Forged in Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

came if she doesn’t want you to see me.”
    I press my index fingers into my temples, my jaw tight, a sick twisting working through me from belly to throat. Why would Ma lie to me? Instead of voicing this question out loud, I simply say, “My mother doesn’t know I’m here now.”
    Marly grins, like we ’re colluding, as if we’re teens again. “It’s good to have secrets from your mother, trust me. Look, I just figured she can’t get over the past. I’m the old bad influence, back in town. She wouldn’t even let me into the house; made me stand on the stoop like a salesman.”
    Suddenly the stack of magazines in the foyer makes sense, why it had shifted to near-toppling when I ’m always so careful coming in. I can picture Ma at the door, flustered, facing off with a grown version of Marly, Wild Girl, the last person to ever see me as I was before the accident.
    We lapse into a loaded silence and then Marly jumps up, taps me lightly on the shoulder. Her fourteen-year-old self rises like steam in my mind, in her favorite black baby doll dress with the velvet bodice and neon green tights, flopped onto my bed clutching a magazine cut-out of Johnny Depp to her chest. I’d let him do whatever he wanted to me. Behind her, there’s an image of me, all gawky knees and freckles.
    How I ’ve missed her.
    Marly begins to putter around the living room, pointlessly tidying what I know will all be packed up anyway.
    “Where’s your mom?” I ask.
    She raises her head sharply, eyes hard. “Didn’t come to her own mother’s funeral, Grace. Would have hired strangers to pack this all up, can you believe that?” Tears hover at the rims of her eyes.
    “ So you’re still not close?” I pick up a long orange and yellow scarf, finger its softness. It is all I can do to keep from grabbing her to me, hugging her.
    Marly laughs, almost a bark, then gazes at me with such direct eye contact I look away, at the scuffed toes of my black boots. I want to ask her how she can do that: take me in without cringing.
    “So you moved to Vegas two months after the—” I can’t say “the fire.”
    She plumps a couch pillow and then sits on it, exhaling as though she ’s suddenly exhausted. “No, we moved to Seattle first, for Bryce’s job. I hightailed it to Vegas when I was eighteen. I actually slept in my car on the night before my birthday, a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the folks. What was my mom going to do about it?”
    I want her to ask me about the hospital, about my recovery, but she doesn ’t. And beyond that, I realize, there’s nothing to ask me. I’ve done so little, my whole life confined to a radius of less than two miles. My face feels tight and hot. I press my hands to my cheeks. “God I don’t think—”
    “ What?” she demands, eyes flitting to my disfigured thumbs, twice the size of normal ones, then away again.
    “ It’s nothing…” Look at you. Didn’t everyone always look at you?
    I ’d always wanted to be beautiful like her, from the age of seven. When our friendship blossomed over hopscotch, I was all knobs and angles and she was confidence embodied in an eye-bursting package. I’m ashamed to realize that nothing has changed.
    “ You’re still my Grace,” she says, a sad smile forming before she pulls a cigarette out of her pocket and lights it. The smoke smells oddly good, but tickles my throat, gives me an instant cough. She frowns at the cigarette as though it has done something unexpected. “Shit. Come outside?”
    I follow her through the long hallway past the kitchen, now full of open boxes. Pans lie side by side with rusty old cookie cutters, and fistfuls of silverware spill out of tall mugs. I have a strange urge to gather these things, caress them as though they are parts of Oona Donovan, whose house I longed to escape to as a kid—a house of flow and openness, color and joy, unlike the dank nest of clutter that I call home.
    We ascend a staircase to the second floor deck, overhung