The man was watching, and Grace knew why. Nevertheless, she put down her trowel and pulled off her gloves before she shoved the straw hat on her head and traipsed inside.
Her husband, William, turned away from the window.
"Doesn't do much good in here," he said. They were standing in the kitchen, where chalk-white walls looked lemon yellow in the last, strong light of afternoon.
Grace tugged at the hat's narrow brim, then lifted it off her head and returned it to the hook behind the door. "Hats constrict me," she said, jabbing at her flattened curls.
"With your fair skin, you've got to be more careful." William lifted two glasses from the cabinet.
She took his place beside the window. "Why careful? I've lived sixty summers in the sun-whatever fair was there is gone." She touched her forehead to the pane's warm glass.
"It's our ozone that's gone," he reminded her, pulling ice from the freezer. "This sun is different from the one when we were young."
When the phone rang, Grace tried not to smile at the welcomed interruption. She moved quickly, answering before the second ring.
"Hello."
"Hey, Mom, is Dad around? I've got some news."
It'd been a while since their son, Billy, moved to New Jersey. Now Grace motioned to William, her budding smile tilting toward resigned, then urgent. He set their drinks side by side on the counter, wiped his hand on khaki pants and took the phone.
Walking back to their bedroom, Grace rubbed her arms as if she felt a chill. Over the years Billy had called from faraway phone booths on deserted roads, from frenzied bars in college towns or from the police station a mile from home. The sequence was always the same. She and William would listen on separate phones. They'd take turns offering just the right amount of sympathy and advice until Billy, his guilty burden lifted, would assure them of his love and hang up.
Grace sank into her Queen Anne chair and looked across the room through the window and its interlude of fading sky. She picked up the phone. "I'm here," she said, waiting her turn. While father and son sought pleasant ground, her gaze shifted back across the room, from the window to the wall surrounding it. She took a small breath.
Hung with family photographs, the wall was a tradition, an ancestral memorial as real as any stone obelisk or marble slab. Her mother and her grandmother had had their memorial walls in their bedrooms, and they, too, had hung family photographs in a way that Grace had always believed would leave no doubt about who they were and who they could not be. She scanned the photographs and found the one of Billy sitting on a faded Santa's lap.
Pay attention, she told herself now. Billy had begun to talk. Her eyes narrowed. Surely he faltered, hemmed, and hawed, but no, his words were quick and lively. She may have let a cry slip out, but she would not remember. All she would remember was his "Lenny," "love" and "civil union."
Grace was struggling. Sunlight leaked from the room as she dropped the receiver in its cradle, gathered her knees tight against her chest and cowered in the corner of her chair. She'd been here before, curled in its palm, driving back those who came to claim her quiet dreams. She, a mother, not a student like she planned. She remembered Billy, three, and Betsy, 18 months, standing, staring, faces traced with tears her own had caused. Back then her episodes had been cathartic. Sobbing-shrieking if the children tried to touch-rocking, telling them to go away. Afterward she'd feel better, as if she'd gotten rid of something dangerous.
She glared back at Billy's photograph and began to cry. Though he wasn't watching, there was a presence. Hugging her knees tighter, rocking left to right, she looked at the photographs of Granny Carroll, Papa Myers and Great-Grandfather Myers.
She felt their shame. "Oh," she managed.
"He wanted to talk to you," William said, hesitating at the door, his arms outstretched, each hand pressing the frame as if it might collapse.
She looked up and saw his brows bunched with pleading. "No, what he wants is absolution." Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, she thought, recalling her own penance from the past: say one Hail Mary, three Our Fathers, and marry him, my child. "Can't he just BE, be one of those...those...homosexual people?" She swallowed, remembering how she hadn't made a scene when he came out. "Does he have to announce it? Does the whole world have to know?"
"It's the twenty-first century, Grace," William said.
"Tell that to the rest of North Carolina," she said.
"Maybe it's time someone did." He moved behind her, reaching over the back of the chair, cupping her shoulders in his hands-holding her still.
"He's asking too much-this is where I draw the line," she said.
She had been a tolerant mom. Accepting Betsy's decision to divorce and leave the church, Billy's seven years in college, his stint as a Jesus freak, and, finally, his refusal to seek normalizing therapy. She accepted it all with silent nods of a neutral face masking disappointment.
She shrugged from beneath her husband's hands.
"There are some things that are still not right." She pushed up out of the chair and faced him. "We come from good people, William, these people." She made a wide, sweeping gesture toward the royal-blue wall of ancestral reminders. "That's your daddy's daddy there-he risked his life so we could know our Southern heritage. And my Great-Granny Carroll-she came over with the high Irish immigrants and worked for some of the finest families in Charlotte. We may not be the wealthiest people in town, William Myers, but no one would deny our roots."
"It's not our roots that are in jeopardy here, Grace."
"This is just not the way it's supposed to be." Her words arrived from some place dark and small. "I disgust you," she said, searching his face for signs of retribution. What she found was pity. "Don't you look at me with that sanctimonious smirk. You can't tell me the idea of William sleeping with this...this...Lenny doesn't make your skin crawl. I'm just saying what you wouldn't dare." She knew her tone would dent his sane composure, but still she turned away-impatient with his goodness-to state her case before the jury framed and under glass.
"Billy wanting it doesn't make it right," she said, facing the wall. "What if I had done what I wanted? Forty years ago when I had the chance? Had the chance to study? To be somebody? What if I had chosen not to mind what they might say-or what they wouldn't? But of course, I did-I minded. Our babies. This house. The respectability of it all consumed whatever once invited me to run-that's right, run-run like hell to keep whatever little dreams I had alive."
William stood motionless.
"You listen," she said, her green eyes fierce and fixed on his. "Billy is an ungrateful boy. I cannot forgive him." She raised her voice above the roaring in her ears. "I'd rather he was dead-do you hear me-dead," she shouted, then realized there was no need-from the wall she sensed applause. "And to me-he is."
***
What does it mean to declare your firstborn dead? Grace met the next morning open for suggestions, open for signs of how to proceed. The day was clear, warm with promise, as she'd carried a flat of rust chrysanthemums outside. Now she sat cross-legged on the patio's cool concrete, jerking up clumps of coral impatiens from red clay dirt that gave without a fight. She flung the plants in a bucket where they lay dying, bound for compost; their spindly roots peeking from skirts of sod, their petals brilliant still. She blew a puff of air from the corner of her mouth. The morning's shade had vanished; she almost wished for her infernal hat.
Early September, and of course it was still hot. She looked around at the havoc she had caused. She probably pulled them up too soon, but Grace liked to enjoy chrysanthemums long before the first frost, and one didn't plant mums and impatiens in the same garden. That's what her mother would say.
The words relieved her of the guilt of bucketed blossoms, while bringing to mind the lush landscape of her younger years. Evolving from a row of blue hydrangeas, her mother's gardens had framed the house on Townsend Street with plants chosen more for hardiness than show. Late April's purple peonies heralded summer columbine and phlox, while asters marked the start of fall, and the dark-green foliage of glossy lenten rose claimed the breadth of winter. Her mother did not plant annuals. Their very nature-temporary and just for show-offended her.
But for Grace, it was the possibility of annuals that captured her imagination and prompted her to think about the lay of the land-not as it was, but as it might be. It mattered to Grace that she could alter her landscape with the flick of a wrist, a tug, a notion. It mattered.
***
Months passed: days and weeks lived without Billy. Birthday parties, barbecues, and Christmas-all took place that year without her son. What Grace could not imagine was how to forgive, much less forget, his betrayal. Thinking of him, her mind wound round itself like jasmine twisting on the garden fence. Though the lack of him became a subject never broached, not a day went by that she did not turn someone into him. She never spoke of it to William, or to garden club friends she'd known for 20 years. She liked to believe it was this silence, and not the faint chink of remorse, that made her sick. Tired at first, then weak. By August she took herself to bed, where she slept and let the summer end without her.
***
It was after the hummingbirds had deserted their feeders, leaving an inch of sugar water soiled with scraps of gnats and bees. Grace dreamed she and Billy were lost in the Nantahala Forest. He was three, plump and proud beside the girl she used to be. It was dusk, then dark, but they were not afraid. They slept, coiled, beside a creek bed piled with stones and in the morning woke to find each other grown. Overhead the sun was high, as one-by-one and one-by-one mother and son cleared the creek of stones the size of faces, then followed as its unrestricted water rushed toward home.
The sun she had dreamed warmed the sheets and Grace woke up. Lying with her face turned to the wall, she winced at the glare of dawn on glass. A hard blink helped her focus on Granny Carroll's moon-white pearls, on Papa's tidy mustache, and on the sepia-tinted photograph of Great-Grandfather Myers. Taken in 1864, his uniform looked larger than his 19 years. He held his rifle toward the camera, as if by handing it across the century, he might protect her from-from what? She didn't need protection. Then why was she afraid?
She stretched, and William, lying close beside her, touched her hand. "You cried out," he said.
"Look at Granddad Myers-nineteen and so defiant. Do you think he might have been afraid?"
"Nineteen is young."
"I was pregnant at nineteen."
She pulled herself to the edge of the bed. In the windowpane's reflection, surrounded by picture-perfect finery, she recognized the deadpan face as hers.
"When does an anchor become an albatross?" she asked.
"When you decide it has," he replied.
***
She used both hands to lift the photographs of family from the wall. Royal-blue blotches appeared like bruises, as one-by-one and one-by-one she stored each portrait in a cardboard box. She saved Great-Grandfather Myers's until the last. Carefully she removed his picture from the wall, but with a flick of her wrist she dropped it in the box and looked away.
Giddy. Free. Possibilities bubbled through her veins. Then the fear of flying, fear of drifting off, fear that she could-worse, that she would want to. This burden was different, but it weighed the same.
William found her in the Queen Anne chair studying the empty wall. "I didn't think about the fading," she admitted.
"We'll repaint," he said, nodding toward the lattice pattern of ghostlike patches.
"Yes, before the boys come," she said, practicing a sentiment she knew she'd need when Billy and Lenny came to visit in the spring. Perhaps by then her heart and head would find a common ground.
Grace went to William. They stood looking out the window at her garden, deserted since she took to bed. She followed his gaze across the landscape lying just beyond the wall, to gaps of dirt empty of her summer annuals, left like shards to strangle phlox and asters limp from lack of care. The day was growing. The sky was white with a sun brighter, less merciful, than a year ago. Luminous and frightening, she thought. A sun exposing more than she might have the will to bear.
