Charming Grace Read Online Free PDF

Helen told me once. “And he is sorely afraid of admitting that happiness has more power than sorrow.”
    Without my mother he reverted to Bagshaw stuffiness; despite having a bohemian Yankee artist for a wife and the notorious G. Helen for a mother, he was doomed to lead a serious life.
    And so was I.
    Within a couple of years of Mother’s death he remarried, picking a female so lovable but so different from my mother that she could only put distance between him and the memory. Candace Upton was a brunette beauty queen from sultry Mississippi, with a talent for everything gracious and gentle; she doted on Daddy and on me, and we loved her. But even with a new mother cooing over me I never felt less than alone, a piece of me missing. My mother’s joy and Dad’s smile had been lost among the wild orchids.
    Poor sweet Candace decided that she could cheer me up and make me her little girl by making me a beauty queen, like her. But that plan, like everything else she and Dad tried in an effort to make me forget watching my mother die, only gilded my peculiar misery.
    I was always looking for a fellow lost soul to explain death to me.
    Harp Vance fit the bill.

    Harp came from the lowest end of the social totem pole. I sat at the top. As Little Miss North Georgia 1977 I already wore the invisible crown of a rich, well-meaning, but prim mountain family who were determined to see me grow up to be a credit to their status quo. Candace entered me in beauty contests all over the South as if I were a prized, red-headed poodle.
    As in most small towns, the lives of rich and poor intersected in small, public spaces where each could be polite but pretend the other didn’t exist. For Harp and me, our first encounter across class lines occurred in the Dahlonega Dime Store. I was seven and he was nine.
    His grandmother was examining half-price boxes of Nunnally’s chocolates left over from Valentine’s Day and his slinky older sister, Michelle, was slipping Maybelline into her macramé tote. I had time on my hands while G. Helen’s housekeeper shopped for birthday cards and dental floss. So I sidled up an aisle to this handsome but shabby boy who lived so far from my world he might as well have been a Martian. He was standing stock-still, gazing upward at a shelf of brilliantly colored, ceramic Santa figurines marked down to fifty cents each. It was July, after all. He held up one hand toward them. The shelf was a good four feet above his reach. He frowned.
    As I peeked at him around a riser filled with plastic flowers—the kind old ladies bought to decorate graves—he plucked a long pocket knife from his jeans, took it by the tip of the blade, then drew his arm back and took careful aim at the shelf of Santas. With a flick of his wrist he launched the knife in a delicate arch above his head. It twirled like a baton. The handle gently thunked a ceramic Santa on the edge of the unreachable shelf. The Santa rocked, toppled, and landed in Harper Vance’s right hand. With his left hand, he caught the falling knife.
    No circus performer ever performed a neater trick. I gaped at him as he closed the knife and slipped it back into his jeans. He raised the captured Santa to catch every glimmer of the store’s florescent lights, turning it in his long, agile hands, touching dirty fingertips to the smooth colors and molded grooves. It was clear the cheap dime-store Santa was a prize he coveted. He cuddled it to his chest as he filched some change from his jeans and studied the coins on his palm. His lips moved, counting. He nodded.
    He had the fifty cents.
    I was enthralled. There I stood, dressed in a frilly Little Miss Rich Girl sundress with matching yellow sandals, auburn hair puffed up in a permed mass of curls that hung to my waist, like a handmade doll kept on an invisible leash. I’d just witnessed a raw act of self-sufficiency by a boy who clearly made his own rules. I burned with envy.
    “Could you teach me to do that?” I