Grace stood in front of her father’s lifeless body, stunned into a total silence. All she could do was entwine her fingers tightly around her mother’s careworn hands, her mother who was only forty-one years old and already a widow. She’d barely had chance to put away the gifts from the twentieth wedding anniversary she had recently celebrated with her husband. Mother and daughter didn’t speak. Together they wept desperate, relentless tears.
The hours, days and weeks that followed were a blur within which Grace suppressed her own grief in the knowledge that her mother’s was far greater. Jimmy returned to campus five days after the funeral. She hardly remembered him leaving.
She made the phone call to Professor Andrews exactly two weeks after Macy Johnson had knocked on her dorm door. Sitting on the bottom stair in her mother’s house, tracing the abstract, spider web carpet pattern with her toes, she dialled the numbers carefully on the recently installed rotary dial telephone. The circular face seemed to move in slow motion as it rewound to the start position after each digit she dialled, her heart thumping as she listened to the hypnotic whirr of the internal mechanism. She hoped Professor Andrews wouldn’t pick up. He did.
Twisting the grey telephone cord anxiously around her fingers, she explained quietly what had happened and that as a result she would be dropping out of college to remain at home with her mother during this difficult time. Professor Andrews listened silently at the other end of the line, waiting until Grace had finished before speaking himself. He told her he understood entirely and supported her decision and was extremely sorry for the terrible situation which had forced it upon her. Sensitive to her grief, he hesitantly mentioned the matter of the feature.
‘I hate to raise this now Grace, but is this something you think you can still work towards? It really is such an outstanding opportunity for you and I’m sure Bill would wait a while, given the circumstances.’
‘I’m so sorry to let you down Professor Andrews,’ Grace replied, speaking softly into the telephone receiver, her words concise and measured, ‘but please can you pass the opportunity to someone else. I can’t write anything at the moment, I’m just too full of sadness. For now, I just have to put my career to one side and be here for my mom.’
Although she would never know it, her college Professor was so moved by her sense of duty to her mother, by the maturity she displayed for a nineteen-year-old girl, that he shed a tear himself when he replaced the receiver.
Two years later, she hadn’t been able to let go of that sense of duty to her mother and that is why Grace Butler stood here now, celebrating her twenty-first birthday in the small kitchen of her family home, rather than in the fancy new bars of Chicago; the same wallpaper with the repeating patterns of barnyard chickens providing the backdrop to her birthday photographs, just as it had done since she was a little girl.
*
While the rest of the guests gathered around Grace to watch her blow out her candles, Maggie, her eighty-seven year old great-grandmother, sat quietly in the back porch watching the celebrations from a distance, the faintest whisper of a smile playing across her paper-thin lips.
Grace spotted her sitting quietly on her own and walked over, the hum of conversation fading slightly as she moved away from the main gathering of guests. It struck Grace how fragile Maggie looked recently; so frail and diminutive, her skin almost translucent, her tired body unable to function without the assistance of medication and walking sticks. It was hard to believe that this same woman had started the four generations of the family which was gathered here now; that it was this, almost insignificant old lady who, as a young girl of only seventeen, had made the difficult journey from Ireland to America in the hope of starting a new and better life.
‘Here’s your slice of birthday cake Maggie.’ Grace always used her first name, at her great-grandmother’s insistence. Great Grandmother makes me sound ridiculously old. I don’t like it she’d said, even before her first great-grandchild was born. ‘It’s your favourite - chocolate sponge with fresh cream and Aunt Martha’s homemade raspberry jam.’
The back porch was lightly scented by the fragrant camellia bushes which grew in the garden. Grace loved the smell and inhaled deeply as she handed over the birthday cake. The old lady took the plate from her, the involuntary shaking of her hands causing the silver dessert fork to rattle on the ‘in vogue’ avocado coloured plate. It was part of a wedding anniversary present which had never been out of the box until today. Grace had watched her mother wash and dry each plate, cup and saucer with great care, especially for the occasion and it hadn’t gone unnoticed by anybody that the simple act of opening that box of avocado coloured crockery was as much about a symbolic gesture of her mother moving on in her life as it was about a practical necessity for more crockery.