They were each holding a little highball glass tinkling with ice.
Her mom hadn’t gotten those glasses down, or poured any celebratory booze in the house, in God knows how long. Booze cost money, and her mom hid it well in case John-Mark had any ideas about helping himself to it.
Glory sat down gingerly on the edge of the armchair.
Unwilling to commit to whatever this scenario was just yet.
Her mother laughed. “Oh, honey. It’s okay. Don’t look so shell-shocked. Turns out Britt Langley has done favors for us both. She resigned her job showing properties for Gary because she’s going to draw cartoons from home, or something like that, and Gary thinks I’m just the person to fill her shoes. It’ll be fun to have a job! And he’s interested in buying the house from the bank and renting it back to us.”
“Sure,” Glory said cautiously, ironically, after a moment. “Jobs are fun.”
She probably shouldn’t have sounded so incredulous.
It was just that this was so out of theblue. This sudden lifting of a terrible burden from all of them. It would take some getting used to walking without it. Maybe an hour or two.
“Job doesn’t pay much,” Gary said cheerfully. “And I call at unreasonable hours. Just ask Britt.”
Glory sat motionless in absolute bemusement.
She knew the difference between her mother trying to charm someone and her mother genuinely enjoying herself. She understood all at once that she hadn’t seen the second in ages.
She was radiant. She was lovely.
And Glory felt unaccountably selfish for not noticing that her mom had been suffering in grace.
And as for Gary Shaw, sitting in that old worn brown-and-yellow print armchair, well, he looked as though he’d come home.
Glory ended up taking her tiger to bed with her that night, like a needy toddler. A full moon was making its presence known, and it lit part of her ceiling, which she watched as if it were an old familiar movie. And in some ways it was.
A castle. A bearded wizard blowing bubbles. A monster pushing a grocery cart. That big old elm tree surrounded by the worn white pasture fence. The face of a lion. A treble clef. A plate full of nachos. Glory had picked out all of these things in the stucco pattern of her ceiling at night since she was a little girl. When she lay still, when the light was right, she could find them all again.
Tonight, she wished the ceiling was an oracle. Maybe if she peered hard enough, her future would emerge from the pattern. She’d see future Glory, stepping into a limousine, waving at adoring fans as she swept into the Grammy Awards. Or future Glory, playing an open mic night to an audience full of hecklers on her fiftieth birthday, simply because she hadn’t taken that one chance, that one, sudden, surreal opportunity, to go withtheFranco Francone to meettheWyatt “King” Congdon.
And in all likelihood sleep withtheFranco Francone.
Judging from the internet search she’d done, approximately a gajillion women would be happy to do just that for no reason other than, for crying out loud, because just look at the guy.
She finally sighed gustily and threw off her covers and slid out of bed, and then, just to give herself something to do, she picked up her tiger and put him next to her African Violet so he could have a little taste of the jungle.
She snorted at herself. And she sat back on her bed and looked at her tiger.
Gary Shaw had taken her mom out to dinner at the fancy French place in Black Oak. And she’d heard her mom come home a little tipsy a few hours ago, and she’d sung.
Out loud.
For the first time Glory could remember.
She sang all around the house, that damn song by The Baby Owls. Really got into it.
And for the first time ever Glory thought maybe some of the music in her must have come from her mom. Her voice was pretty and expressive and joyous. Her mom’s gift, Glory realized, was to love and be loved, and she was happiest when she was in a relationship.
And as Glory sat there staring at her old tiger in the moonlight, she all at once understood why she’d never heard her mom sing around the house before. Because like a bird with a blanket thrown over its cage, her mom hadn’t seen the point in it.
And from there, the realizations came in a cascade.
Glory understood that she was, in fact, despite ongoing appearances to the contrary, inherently lucky.Reallylucky.
Because she’d seen examples of big, big real love her whole life. She’d seen the before and after of it. How it felt to live with it, and how life looked and felt when suddenly, in a heartbeat or a gunshot, it was gone.
