Charming Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

blurted.
    He jumped. His hands opened like the wings of startled birds. The Santa hit the store’s hard linoleum floor and cracked in two. We both stared at it in horror. I rushed over. “We can hide it under the bottom shelf,” I whispered. “I hid a whole box of broken Christmas ornaments under there once.”
    His face tightened. “That’d be wrong!” That single sentence, barked out in a backwoods twang, summed up his refusal to take the easy way out.
    “What’s going on here?” The store manager, a woman armored in lavender polyester, stomped up the aisle. She glowered only at Harp. I was, after all, a Bagshaw. “What are you up to, mister? Did you climb up on these shelves and knock that Santa off? I swear, I’m never letting you trashy Vances in here again, I swear—”
    “I broke it,” I announced loudly.
    Where those words came from when I was only seven years old, I don’t know. Perhaps G. Helen’s fight-for-the-underdog attitudes had already begun sinking in. At any rate, despite Harper Vance staring at me as if I’d lost my mind, I raised my chin and repeated, “I climbed up and grabbed at the Santa and knocked it off.”
    “Well, well now.” The manager blinked awkwardly and formed a smile. “Accidents will happen. Don’t you worry—”
    “She didn’t break the thang. I did,” Harper said. He faced the manager. “I broke it. Here.” He thrust out his hand with his few coins spread on his palm.
    The manager bent over it, scowling. “I should have known. You don’t have enough for the price plus tax. You broke the Santa and you can’t afford to pay for it. I’m tired of you Vances coming in here and pilfering—”
    His face began to color. “I’ll get some more pennies! I can too pay for it!”
    “Maybe I’ll just call the sheriff, young man, and let him talk to you—”
    I wailed. For even better effect I also collapsed with my hands clamped to my face. “I broke the Santa but nobody believes me,” I cried in huge, dramatic gasps. I’d been competing in beauty contests for at least a year by then. I knew how to perform for an audience. “Everybody thinks I’m a liar! But I broke it, I broke it! I’m not a liar! No one listens to me!”
    “Oh, honey, shush.” The manager huddled over me. G. Helen’s housekeeper rushed up, demanding what had happened, chirping in disgust when she heard I’d broken the Santa. “Well, good lord, I’ll pay for the cheap little hickie. Gracie, hush. Hush. What in the world is the matter with you? You’re gettin’ your eyes all puffy. What will Miss Candace say? You gonna show up at your ballet class lookin’ like a frog.” And to the manager, “If she says she broke the Santie, she means it. What’d you do to upset her so?”
    “Nothing. Nothing.” The woman waved her hands urgently. “It was just an accident.”
    “Well let it be, then.”
    “Yes. Yes. No problem. Let’s forget all about it.”
    G. Helen’s housekeeper lifted me to my feet, cooing. I continued to sob but peeked through my fingers at Harp. He stared at me as if I had changed places with his precious Santa. His wild eyes were big and dark and filled with wonder
    As the housekeeper led me away, in essence putting me back on my leash, I winked at him. After a long moment, as if he had had to think hard before recognizing the tiniest thread of friendship, he put his hand to his heart. I never forgot that. His hand over his heart.
    For me .

    I rarely saw him over the next few years. I had private tutors; he went to the public elementary school—or didn’t go. Lumpkin County’s truant officer hunted lost dogs more passionately than he hunted Harp. Lost dogs were easier to find.
    I was ten and Harp was twelve when he ran away for good from his grandmother’s rusty double-wide trailer. It happened in the fall of the year, a month after his grandmother died, leaving Harp and Michelle on their own. A cabal of upstanding citizens (led by my Great Aunt Tess) went