driveway beside her house, got out of the car, and crunched across the rocks to retrieve the mail. The late-afternoon sky was a glorious blue, and in the distance beyond the housetops she could see the peaks of mountains touched by the western sun. Gray and green and purple, projecting up like—

  Like breasts, her mind interjected without warning. Like firm, young, healthy, noncancerous breasts.

  Grace turned her eyes from the view and busied herself with emptying the mailbox. Bills. Always bills. A second notice from Carolina Power. A bank statement that, she knew without looking, would not show a sufficient balance to cover all she owed. And a credit card. A brand-new Visa, stamped with her name.

  When had she applied for that? She couldn’t remember, and couldn’t believe anyone would actually issue a credit card to someone who made less than $25,000 a year—every dime of which went to rent, food, auto repair, and other necessities of life.

  For years she had lived from paycheck to paycheck, always feeling the hot breath of poverty on the back of her neck, always worried that the money wouldn’t stretch through the month. Once in a great while, when she had little extra in her purse, she would stop along the roadside and give a dollar or two to one of the homeless folks who spent their days under the bridges and their nights in the local shelters.

  She understood, and didn’t fault them for their plight. It would only take a month—two at most—to put someone like Grace herself on the streets. A layoff. A downsizing. An illness…

  She shook her head and pushed the unwelcome reality out of her mind. She always told herself it didn’t pay to dwell on the what-ifs. And now the biggest what-if of all had come to call—not just to visit, but to take up residence with her in her shabby, cramped little house.

  She gazed, disbelieving, at the Visa card, shoved it back into the envelope, and climbed the two broken concrete steps to the front door.

  The day had been warm, but inside, the house was dark and chilly. Grace turned on a couple of lamps, then went into the kitchen, dumped the mail on the counter, and opened the refrigerator. Half a loaf of wheat bread, a couple of eggs, a third of a quart of milk nearly a week past its prime. A bag of salad greens, brown and slimy around the edges.

  She opened the cabinet above her head and took down a can of cream of broccoli soup—the cheap generic kind, a store brand. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she slammed the can down on the countertop. Ridiculous. Less than six hours ago she had been diagnosed with cancer, and here she was, crying because she couldn’t afford real soup!

  “Damn,” she muttered to the empty house. “Just once, I wish—I wish—”

  What did she wish? That she could have things nice. A house with freshly painted walls and a wallpaper border. Furniture that wasn’t sagging and scarred. A real dinner in an upscale restaurant, with flowers on the table and candles and white linen.

  Grace emptied the soup into a saucepan, added some of the milk, which smelled all right despite its expiration date, and put two slices of bread in the toaster. When the meager meal was ready, she took it to the kitchen table and sat down with the rest of the mail.

  Bills, unopened, went into one pile. She’d deal with them later. The bank statement she set aside to go over after dinner. The usual assortment of catalogues and advertising flyers went straight into the trash can. And there, on the bottom of the stack, lay a padded manila envelope.

  Grace pushed the soup bowl aside and picked up the envelope. The return address was from Arlington, Virginia. The handwriting seemed vaguely familiar, but it had been so long. More than a year, she thought. Or was it two?

  She wiped the buttery knife on a paper napkin, slit open the envelope, and removed the contents. A small bound book, ragged and faded, its spine broken and its corners bent. On the front, stamped into the green leather, a barely visible image of a park scene—a bench, a fountain, a lamppost.

  The circle journal had made its way back to her again.

  Grace finished her lukewarm soup and sat fingering the journal as darkness gathered outside the kitchen window. She glanced into the glass, and a reflection stared back at her. An ordinary-looking middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair, badly cut, and lines of weariness fanning out around her eyes and mouth. Who was this woman? Not the person she imagined herself to be. Certainly not the girl she once had been—so sure of everything, so full of hope and dreams.
/>
  “Promise that we won’t lose touch,” she heard Tess Riley’s voice echo in her memory.

  And her own girlish response, full of feeling and purpose: “And promise that whatever happens, we’ll always be honest with each other.”

  So much for good intentions.

  She shoved the book aside as bitter tears stung her eyes. She didn’t want to read what was in it, didn’t want the reminders it carried of the life that could have been. Didn’t want to resurrect that sense of warmth and belonging, those feelings she would never know again.

  Yet the memories persisted. Even without reading the words or letting her eyes linger on the familiar handwriting that filled its pages, the journal called her back. Back to the person she had been thirty years ago. Back to the friends she had promised to be faithful to.

  And so, as night fell in the mountains and the lamp above the kitchen table spilled a yellow pool of light onto the pages, Grace Benedict took the circle journal in her hands and let herself remember.

  -2-

  PILATE’S QUESTION

  Fall Semester

  Freshman Year

  “W hat is truth?” Professor Alberta Wall intoned in her intense, gravelly voice. “That is the question before us, a question that has baffled philosophers and theologians for millennia.”

  She gazed around the classroom, frowning, her eyes squinting behind round little wire-rimmed glasses. “So.” She pushed the glasses back up her nose with a bony forefinger. “You will be answering this question—or attempting to do so. But never fear, you will not be alone in your frantic groping for coherent thought. We will be doing this as a team assignment.”

  Grace glanced surreptitiously around the classroom. A team assignment. Lovely. None of the girls in her dorm, none of the people she hung out with, were in Dr. Wall’s Intro to Philosophy course. Grace knew some of the students by name and had laughed and joked with them over the professor’s eccentric habits—like erasing the blackboard with the palm of her hand and then rubbing her nose. But who would she pick to do a class project? She didn’t really know any of them well enough to decide.

  Grace hadn’t really wanted to come to UNCA in the first place. She was a small-town girl better suited for a small campus. She’d have been perfectly happy living at home and commuting to the local community college. But her mother had insisted.

  “College is the experience of a lifetime,” Mama had repeated for the hundredth time. “The university will be good for you. You’ll have a wonderful time, trust me. Studying, learning, living in a dorm with other girls your age. College campuses are—I don’t know. Magical.”

  Mama’s tone when she said this was wistful, euphoric. Grace heard in her voice the echo of nostalgic longing, a reverberation of long-dead dreams and wishes unfulfilled. And, perhaps for the first time in her life, Grace wondered if her mother might have had more in mind for herself than living in the country, being married, and raising a child.

  But she hadn’t asked.

  Grace had never been particularly close to her mother. From birth, practically, she had been a daddy’s girl. Mama always seemed remote and distant, an island barely visible on the far horizon. Daddy, on the other hand, was the ground she walked on, the sun that warmed her. He had a charming smile and an outgoing personality and a quick wit that made everyone laugh. He wasn’t handsome, at least not by the conventional standard of movie-star good looks. He had a round, boyish face, thinning sand-colored hair, and a dimple in his chin, and when Grace tried to look at him objectively, he reminded her a little of a golden retriever puppy. But even in that he was utterly irresistible. Adorable, clownish, a tad clumsy, and absolutely endearing.

  Oddly enough, only her mother seemed immune to her father’s charms. Where Daddy was loose and free and easygoing, Mama held herself tight and standoffish, as if she feared that the least bit of levity might shake her atoms loose and she’d fly apart completely. Daddy drew his energy from others, like a direct transfusion, while Mama retreated into her books and endured with grim resignation the company of Daddy’s enthusiastic friends.

  As a child, whenever Grace had thought about growing up and getting married, Daddy was the kind of man she envisioned falling in love with. She couldn’t for the life of her understand her mother’s aloofness, and when Mama spoke about the “grand adventure” of going off to college, Grace had gotten the distinct impression that Mama herself would love nothing more than to escape into the academic world and never come out again.

  Maybe for Mama, the adventure of intellectual exploration would have been enough to satisfy. But it wasn’t enough for Grace. She liked her classes, for the most part, liked the girls in her dorm. They stayed up late, talking and laughing and pretending to study, but there was nobody Grace really connected with yet. She supposed it would just take time.

  The main problem was that Grace’s friends in high school had mostly been people she had grown up with since kindergarten. She didn’t feel like she had to prove herself with them in order to be accepted. She had known where she fit. Now, at college, she was having to start all over again, and it wasn’t as easy as Mama had led her to believe.

  Grace forced her mind back to the present. The professor was talking again.

  “All right,” she said, “how many of you have ever read Aristotle? Plato? Kierkegaard? Sartre?”

  No one moved. Professor Wall cleared her throat. “As I suspected. OK, let’s take it down a notch. How many of you have ever read the Bible?”

  Almost everyone raised a hand, but most of the students looked uncomfortable and tentative, as if afraid Wall might call on them to produce a sermon on the spot.

  “Yes, well. A fascinating collection of myths.” Dr. Wall quirked one eyebrow.

  Grace jerked her head up. She wasn’t particularly religious, but she had been born and brought up in the South, squarely on the brass-hard buckle of the Bible Belt, and she had never—never—heard anyone refer to the Good Book as a “collection of myths.” People swore on the Bible in court, swore by it in the streets, quoted it from the political stump, wrote their wedding dates and babies’ names in the front. Some even dusted it off and carried it to church on Sunday. Rarely did anyone live by its teachings, but if they questioned its authority, they kept their heresies to themselves.

  And no one in the South ever called it “myth.”

  Clearly, Dr. Alberta Wall was not from the South.

  If anyone else noticed her faux pas, however, no one spoke up, and the professor went on.

  “Perhaps this story will seem more relevant to you than Aristotle or Plato.” She picked up a battered black book from the desk and thumbed through it. “Anyone ever hear of Pontius Pilate?”

  A few hands went up, and one pimply-faced boy in the second row responded. “He was the, uh, the governor or judge or something—the one who sentenced Jesus.” The boy ducked his head. “I think.”

  “Right. The story goes that when Jesus stood trial, his judge Pontius Pilate raised a rather significant question. Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’”

  She snapped the book shut and dropped it on the desk with a resounding wham. All heads jerked to attention, and someone in the back let out a nervous laugh.

  “What is truth?” the professor repeated, narrowing her eyes and looking around. “Pilate asked the question, but Jesus didn’t answer. And still the question resounds through centuries of philosophical debate.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she articulated each word: “What—is—truth?”

  She held up a typed list, then walked over to the wall and thumbtacked the paper to the bulletin board next to the door. “That’s your assignment between now and next Tuesday,” she said with her back still turned. “I’ve divided you into groups of four—and, no, Mr. Jacobs, you cannot be in a group with Miss Summers.”

  Everyone tittered. The budding romance between Cal Jacobs and Evelyn Summers had quickly become the stuff of legend around campus. Grace had even seen them making out in the back
row when Dr. Wall turned her back to write on the blackboard. Apparently Dr. Wall had seen it too—or had a mole in the class.

  “In fact, I’ve deliberately grouped you with people you most likely will not know,” she continued, facing the students once more. “Philosophy is born out of a divergence of opinion, not out of agreement. For the next few days, you will work together with others in your group, and you will come up with an answer to Pilate’s question. Beginning next Tuesday, each group will have ten minutes to report its process to the class.”

  Someone waved a hand in the far corner of the classroom. “You want us to answer a question Jesus couldn’t answer?”

  “Exactly.” Dr. Wall gave a devious little smile. “It shouldn’t be that hard—there are four of you, and only one of him.”

  A nerdy-looking girl in the front row frowned down at her notebook. “Next Tuesday’s supposed to be the midterm exam.”

  Professor Wall crossed her arms and produced that same wily smile. “This is your midterm exam. It’s worth twenty-five percent of your grade. So be serious about it.”

  Amid a general buzz of disbelief, she picked up her briefcase, stuffed the Bible inside, and walked out the door.

  At a rectangular table in the conference room of the library, Grace sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed on the scarred wooden tabletop. Someone had scratched Pete loves Ginger into the varnish.

  Around the table sat three other students from Dr. Wall’s class. By the looks of them, all were definite Gingers—girls who could inspire vandalism as a declaration of love.