Grace by T. Greenwood Page B

rested it against the bar stool, but Kurt had no idea what he carried inside, what a lawyer’s trappings were. Billy was five hundred miles away, but it felt farther than that. It felt like a whole lifetime between here and there. Between them.
    â€œI need to borrow some money,” he said into the silence. “Not a lot. Call me back.”
    By the time he pulled into the driveway at home, the nerves in his legs were raw and thrumming.
    T revor sat down on the couch next to Gracy. She was watching SpongeBob, hugging a stuffed bunny he hadn’t seen before. She put her little feet up on his lap without taking her eyes off the TV. There were holes in the toes of her tights, and her big toes were both sticking out. He didn’t know how she could stand it. He tickled her toes, and she wriggled and giggled.
    â€œStop it!” she squealed.
    â€œColor with me?” she asked. There was a TV tray in front of her, paper and crayons all over it.
    Trevor’s mother was busy making dinner in the kitchen: The smells hit him like a punch in the gut. Ever since the fight the other day, he’d been skipping lunch, avoiding the cafeteria completely, eating vending-machine peanut butter crackers in the art room during lunch period. Now his head felt swimmy with hunger, his stomach knotted tight.
    â€œDinner!” she called.
    The table looked fancy, with candles and the good place mats she usually only put out for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She dished fish sticks and green beans onto his and Gracy’s plates and big juicy pork chops onto hers and his dad’s. The smell of it all made his mouth fill up with saliva. It was all he could do to keep from shoveling it in with his fists.
    His dad sat down and scowled. “What’s all this for?” he asked.
    His mother shrugged, smiling and pouring some wine into two tumblers. “You’ve been working so hard lately, we both have, I just thought it would be nice for us to have a nice family dinner.”
    She smelled like flowers, and her hair was still wet. When Trevor got home from school, she’d asked him to watch Gracy while she took a bath. She was in there a long time, and when she came out she smelled sweet, the steam coming off her like hot roses.
    â€œHow was your day?” she asked, and her voice sounded funny. Too high, like a cartoon version of herself.
    His dad just nodded, and his mother looked at him hard, like she wanted something. Like he was supposed to be able to read her mind. She did that to Trevor too. But his dad didn’t say anything, he just started to saw at his pork chop.
    His mother took a deep breath, like she was filling herself with air, and he wondered, for a moment, if she might just float away. He imagined her lifting off the ground, like a ghost, slipping out like shower steam through a crack in the front door.
    Gracy was trying to explain some sort of project with lima beans they were doing in her kindergarten class. Trevor remembered doing that in kindergarten too, the beans wrapped in wet paper towels, their sprouts curling like tapeworms inside their plastic bags. It was supposed to teach them something about life cycles.
    â€œAnd mine was the first one to sprout. The first one!” Gracy said, grinning as she speared a fish stick with her fork. “Mrs. Nelson says I have the best handwriting in the whole class. Do you know how to spell difficulty? It’s hard. D-I-F-F-I-C-U-L-T-Y. That’s funny! It’s difficult to spell difficult .”
    Trevor’s father hadn’t spoken a dozen words to him since the fight at school. And Trevor was afraid to look him in the eye, so he concentrated on cleaning his plate. When he was finished, he quietly asked for more.
    â€œHelp yourself, honey,” his mom said.
    He scooped another pile of green beans, like slimy pick-up sticks, onto his plate, and took the last fish stick from the greasy cookie sheet.
    â€œI need you to come to