Grace Grows by Shelle Sumners

up.”
    Steven laughed and turned on his bedside light. He handed me a flat, square turquoise box. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”
    “Oh.” I smiled. “You don’t want to give me this tomorrow?”
    “No, it’s officially Christmas.”
    It was a bracelet, from Tiffany. Three bangles, bound by a single link attached to a silver heart.
    “Steven. It’s so pretty. I love it.”
    He smiled, pleased with my response. I slid it onto my wrist and admired it. He turned out the light and I sank down under the covers with him.
    He pulled up my nightgown and I tried to relax, but I kept thinking about my mother and José downstairs, watching the pope.
    Atticus
     
    On New Year’s Eve my dad cooks. A few early-evening hours of visiting and playing catch-up, and then we go our separate ways.
    Oh, he takes me somewhere for dinner around my birthday in September. He e-mails me almost daily and every few weeks or so invites me to do something with him. Usually I decline, though, because it starts to feel like too much. Something like love for him starts to creep in, and then I remember not being his priority when I was a kid. And my chest starts to hurt. So I have found that I have to measure how much time I spend with him. Keep it light.
    When I was younger I was careful never to let Dan see that I thought anything about him or his life was cool. On top of the normal teenage disenchantment with my parents, I had an extra, thorny layer of pain. I was carrying around my own anger and some of my mom’s, too. For most of my teen years I barely spoke to him, even when we were in the same room.
    To his credit, he kept trying with me. He still tries.
    Now I try, too.
    Dan lives on the top two floors of an old garment factory he owns in SoHo. You use a key in the elevator and it takes you up to his lower floor and then you walk right out into his gigantic living space. It’s furnished with weathered leather couches and his paintings, and it has big windows with an incredible view of New Jersey. One time I came off the elevator as David Bowie was getting on. He owns some of my dad’s paintings.
    “You’re Grace, I believe,” Mr. Bowie said.
    I eventually closed my mouth. And then opened it again to say yes.
    “Your father showed me your photograph.”
    “Oh,” I said. Intelligent, reasonably verbal girl becomes idiot.
    Tonight it was just the two of us.
    I stepped inside the apartment and found twinkling white lights strung all across the ceiling. Maybe he was having a party later.
    “Dan?” I called.
    “Grace?” There was an alarming, glassy crash overhead. I ran up the iron spiral staircase in the middle of the room.
    Dan was standing in the middle of the paint-splattered floor of his studio, grinning. My dad is short. Taller than me, but shorter than my mom. He has shaggy, silvery hair, and—for a man circling sixty—a disconcertingly young face.
    “Are you all right?” I searched him for injury, surveyed the room for disaster.
    “Oh, sure.” Then I saw the remote he was holding. He pressed a button and this time we were treated to the shriek of shredding metal. Like I imagined the Titanic striking the iceberg might have sounded. I covered my ears till it was over.
    He pressed the button again and it was crickets, in a summer, twilight meadow.
    “I vote for that one,” I said.
    He pressed the button again. Strange, high, trilling noises, and then this juicy, mucky, sucking sound. “That’s an elephant giving birth.”
    “May I go now?” I asked politely.
    “Absolutely not. For the next one hundred and eighty minutes, you’re mine.”
    Dan had a major gallery exhibition coming up in Atlanta. He showed me the paintings that went with the sound effects. For a while now he had been into abstract expressionism—splattery, spiky, what’s red, white, and black all over? stuff. But these were gigantic, realistic paintings, of naked plastic doll parts. Disturbing. They made me think of a creepy Beatles album cover I