Tuesday Night Miracles by Kris Radish

her arms and holds her for a few seconds and then pushes her away and lightly slaps her on the face.
    “Ouch! What was that for?”
    “Snap out of it, sister. Stop being a baby. Suck it up.”
    Grace sticks out her lower lip like a pouting one-year-old and drops her head. She’s on the verge of keeling over. She’s absolutely exhausted from the inside out.
    “I’ll try to try,” she promises.
    “I’m bringing dinner over tomorrow night, by the way, and the girls are coming with me so Kelli can teach them how to smoke and climb out windows.”
    No one can make Grace laugh like Karen. She smiles and immediately feels as if she seriously doesn’t deserve to have such a wonderful person in her absolutely overburdened life.
    “Go in the house,” Karen says. “Eventually you’ll have to tell her. I’m getting the hell out of here.”
    “Thank you, Karen,” Grace manages to squeak out as Karen lopes back to her car as if she were a secret agent coming out of hiding.
    When Grace gets into the house, her daughter is sprawled across the living room; boyfriend dink-wad is not in sight, thank God. He’s banned from the house for an indefinite period, which created a raging war that’s not yet over. It is not a good thing to threaten to file criminal charges against your girlfriend’s mother, even if she did total your car.
    “Yo, Mama.”
    “Hi, baby. How are you?” There are books, empty plates, glasses, and a trail of clothes from the door into the living room and the kitchen.
    “Where were you?” Kelli is standing with her head turned to one side as if she’s now the mom in charge.
    There’s a million-dollar question. “Honey, I was at anger-management class with two other crazy women” is not going to cut it.
    “A meeting. Did anyone call?”
    “Mom, the phone thing is weird. We are, like, the last people in the world who have a landline. But the phone did ring. It was that same guy from your work who always calls, Evan.”
    “Oh.” Grace looks away, trying to act as if she doesn’t care.
    “He calls a lot,” Kelli says, dropping her head and trying to look into her mother’s eyes.
    “We have a lot of projects going on at the hospital.”
    “Whatever.”
    “Does he want me to call him back?”
    “What do you think?” Kelli says in a snotty tone of voice that really means, “Mom, get a life!”
    Grace turns, so that Kelli won’t see her blush, and walks quickly into the kitchen.
    The last thing she wants to do is talk to her daughter about Evan. It’s none of her business. As far as Kelli is concerned, Evan works in accounting at the hospital, right next to her mother’s office on the third floor, and is helping her with cost-effective procedures. Nursing is not what it used to be, and now that Grace is a critical-care manager she spends more time with her hands on paperwork than on a patient’s pulse.
    Kelli does not need to know that Evan keeps buying Grace coffee, has asked her out to lunch at least fifteen times, and has made it known that he’s interested in more than the bottom-line numbers on her nursing floor.
    And Kelli also doesn’t need to know that Grace is trying to figure out what to do with her own rising feelings for the gentle man whom she sees every day.
    In order to forget the whole mess, Grace would love to go to bed early with a glass of wine and a trashy novel, but that’s an impossible dream. She’s taken on an extra shift to pay the damn attorney she had to hire to help her navigate through this anger mess, she brings home paperwork every night, and she’s living in constant fear that human resources will fire her if they find out about the pending assault charges and her evil temper.
    That would be the end of her life. The one blessing so far is that the newspapers have gotten so small they’ve stopped running police reports. People talk, she knows this, and she’s surprised that Kelli’s damn boyfriend hasn’t taken out a full-page ad on Facebook about