Archive of Our Own

Act I

The first woman Grace ever loved had been her mother.

She can remember sitting in her mother’s lap as a child, feet kicking excitedly as they looked in the vanity mirror at their reflections. Her mother would show her how to apply just the right amount of cold cream before sweeping it away in quick, smooth motions, as if it had never been there at all. She would bounce Grace up and down on her knee, laugh like she meant it, kiss her temple and call her ‘beautiful girl’.

Everyone that saw them said they looked just alike, smiled at them when they walked down the street hand in hand. It was like her mother was a movie star, radiant and elegant, magical in a way that all the other mothers weren’t. Being around her made Grace feel like she was special, like she was destined for greatness, like she could do anything.

Until she wakes up one day and her mother is gone, nothing but a half-empty bottle of L’air du Temps left in her wake. It’s more than Grace’s six year old brain can handle, her mother leaving without so much as a goodbye, and every day she climbs the big oak tree in the backyard, surveying, watching, waiting. Little does she know there’s nothing to wait for; she’ll never see her mother again.

Her father’s not the same after her mother leaves. He doesn’t smile anymore, doesn’t pick her up and twirl her around, doesn’t let her stand on his toes while they dance to Perry Como. Instead, he becomes a shell of himself. He goes to work and comes home, fills in the gaps with glasses of scotch. There’s a second wedding somewhere in there, too, with a step-mother that tolerates Grace at best. They never really get along–she doesn’t wear perfume, only uses plain soap.

For all intents and purposes Grace is alone, left with nothing but a memory of her mother and the leftover perfume she can’t bring herself to use. She wishes she could fly away like the glass dove on the top of the bottle, like her mother, far away where no one can find her. She dreams and plans for her future, one where she’ll be free and uninhibited, unbothered by anyone else.

She grows up and forgets what her mother’s face looks like, has to remind herself with a few fading photographs and a glance in the mirror. Her father can barely look at her anymore, like she reminds him too much of her. Plenty of people call her beautiful now, but the words never carry the same weight, never make her feel the same way her mother did–like she could move mountains.

She asks her father every year where her mother went, and he always replies the same. “She wasn’t well, Gracie,” he says, and he sounds so exhausted, so beaten down, so abandoned. He doesn’t look her in the eye anymore, and by the time she’s thirteen she’s given up on asking him, of talking to him about anything other than report cards and curfews. She’s given up on waiting, realizing that she’s just another casualty in her mother’s war of self. Grace tries to convince herself that she doesn’t love her anymore.

She fails.

Grace is fascinated by Maureen McCloskey the minute she lays eyes on her. It feels like an instant connection, as if they’ve known each other their entire lives. They meet in the seventh grade, eyes meeting across their classroom, and Grace smiles against her own volition, the corners of her lips twitching as Maureen smiles back at her, rolling her eyes in response to the math equations on the blackboard.

She’s pretty, is the first thing Grace thinks. She wishes she was pretty like that. Wishes she filled out her school dresses the same way, that her skin was as clear, her hair as effortlessly styled. Maureen’s eyes are the most beautiful shade of hazel, and her teeth are perfectly straight. Her smile lights up the room.

They become friends quickly and easily, and by their freshman year of high school they’re inseparable. They shop together, eat together, sneak into Psycho together when it first comes out, holding onto each other tight as Norman Bates stabs Marion Crane over and over again. Maureen grabs her hand over the armrest and squeezes, only letting go when the credits roll.

There are boys, too, and they pass in and out of Grace’s life like ships in the night. She’s too busy with Maureen for them, anyway. Too busy thinking about what to get her for her birthday, what color they should paint her room over spring vacation, what ice cream flavor to get after they’re done shopping for homecoming outfits.

It’s the summer before their junior year when Maureen breaks the news. Her father had accepted a job across state, and they were moving in a few weeks. Grace is devastated, unable to imagine an existence separate from her best friend.

“You’re just going to leave me here?” Grace asks, voice trembling.

Maureen puts her hands on Grace’s shoulders. “C’mon, don’t have a cow. I’m gonna write! Promise,” she says, reaching out with her pinky finger to wrap it around Grace’s own.

Maureen pulls her in for a hug goodbye, and when Grace gets home she smells like Maureen’s perfume. It’s a lovely scent, she thinks as she holds her cardigan to her nose, inhaling deeply. She should have asked what it was. She hangs the sweater up in her closet, figuring it’s okay not to wash, to wear again tomorrow. Outside, the trees are starting to change color, and soon the leaves will fall. She sits on her bed in the quiet, alone again as the storm clouds roll in.

Every day she waits for a letter, a postcard. They never come.

She meets him at a mixer in college. He’s charming enough, in a pre-law sort of way, and he always seems to say the right thing. He tells her she looks beautiful, that her dress fits her perfectly, that the shoes complete the ensemble. It’s sweet, she thinks, to have a guy who understands enough about fashion to compliment her on it.

They don’t talk much. Don’t touch much, either, and yet she still finds herself sitting across from him at a fancy restaurant one night four years later, a velvet box nudged across the table in front of her without a word. She stares at it as she finishes chewing her overpriced salad, eyes meeting his over the top of the taper candles that are meant to be romantic but are just getting in the way.

He almost seems nervous, like he thinks she’ll bolt at any second, and he wrings his hands under the table. There’s no grand speech like she’s seen in the movies, no declaration of love that brings tears to her eyes. Instead, he approaches it much like he would in the courtroom: professional, curt, clear.

“Grace,” Robert says. “I’d like you to marry me.”

She swallows, reaching to open the box. The ring is a cut she’d never have picked for herself, and she much prefers gold to silver, but she slips it onto her finger anyway. It’ll have to be resized; it’s too big.

“Okay,” she replies, because it makes a certain amount of sense, him and her. Grace Hanson looks right on paper, like she could be successful and respected, an upstanding member of whatever community they choose. They could build a life together, the two of them, even if it’s not worthy of the big screen.

They get married on November 10th. Her father’s too drunk to walk her down the aisle, so she walks alone. People take it as some sort of progressive statement, but it’s not. It’s just her walking into a brand new life the same way she’s done most things: by herself. Halfway down the aisle she looks at Robert standing at the altar, shaky hands hidden in his pockets, and for the first time in years all she wants is her mother.

The car ride to the hotel after the reception is quiet except for the tin cans tied to the back bumper. The wedding party had seemed so happy, so overjoyed at the start of their life together, but all Grace feels is tired, uncomfortable, covered in uncooked rice. Glancing over to her new husband, his hands grasping white knuckled onto the steering wheel, she wonders if he feels the same.

They have sex for the first time that night. Four years together and he’s never touched her like this. She’s never been touched by a man this way before, period, not counting the time in the backseat of Ken O’Dell’s Corvair in high school, but she’d spooked then and they hadn’t gone all the way. Here now, though, the lights are off and it all feels overwhelmingly cold, distant, awkward. She wishes she could be somewhere else.

He comes and she doesn’t, and afterwards he rolls onto his side. “Thank you,” he says into the dark, like the whole thing was some kind transaction, like a cashier had just handed him change for a dollar.

She curls in on herself beside him, knees to her chest and eyes wide open. Her wedding ring catches the moonlight from the window, and it makes her breath hitch in a bad way. Until this moment, she’s never understood her mother’s need to run.

She has a miscarriage between Brianna and Mallory, and it’s the only time she can ever remember Robert holding her. They sit together on the floor by their bed, his arms wrapped tight around her as she sobs into his chest, and it’s like he’s protecting her from the world. The world their unborn child will never get to see.

She feels like a failure, like losing the baby is a physical reminder of how unfit she is to be a mother. She’d known when Brianna was born—known during her first pregnancy, even—that she wasn’t a Donna Reed type of woman. Her DNA wasn’t coded for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, for bandaged knees or keeping house. She wasn’t built that way. She was built to be ambitious, to make something out of nothing, to create an empire for herself from the ground up.

Robert had been the one who wanted kids, something in him that was desperate to nurture. With the disappearance of her own mother, Grace had felt like she wasn’t well equipped with the right knowledge to be a parent, like she was predestined to run away the same way her mother had, leaving a trail of destruction behind her. Her entire first pregnancy had been one inconvenience after another, and although the love she felt after holding Brianna for the first time was stronger than anything she’d ever experienced, the terror of the responsibility was enough to make her shut down, postpartum depression pulling her under by the ankles. It was almost a full year before she felt like she could breathe again, and by then Brianna was running away from her and into Robert’s arms. It was too late.

They were going to name the baby Samuel. She’d already picked the outfit they were going to bring him home in. Brianna already hated his guts, said she wanted mommy and daddy only for herself. What Brianna wants, Brianna gets, Grace thinks callously, and she feels heavy enough to melt into the floor.

She’s close to forty by the time Mallory comes along, and the pregnancy is the opposite of easy. It’s long and it’s hard and it’s terrifying—the scariest thing she’s ever had to do. Every complication that could happen does happen, and for the last three months she’s forced to take conference calls in bed, forced to accept barely palatable meals from Robert’s secretary.

It pays off, though, when she lays eyes on Mallory for the first time, counting all her fingers and toes and marking them all present and accounted for. Grace can’t claim to be the best mother, but she can say with complete confidence that she loves her children fiercely. That she’ll hold onto a marriage she feels like a stranger in if it means giving them a good home, a good life, the childhood she never had herself. That she will fight every obstacle there is if it means coming home to them every night, no matter how late.

She looks at Mallory, tiny and fragile in her arms, and she can’t imagine leaving her. It’s in this moment that Grace realizes she’s nothing like her mother at all.

They start spending more and more time with the Bergsteins, much to her chagrin. Not that they’re not nice people, it’s just that they’re very...granola. Very different, compared to her other social circle. Sol is sweet enough, attentive and helpful, almost like he’s trying hard to prove something. His wife, though, is another story.

Frankie’s not trying to prove anything. She’s an enigma, an equation that Grace can never quite solve. She’s always prided herself on reading people, on being able to piece together motive and action—it’s something that’s gotten her far in the business world—but with Frankie it’s impossible. Nothing matches up, nothing makes sense. The pieces don’t fit, and it confuses Grace, exhausts her.

And yet at the same time, she can’t help but be jealous of Frankie. Jealous of her free spirit, her unwillingness to go with the flow, the way she’s unbothered and unafraid and unapologetic. She’s jealous of her marriage, that’s for sure, which seems so effortless and affectionate, loving in a way her and Robert’s has never been. Frankie and Sol are everything to each other, it seems, and Grace has never been anything to anyone. Not enough to stick around, at least.

She’s jealous of the relationship Frankie has with her sons, the easy playfulness that she exudes, that draws Brianna and Mallory in from the moment they meet her as children. Frankie becomes the ‘cool mom’, the one that lets Grace’s daughters call her by her first name, try on her floral prints from the seventies, giggle over her collection of phallic sculpture. It all comes so naturally to her, Grace thinks, and it’s unfair. Like she’s hogging all the maternal instincts for herself.

There’s a resentment that grows deep in her belly for the woman, a bitterness that can’t help but rear its ugly head at social functions and dinner parties. They’re just too different, polar opposites that repel each other like two magnets, and it’s not like it’s Frankie’s fault, the way Grace falls into a fake, clipped tone every time they speak. Not her fault that Grace lays subtle digs about the food she makes, the clothes she wears, the paint under her fingernails. She wishes she could at least say it made her feel better, being a bitch, but it doesn’t. It just makes her feel less and less like the person her younger self had envisioned she’d be.

Then again, she hadn’t pictured this godawful existence for herself then, either.

Phil comes along like a breath of fresh air, a cool breeze on a hot day. He’s refreshing, affectionate in a way she’s never experienced, and he makes her feel like she takes up space without being a waste of it. With him she feels seen and heard and of worth, and she never has to wonder if she’s enough for him, if she matters to him. He makes it obvious.

They talk every day in the hour long overlap between the end of her work day and the end of his. It always starts with the tile grout, or the backsplash, the hanging rack for her pots and pans. She doesn’t expect to tell him her secrets, doesn’t expect to pour her heart out to him about things she’s never even told her own husband, but he’s Phil and he has kind eyes and a warm heart and is the best listener she’s ever known.

He kisses her one day, in the kitchen surrounded by drywall dust. It feels warm, safe, like she could burrow into the moment and live there. It’s not fireworks, but they could get there, she’s sure of it. Knows that perfection is right beneath the surface, if they only had the chance to explore.

Her kids are almost grown, and she wonders what it would be like if it weren’t impossible. What a life with Phil would look like if there weren’t so many obstacles in their way. Her marriage to Robert is malnourished, starving, suffering, and she longs for someone to make her feel alive again, dangerous and human. She wonders if Phil could be that person.

But he’s married, and so is she, and before she knows it the kitchen is finished and he’s out the door, gone so fast she wonders if she imagined the whole thing. He had made her feel something she hadn’t felt since the first time she waited for her mother to come home. He made her feel hopeful, and without him that hope was gone, crushed under the heel of reality.

She runs into him a few years later, and it’s as if nothing’s changed. He still looks the same, still looks enamored with her, still leans forward to listen when she talks. She craves this kind of attention, this involved conversation—it’s something she never gets at home from Robert or the girls. All she gets from them are a series of grunts and shrugs, like her household is operating as its own post-verbal society.

Talking to Phil makes her feel like a real person again, and she wants to hold onto that feeling, wants to hold onto him if it means feeling human for one more second. The night ends eventually, though, and he lets her go with a hand on her cheek and a ‘be well’, disappearing as fast as he had the last time. She sits in her car in the bar parking lot for an hour, not wanting to go home, not ready to fall back into the mundanity that her life has become, a vicious cycle of loneliness and predictability.

She gets home at two in the morning. No one’s waiting up, no one wonders where she’s been.

Being CEO of Say Grace is what makes her get out of bed in the morning. It’s what gives her purpose, what makes her feel like her life isn’t completely meaningless. She matters to people in the office, and they hang on her every word. They value her opinion, and she’s the one they have to please, the one who has the final say. It’s a rush, and she’s addicted to the power, the control, the way people regard her when she walks into a room. It’s like she’s queen. Here, people see her, and she’s no longer invisible the way she is to her family.

She gets off the elevator and is immediately greeted with a cup of coffee from her assistant as she makes her way to her office. Four messages and a handful of emails await her as she sits down at her desk, and she’s not even through reading before a knock sounds at her door. “Karen,” she says, glasses sliding down her nose as she looks up to see her creative director. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Bottle designs,” Karen replies with a smile, holding up a folder, “for the new night cream. Simple, elegant. I think you’ll agree.”

She hands the portfolio of sketches to Grace and it’s quiet for a moment, nothing but a shuffle of papers as Grace flips through the portfolio in comfortable silence. “How was Brianna’s graduation?” Karen asks after a moment.

“Hot,” Grace replies, looking over the design options. “Why we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for tuition and they don’t provide an air conditioned space is beyond me.”

Karen chuckles, moving to stand beside Grace as she tries to get a better look at her notes. “That was my favorite one too,” she says, pointing to the design Grace had starred. “Reminds me of the one my mom used to have.”

Grace’s lip twitches. “It does have that feel, doesn’t it?” she replies quietly, and she can feel Karen’s eyes on her, sizing her up.

“You working late tonight?” she asks. “We could have a nightcap or something, if the new distribution deal goes through.”

Grace raises her brow, smirking. “What do you mean ‘if ’?”

Karen laughs, taking the portfolio and heading to the door. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Sure enough, the deal does goes through, and she’s waiting in her office when Karen shows up again, leaning against the door jamb with a bottle in her hand. Grace smiles up at her from where she sits on the couch. “You going to share or are you just going to stand there?"

By eleven o’clock they’re more than a little tipsy, giggling over nothing as they knock back more glasses than they should. Grace can’t remember the last time she felt so loose, so comfortable, and her eyes slip closed in contentment. In the lull, Karen reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and Grace inhales sharply, eyes opening to a hand on her knee and a pair of lips on hers. She pulls away violently, startled, brow furrowing in confusion.

“I’m sorry,” Karen breathes, embarrassed. “I must have misread the situation.”

Grace clears her throat. “Yes, I’ll say you did,” she replies, suddenly sober, and she hates the way her voice sounds: cold, removed, holier than thou.

“I just thought–” Karen starts, tongue darting out to wet her lips. “I thought we–”

“You thought wrong,” Grace says, voice low, dangerous.

Karen exhales like she just got punched in the gut, and she nods slowly, slipping her heels back onto her feet wordlessly and grabbing her blazer from the back of the couch. She opens her mouth to say something, but no words come out. Grace can’t look her in the eye, and it’s dead quiet until the office door opens and closes, the sound of the other woman’s feet echoing down the hallway.

Grace sits there for god knows how long, staring at her own face smiling back at her from one of the moisturizer boxes on the shelf. She racks her brain, looking for a time when she could have sent mixed messages, led Karen on somehow. Did she really come across as that way? Did everyone think she—was there something about her that just screamed—

All of a sudden she feels bile rising in her throat, and she barely makes it to the trash can under her desk before she vomits. She heaves until there’s nothing left, and she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, her head pounding. Too dizzy to make it back to the couch, she curls up on the floor, finding fitful sleep until the early morning hours when the first hint of light filters into the office. She wakes to an aching back and a message from Robert, asking where his navy blue suit jacket with the red pinstripe lining is.

It’s at the dry cleaners, she thinks, and I didn’t come home last night.

Karen submits her resignation a week later, and it’s not even delivered by hand, just waiting for Grace on her desk when she comes into work one morning. At the sight of it her stomach drops, and she feels sick again, tangled up in knots. Nevertheless she straightens her posture, shakes her head, moves on.

Grace replaces Karen with someone her complete opposite. She doesn’t invite him in for a drink.

Act II

She doesn’t know what she had expected from retirement. A vacation, maybe, somewhere sunny with a book in one hand and a martini in the other. Maybe even just lazy days and nights she can sleep all the way through, a weekend at the beach house here and there. She doesn’t need much, she tells herself. She just needs to relax.

A week in, though, and she’s relaxed enough, the realization setting in that this is what her life is now. Nothing but a house void of her kids, void of her husband, void of the dog she’d refused to get when the girls were young but now longs for. At least then there’d be something to keep her company other than silence, a warm body in her bed that wouldn't cancel dinners and lock himself away in his study rather than speak to her.

She finally breaks down one day and calls Janet and Arlene, telling them to count her in for whatever it is they do. Before she knows it she’s inducted into the Retired Bimbos of America, where they drink mimosas all day and talk about how proud they are of their grandchildren, how ‘Little Tommy got into the perfect preschool that will look so grand on his college transcript and isn’t that just fabulous?!’

It’s laughable, really, how fake and pretentious these women are, but Grace supposes she’s no better than them, not really, so she plays her part. She helps plan the charity events for the organizations she can’t remember the full names of, attends the arbitrarily themed cocktail parties, invites them all over for dinner so she can convince them that she and Robert are happier than they’ve ever been. At the end of the day she’s playing a character, and she’s damn good at it, so good she almost convinces herself. Before she knows it, her day planner is full, and she’s too busy with back to back lunches at the club to think about how miserable all of this makes her.

Because working had been it for her. It had made her feel alive and given her everything she couldn’t get from her personal life. Her business was what had kept her warm at night, what had provided for her and protected her, and she had nurtured it in return, watching it flourish and grow and thrive. But then Brianna came to work and Grace saw her potential, saw the hunger and fire in her eyes that reminded her so much of herself. She knew if she waited too long she’d be forced out, so she did what she could to save herself the embarrassment. She stepped down, handed over the reigns and dried her secretary’s tears on the way out. Decades of backbreaking work and all she has to show for it is a name plate and a miniature bottle of hand sanitizer.

It would be funny, if it didn’t break her heart.

She has to give it to him, of all the ways she’d imagined their marriage falling apart, this was not one of them. If she had to bet, she would’ve put money on losing track of him at the mall, possibly a freak car accident, maybe even incarceration, but Robert’s hidden and apparent flaming homosexuality? Color her surprised.

Except she isn’t, not really, and it makes it all the worse. The warning signs had been there and she’d ignored them from the beginning, mindlessly turning the other way, convincing herself that it was how marriage was for everyone, stark and suffocating. She feels idiotic, truthfully, and the shame of not realizing sooner makes her get in her car at two in the morning, bare faced and pajama clad, looking for anywhere else but somewhere where she has to breathe the same air as him.

She drives for an hour before she decides to park by the boardwalk, and no one’s around except for drug dealers and street walkers. No one to see her gradually lose her mind, debate over whether or not to tie some bricks to her ankles and call it quits. She wouldn’t, really, but the tension in her shoulders is about to drive her crazy and she needs some kind of release.

So she yells, screams at the top of her lungs until her throat is raw, and it’s animal, guttural, wounded because her life has been stolen from her. Forty years of thinking there was nothing more to life than this, that she needed to buck up and get over it, that it was what it was and there was no changing it. Then tonight happens, and Robert drops the bomb that there’s more and she’s never known it, never gotten to experience it, let it pass her by without so much as a second glance.

God, she’s angry, and it coils tight around her, makes her heart rate skyrocket until she can do nothing but pound her fists into the steering wheel. She hits and hits until her hands ache and the car horn sounds into the silence of the night. She’s tired and humiliated in a way she’s not sure she can recover from, not sure she can face in the light of day, and the thought of going back to that big, horrible house is unbearable.

She glances at the time. It’s almost six o’clock. Robert will be out of the house for work in an hour. She leans back in her seat, deciding to wait it out and stay to watch the sunrise, to welcome whatever new fucking existence this will turn out to be.

All she knows is that she’s seventy years old and has a roommate. The only people in the same situation at her age are in assisted living facilities, and the irony of it isn’t lost on her. The double irony of her roommate being her ex-husband’s lover’s ex-wife? Definitely not lost on her.

She could go on and on about the things that drive her crazy; the way that Frankie refuses to wipe her feet at the door, forgets to close the refrigerator after she raids it for munchies, leaves clay covered fingerprints all over the walls. It’s annoying, certainly, and yet oddly comforting. The fact that this house feels lived in, full in a way her other one hadn’t been. Sure, it may require more involved cleaning, and the floors will always be a little bit sticky no matter how much she mops, but at least it’s not vacant, void of any signs of life.

There’s always noise here; it’s never silent or still the way she’s used to it being. She wakes up to the sounds of Frankie chipping away at sculpture in her studio and goes to sleep to the sounds of her trying to learn how to whip and nae nae. When this became her life, she’s not sure, but it’s becoming hard to sleep without Kriss Kross playing from the other room.

She tries to put herself out there and get back in the dating game, but it all feels too stiff, uncomfortable, like she’s trying for something that’s not meant to be. The attention she gets from Byron and Guy is great, really, and it’s more than she’s used to, but it’s like their relationships have no real substance, like they always leave her wanting more. The physical aspect is one thing, but she wants a life with someone again. She wants someone to share a glass of wine and a kiss goodnight with, someone to hold her when she’s falling asleep. It’s all an elaborate pipe dream, she knows, and it’s becoming something she’s resigned herself to never have.

But then Frankie shows her Phil’s account, and it takes her back to that feeling, the one of being wanted, being heard, of hoping for a future. It’s too good to be true, them together after everything that’s happened, and she gets wrapped up in the grandness of it, the romantic-ness of it, like she’s living in a movie. They meet and he still looks the same, sounds the same, still talks to her like he cares to hear her answer, and she loves the way he makes her feel.

Until he makes her feel like a fool, sitting outside his house with the car windows down. He still has a wife, and even if he insists it’s different, it still ruins the illusion. The ink of the real world seeps back into the picture, makes the credits roll too soon, and the ending is left abrupt, unfinished. It really was all too good to be true, this happy ending she thought she’d finally found. It always was, and she’s only capable of seeing it now, once it’s too late.

She drinks herself into a stupor, wallowing in self pity until Frankie pulls her out of it and tells her to get her head on straight. She feels so hopeless, so out of sorts, so acquiescent to floating through the rest of her life. Babe’s party distracts her, at least, until she’s confronted with the fact that she’s going to lose one of her best friends, whether she assists or not.

Babe’s gift gives her purpose again, lets her see a future for herself, a future with Frankie. A future that’s them, together in this house, a brand new business to build. It may not have been what she had pictured, but it’s more than enough.

Robert’s mother had been a bear of a woman, disagreeable and impossible to please. Grace had always tried her hardest to impress her, to get on her good side, but it was impossible, like nothing she ever did was enough. She herself wasn’t enough, and even though she wished she hadn’t cared so much, she did. She would put so much energy into decorating and cooking and cleaning, all so that she may receive a word of kindness from her mother-in-law. A ‘wonderful job, Grace’ or a ‘this veal is lovely, what’s the recipe?’, but she never got one.

She remembers watching the way Robert would retreat into himself when his mother was around, the way he became small and fragile. It made her want to reach out to him, but it was like she didn’t know how to, like she was so out of practice showing anyone affection. She’d stand by the sidelines and watch, and it still makes her feel terrible, like she could have done something but didn’t. At least today she got to make up for it, got to laugh with Robert like she never had when they were married, and in a department store no less.

She tosses it around in her brain, wonders whether she’d have preferred a mother like Barbara Hanson to her own nonexistent one. She chuckles humorlessly at the thought as Frankie sits next to her on the beach, smoking a blunt and raising a brow in question. “What punched you in the giggledick?” she asks.

“I was just,” Grace says, letting out a short sigh. “Thinking about Robert’s mother.”

“Ugh, that sea witch,” Frankie groans, rolling her eyes toward the night sky. “Christ, I remember meeting her at Mallory’s wedding. She asked me if I was ‘aware I was wearing clogs in the house of the Lord.’ You know what I said?”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“I told her if God had a problem, she could take it up with me herself.”

Grace tries not to smile, but she fails and nudges Frankie’s shoulder with her own, looking back to the ocean. The events of the day catch up with her, and she can’t help but think about her own mother. She wonders if she’s still alive, still out there somewhere, if she’s suffering wherever she is. She wonders if she has any brothers or sisters she doesn’t know about, if they know about her, if they wonder about her too. She clenches her jaw, tries not to feel too bitter, too hurt over something that happened over sixty years ago. It’s ancient history now, she thinks. She doesn’t have a right to be angry anymore.

And yet she is, overwhelmed by a visceral hurt that envelops her bones, flows through her bloodstream, makes her muscles ache. The person who was supposed to love her the most had left her. Robert’s mother may have been a bitch, but at least she had stuck around.

“Why do I get the distinct feeling that you’re not telling me something?” Frankie asks again, breaking into her thoughts, and Grace doesn’t want to talk about this. She never wants to talk about this, and she’ll avoid it at all costs, jump into the ocean and swim until she can’t anymore if that’s what it takes to avoid this conversation. But she glances out of the corner of her eye towards Frankie, sees the concern in her eyes, and she bites the inside of her cheek. Damn her.

“My mother,” she starts, and her breath hitches in her throat. “She left us when I was six. No note, no anything,” she looks to her hands to avoid Frankie’s gaze and marvels for a moment at how old they look. “The stuff with Robert today just reminded me. It’s stupid, really.”

“It’s not though, Grace, it’s,” Frankie pauses, shaking her head and looking for the words. “It’s valid. Your feelings are valid.”

Grace scoffs. “Tell that to Robert, to the kids,” she says. “To them I’m nothing but an alcoholic with a dildo company. My mother? She was my hero. ”

“And you’re mine,” Frankie replies resolutely.

“Oh, please.”

“I mean it,” Frankie repeats. “Listen, kid, you may be a crotchety bag of bolts with a penchant for hairspray, but you’re as much of a hero to everyone as your mom was to you.”

Grace’s looks over to her, unsure. “You think so?” she asks.

“I know so,” she insists. “You stayed all those years in that downward spiral of a house, for god’s sake! You didn’t run when the going got tough, you stuck it out. For the kids, for Robert, for that gardener you loved so much.”

“Rico,” Grace corrects tearily.

“That’s right, you did it for Rico!” Frankie smiles and wraps her arm around Grace’s shoulders. Grace’s eyes are far away, like she’s lost at sea. They sit there for awhile in companionable silence before Frankie asks, “What was her name, your mom?”

“Rebecca,” Grace says in a reverent whisper, like it’s holy. “Her name was Rebecca,” and she grabs the blunt from Frankie, takes a long drag, feels the smoke fill her lungs. Frankie’s hand settles warm on her thigh in response. That’s all it takes.

It’s a feeling she’s never experienced before; dry, wracking sobs that take control of her entire body, make her feel like she’s drowning, like she’s barely holding on. She can’t breathe, can’t see straight, and her head pounds, her pulse keeping time in her temples. Every moment of her life plays out in front of her, the losses and the gains and the decisions, the things she wishes she’d done but didn’t. She watches the people she’s loved leave her, sees the unborn son she never got to know, sees the maybes and the might-have-beens. The pain drains out of her, slowly, until there’s nothing left. Her chest aches, her throat is raw and she’s running on empty, like the load she’s been carrying for seventy-two years has all of a sudden been lifted, floating away into the night sky.

It’s starting to rain.

The static in her brain starts to clear, makes it so she can hear Frankie’s voice repeating “I gotcha, I gotcha,” over and over again, rocking them back and forth as Grace trembles in her arms. She’s not sure how long they’ve been this way, only knows it’s been years since someone held her like this without an ulterior motive. Hell, she’s not sure that she’s ever been held quite like this at all. She feels loved.

She sits up and wipes her nose on her sleeve. She’s a disaster, she thinks. A goddamn disaster. She sees herself as if outside her body, and the image is enough to make her shoulders shake, this time from laughter rather than tears. All of a sudden she’s laughing maniacally as the rain starts to fall harder, lightning lighting up the sky before thunder sounds in the distance.

“I think I’m having a mental breakdown!” she yells to Frankie as the thunder booms.

“No shit, Sherlock!” Frankie says as she stands, pulling on Grace’s arm to help her up. “Let’s get you inside before they stick you in a cell!”

They get to the house before they get too drenched, but Grace is still shivering from the cold and the after effects of whatever the hell that was outside. Frankie practically pushes her up the stairs to her room, picking out a pair of pajamas and telling her to put them on before she runs downstairs to make a cup of tea.

Frankie puts her to bed, makes sure she takes her medication, tucks her in like she’s a child. She reaches out to rub away the mascara under her eyes and makes sure her hair is out of her face, and in this moment Grace feels secure, safe, light in a way she can’t remember ever feeling. It’s almost like tomorrow will be the start of something new, something extraordinary.

She sleeps better than she ever has.

Act III

She hadn’t been enough.

She had sat on the beach that night in Frankie’s arms, thinking for whatever reason that this was it, them together. Business partners and best friends for eternity. She had started to feel comfortable, started to look forward to coming home, started to see a future that was uniquely theirs, but Frankie hadn’t felt the same. She’d wanted to fly, to soar, to live a bigger life, and Grace hadn’t been enough for her to stay. At the end of the day, that’s what it came down to.

Now Frankie’s in Santa Fe with Jacob, who Grace wishes to god she could hate, but can’t. She gets it, understands him somehow, knows that if she were in his shoes she’d want to hold onto Frankie, too. Hold onto her quirks and her weirdness, her ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the room. There’s only so many people like that in life, Grace thinks, and she had found one, but now Frankie’s flown the nest and there’s nothing she could have done to make her stay.

Not for lack of trying, though. Grace had poured her heart to her, and there was no stone left unturned, no word left unsaid, nothing she didn’t try to get her to stick around. She had tried her hardest, and when they were up in the balloon she had almost thought that Frankie wouldn’t go. That she’d kiss Jacob goodbye, stay in California with her, keep working and painting and driving her up the wall. She’d been wrong.

She shouldn’t be surprised, with her track record the way it is. The uncanny knack she has for driving people away. It’s her own damn fault, and listening to Frankie’s compliments and promises and believing them had been her own undoing. People never stay, and it’s not until now that she’s finally getting it through her head.

Her mother leaving had hurt, losing her son had been devastating, letting Phil go was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. Why is it, then, that now of all times she feels paralyzed, lost, unable to move on? What is it about Frankie moving away that makes her not able to get out of bed in the morning, too exhausted to even reach for her phone?

She tries not to dwell on it, pretends to be unaffected when anyone asks, claims sickness to avoid the prying eyes of her family. She says 'I’m fine' so many times that it becomes a mantra, becomes convincing enough that even she almost believes it. It doesn’t stop her kids from stopping by the house, though, under the guise of borrowing a book or dropping off cupcakes baked by her grandchildren. When they come they find her still in bed in the mid afternoon, dirty dishes in the sink downstairs and mail piling up in the mailbox.

“This isn’t you, Mom,” Mallory tells her. “Lying in bed like this. It isn’t you.”

And that’s all fine and dandy, she thinks, her child telling her what she is or isn’t, like she has any idea at all who she is or where she’s come from. It’s ridiculous, insulting, and if there’s even a fraction of truth behind it she couldn’t care less.

“Frankie says you’ve been ignoring her calls.” she adds, and just hearing the other woman’s name makes Grace’s heart clench. “She’s worried about you.”

“Not worried enough to come back,” she can’t help but say, and she closes her eyes tight, hoping that the goddess of ineptitude will rain mercy down upon her.

“Is that what you think? That she doesn’t care?” Mallory asks, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Mom, Frankie loves you. She misses you. She had to make an impossible decision.”

“No, she made an easy one,” Grace says as she sits up, unable to take it any longer. “That woman has never given a damn about me. She couldn’t wait for some knight in shining armor to come along and save her from the hellish existence she was forced to share with me after the divorce.”

“I know you don’t believe that.”

“Don’t I?” she challenges, eyes wild. “Tell me then, Mallory. Tell me what I believe,” she says as she lets out a mirthless chuckle. “This should be good, coming from someone who wasn’t even able to hold onto the father of her children.”

“Fuck you,” Mallory spits out, and it feels like a win until she looks up her, tears in her eyes. “Seeing you like this isn’t a joke, Mom. It’s scary. Me and Brianna we’re—we’re scared. We felt like we were just getting to know you and now it’s like.. it’s like you’ve given up.”

Grace reels back and Mallory stands, smoothing the front of her skirt and wiping her eyes. She can’t even look in her mother's direction. “Take a shower,” she says on her way out. “You reek.”

The door closes and the room is quiet, judgmental and suffocating. She sits in stunned silence, mortified, and she doesn’t move for what feels like hours, locked in place until the sun goes down and she’s alone in the dark. A text from Mallory lights up the room, and she scrambles to unlock her phone. The message is nothing but a phone number and a single sentence:

In case you need someone to talk to.

The clock ticks in the corner, keeping time and reminding her how much is left in the session. It’s torture being here, and she’s not sure why she agreed to it, what had compelled her to call the number and make the appointment. She’s not even sure how she got here, sitting across from a therapist that insists she call her by her first name like they’re old war buddies.

“So,” Diana says, breaking the silence. “You’ve gone through a hard time recently.”

“I wouldn’t say a hard time,” Grace insists. “Just some life changes, you know, getting older.”

What am I saying, she thinks, this woman can’t be more than thirteen.

“What kind of changes?”

Grace shrugs. “The usual. Retirement, a divorce...a new business!” she adds proudly.

“A business, that’s big,” Diana says, smiling. “What are you in the business of?”

“Vibrators,” she replies, shoulders straight, “for women with arthritis.”

Diana stares at her in disbelief for a moment, mouth clicking closed before she chuckles. “Well, can’t say that’s what I was expecting. Mind if I ask how you got into the vibrator business?”

“A friend of mine, Frankie, and I started it together after a good friend of ours passed away. She had left me a vibrator, told me it wouldn’t break my heart,” Grace explains, remembering Babe’s note. “Long story short, it was good, but we made a better one.”

“Congratulations,” Diana says. “And is Frankie still in your life?”

Grace’s stomach drops, and she clears her throat. “In and out of it. We were roommates after the divorce.”

“And what brought about the end of your marriage?”

“He—Robert, my ex-husband—he had an affair.”

“What was your reaction to the news?”

Grace blows out a breath, shoulders tensing and foot bouncing up and down. “Anger?” she says, like it’s a question. “Betrayal, confusion...hurt?”

Diana nods. “You loved him.”

“Yes and no,” Grace says, and Diana raises a brow in question. “I don’t think I loved him, really, looking back on it now. Not like you’re supposed to love your husband, anyway. I thought our marriage was how it was for everyone, but it was almost like,” she searches for the words. “It was almost like we were business partners.”

“Like you and Frankie are business partners?”

“That’s different.”

“How so?”

“Frankie is,” Grace pauses, taking a breath. “She’s different from anyone I’ve ever known. She’s not your average run-of-the-mill grandmother, she’s...she’s no-nonsense. She doesn’t bullshit you, she tells it like it is, but it’s all out of a place of love and understanding,” Grace smiles to herself. “And she’s smart, god, she’s smart, not that she’d let you know at first glance. She’s youthful, and easy going, and artistic, she’s…” she trails off. “She’s nothing like Robert.”

Diana smiles softly. “Where is she now?”

Grace’s eyes move to her feet. “She’s in Santa Fe. With her boyfriend,” she says, grinding her teeth. “She moved there a few weeks ago.”

“What about the business?”

Grace scoffs. “Wouldn’t I like to know.”

There’s silence for another moment, and the clock keeps ticking, seconds passing slowly. “She said I was her hero,” Grace says, unprompted. “Said I could do anything, told me to believe in myself. She built me up and made me feel like there was more to life and then she left.”

Diana eyes her from across the room but doesn’t say anything, and it’s like Grace can’t stop herself. “And it would have been fine if it had been three years ago, but now? We have the business, you know, and we have the house. Bud and Alison are going to have a baby and Robert and Sol are annoying the shit out of me with their pity dinner party invitations, and it’s like,” she starts to tear up. “It’s like I can’t do this without her. Like I can’t fucking live without her, which would be hilarious if you knew us.”

A tear falls and she wipes it away angrily, embarrassed. It's quiet again, and Diana furrows her brow. It looks like she’s fighting an internal war with herself. “Grace, may I ask,” she says, leaning forward, “and don’t get me wrong when I ask this, but is it possible that you have feelings for this woman? For Frankie?”

Grace crinkles her nose, confused. “Feelings? As in romantically?” she blinks. “No, I–I’m not a,” she glances around the room, lowering her voice, “a lesbian.”

“Does that word bother you?” Diana asks.

“No! No, it just,” Grace stutters. “It doesn’t apply to me.”

“Okay,” Diana says, and she glances at her watch. “It looks like we’re out of time. Since this was a preliminary session we don’t take up the full hour but if you’d li–”

“That’s it?" Grace asks, agitated. "You’re just going to leave me with that offhand accusation and no answers?”

“It wasn’t an accusation,” Diana insists, “and therapy is a place for you to talk out what’s going on in your head, Grace. We’re not going to solve the world’s mysteries in one session,” she stands and leads Grace towards the door. “I’d love to see you next week, though. Same time?”

Grace nods dumbly in response, fiddling with the strap of her purse as she makes her way out into the hallway. She’s halfway down the hall before she hears a voice call after her.

“My advice?” Diana says. “Give her a call.”

She gets home after sitting in traffic for an hour and a half, and she’s exhausted the minute she crosses the threshold. Tossing her purse and keys onto the counter, she opens the fridge to find seven different kinds of hummus that Frankie had left behind. She’s not hungry, hasn’t been for weeks, but the sight still makes her smile, makes her heart ache in some way. She opens the freezer and grabs a bottle of vodka instead; looks like she’ll be drinking her dinner tonight.

She makes herself a martini and sits on the couch, opening the book she’s nearly finished with. She stares at the page, reading it over and over again but not digesting the information, like she’s unable to, caught up on Diana’s words from earlier.

Is it possible you have feelings for her?

God, what a crock of bullshit. She’d always thought therapy was overrated, but at least now she has the evidence to prove it. Her in love with Frankie? Absolutely ridiculous. She’s never heard anything so stupid. They’re friends and barely friends at that, anymore. It’s a miracle the woman got her therapist’s license, with these unfounded observations.

She downs the rest of her drink and makes another, and another, and another. The night seems to pass her by, and before she knows it she’s drunk, lying on the couch in the dead of night and humming mindlessly to herself. The phone is sitting on the coffee table and it catches her eye as she sits up, biting her fingernails and remembering Diana’s advice. Frankie. She should call Frankie.

She’s clumsily dialing before she can stop herself, and it rings for an eternity before getting sent to voicemail.

“Hi, Frankie,” she says after the beep, and her face is so warm. “God, you’re probably asleep. Hopefully you are. The doctor said you should be getting at least eight hours and I know how addicted you are to infomercials after midnight, so,” she takes a breath. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. You’ll never guess what I did today, and no, it had nothing to do with water sports.

“I went to see a therapist. And apparently—drumroll please—I’m a lesbian!” she takes a sip of her drink, some sloshing over the sides of the glass. “And not just any lesbian, either, but a lesbian who’s deeply, madly, overwhelmingly in love with you. Isn’t that hilarious? I just had to tell you, you know, since you’re off living your bigger purpose in Santa Fe with Jacob and I’m just here in our empty house being... a lesbian.”

She swallows and stares straight ahead, seeing her reflection in the glass of the door that leads to the deck. It scares her for a moment, makes her think there’s someone else looking back at her, but she reaches up to touch her face and the reflection follows. It’s just her, drunk on a couch in the middle of the night talking to Frankie’s voicemail.

“I wish you were here,” she says, broken. “You’d be able to help me make sense out of all of this, talk me down, tell my therapist to go fuck herself,” she sniffs. “But you’re not, you’re just..you’re 840 miles away. I looked it up. 840 fucking miles, Frankie. We haven’t been that far apart since that failed Burning Man trip two years ago.”

It’s here that she realizes she’s started crying and she hates it, hates that she’s this person, drunk and lonely and crying because she didn’t get her way. But it’s like she can’t stop, like she’s experiencing the worst case of word vomit known to man, and before she knows it she hears herself sobbing into the phone. “Come back,” she pleads. “Just–come back, Frankie, I–”

She gasps, realization hitting her, and she scrambles to hang up. She clutches the phone in her hands and looks at her reflection, who’s staring shocked back at her.

What had she done?

It’s two days with not so much as a peep from Frankie, and if Grace thought she’d been unable to function before, this is a whole other story. Now all she does is sit and wait by the phone, ignores calls from everyone else just in case Frankie calls back. She doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, barely sleeps. She just stares at the phone, full of regret.

She can barely remember what she’d said besides come back, but she’s sure it’s humiliating, sure it’s something she’ll never live down if she ever even hears from Frankie again. God, she had been so stupid, so out of control. It’s just that she’s so unused to spiraling like this without Frankie by her side, it’s like she barely knows how to stand up without the other woman to lean on.

She flip flops between thinking about Frankie and thinking about herself, about the question Diana had posed. Her emotions range from laughing at the sheer thought of it to white hot rage at the accusation, and the whole thing has her thrown for a loop. She can’t be gay. She was married to a man, she’s had sex with men, she finds men attractive, for the most part. Phil had wanted to be with her, and she’d wanted to be with Phil, it just didn’t work out because—

Because she’d called it off.

Shit, she thinks, but it’s all circumstantial. She’d called it off with Phil, so what? He still had a wife, and Grace couldn’t have snuck around behind her back like that, no matter what the underlying circumstances were. Things went sour with Guy, sure, but she had just gotten divorced and she hadn’t known what she wanted yet. The thing with Byron was a mistake from the get-go.

She sighs. It’s not like this for other women her age, they don’t have to second guess themselves like this, don't have to rack their brains for information about themselves, not unless they have dementia. She’s always been confident in who she is, who she’s loved, except, well. Now she’s not entirely sure she’s ever really been in love, like the curtain has been lifted to reveal the fact that she doesn’t know herself nearly as well as she thought she did.

She’d never been boy crazy as a teenager, there’d only been one-off dates and badly planned proms. The only constant of her formative years had been Maureen McCloskey, and even she hadn’t stayed around long. Grace still feels that heartache though, the hole Maureen had made when she’d left her behind. Looking back on it, Grace thinks, it’s almost like Maureen broke her heart.

Which is completely and utterly normal for teenage girls. They share a bond, don’t they? They tell each other everything, share their lives, their feelings. They grow attached, and that’s...that’s normal.

Isn’t it?

She’s on the edge of hyperventilating, because she’s not gay, she can’t be gay, there’s no way in the entire world, the entire universe, that she’s gay. Robert’s gay! It’s not possible for two spouses who were married to each other to both be gay. There must be an unspoken agreement somewhere, a document that declares it legally impossible.

A document like their marriage license, the one that she hadn’t really wanted to sign but had anyway. She had known she didn’t love Robert the way she should, the way her parents had loved each other in the early years, but that was life, wasn’t it? She loved him enough to start a life with him, a partnership. It was enough, the two of them together. They were enough.

Until they weren’t and Robert fell in love with Sol, and she fell in love with her business, and they lived separate lives while still sleeping in the same bed. It hadn’t bothered her the way it should have, maybe, but it was the natural progression of things. It was how all marriages ended up in the end, right?

She stands up and starts to pace, because the fact that she’s even humoring the words of that delusional therapist is insanity. It’s just a word, a concept, an identity that doesn’t apply to her, so why does she feel like it’s crawling underneath her skin, seeping out of her pores, making her itch? It’s all too much, like she needs to run, escape from herself.

“I just thought–I thought we–”

“You thought wrong.”

She remembers that night, that conversation, the spark she’d felt that caused her to panic, to run, to feel sick to her stomach. Karen had been nothing but kind, funny, caring, and Grace had destroyed her, made her feel small and pathetic, told her she had been imagining things. She hadn’t known it then but she thinks now that she had wanted it, yearned for it in a way she didn’t realize she was capable of.

Fuck, Grace thinks, room spinning. She thinks she might be gay.

“Hey, stranger,” she hears behind her. Great, she thinks, just what she needs. A hallucination to wrap up her panic attack with a nice little ribbon. She turns around, though, and Frankie’s standing there, real, alive, wearing the most ridiculous outfit she’s ever seen. She steps back in surprise, legs shaky.

“What are you doing here?” she breathes.

“You called, you sounded like you were in trouble,” Frankie says. “It took two trains, a skateboard, and a very moody alpaca named Pat to get here, but here I am.”

“Seriously?”

“Hell no,” Frankie laughs. “Jacob drove me.”

“Jacob’s here,” Grace says, her shoulders falling dejectedly.

Frankie flinches. “He left, actually, after he dropped me off. He wasn’t so keen on coming back.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“He’s not,” Frankie says as she scratches her head. “He’s going back to Santa Fe.”

“But you’re here,” Grace says, confused.

“I know that, dummy,” Frankie replies, rolling her eyes.

“How are you going to get back?”

“For Christ’s sake, Hanson, quit being so dense,” Frankie steps forward, grabbing her by the shoulders. “I’m not. I dropped my stuff in the studio before I came in.”

“You mean you’re back? You’re actually back, for good?”

“You needed me,” Frankie says. “And Santa Fe wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. There were too many hipsters and it was hot as balls. Plus this beautiful skin burns easily.”

“But what about Ja–”

“I don’t want to talk about Jacob,” she says. “Now can you just shut up and hug me already?”

Frankie pulls her in for an embrace and she melts into it, like she’s herself again, like she can finally breathe for the first time in a month. “God, I missed you,” she says into Frankie’s neck.

“I missed you, too,” Frankie tells her, pulling back. “Listen, not to break up this glorious reunion or anything, but are we going to talk about that message?”

Grace steps out of Frankie’s arms and tries to put as much space between them as possible. “Oh, I–” she starts, “I was drunk, rambling. I hadn’t slept in days.”

Frankie narrows her eyes. “So you didn’t really go see a therapist who propelled you into a widespread gay panic?”

“Not in so many words, no,” she replies, sitting down on the couch and staring at the floor.

“Grace,” Frankie warns, sitting down next to her. “What’s going on with you?”

Grace just shrugs, like she has too many things to say and doesn’t know where to start. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she says, finally.

“How do you mean?”

“I didn’t love Robert, I didn’t love Guy... I thought I loved Phil but now I’m not so sure, and...” she trails off, lost for words again.

“And?” Frankie asks, ducking to catch her eye.

All of a sudden she feels nervous in a way she never has before, like her entire life has led to whatever she chooses to say next. Her heart is about to pound out of her chest and her hands are shaking so badly she has to grip onto the edge of the couch cushions. Frankie looks at her, kind, warm, open, and she takes a breath.

“And all I’ve thought about for the last three weeks is how not-sticky the floor is.”

Frankie tilts her head, confused, and Grace continues. “The entire time I’ve known you, you’ve driven me crazy. Back when the kids were young you were like this,” she looks to the ceiling, “this wild woman who did what she wanted and didn’t apologize for it. It wasn’t what I was used to, it wasn’t what I had known. I had known life to be cut and dry, cookie cutter, and then you came along with this energy and this zest for life and I was jealous. I treated you so terribly,” she says, and her voice breaks on the last word.

Frankie shakes her head. “C’mon, Grace, we’re past this–”

“Let me finish,” Grace insists, and Frankie’s hand reaches out for hers, needing the connection. “Then the divorce happened, and I was heartbroken, but I was more heartbroken over the fact that life had happened without me really living it, that Robert and Sol had known happiness for twenty years and I had just known the loneliness that Robert left me alone in that house with.”

“Jackass,” Frankie interjects.

“And then I moved in with you,” Grace smiles. “This woman who I thought I hated, who drove me crazy, who I had nothing in common with, and I,” she swallows, lip quivering, “I fell in love with her. I fell in love with her like I’ve fallen in love with every woman I’ve ever known, and I was too stupid to see it until it was too late.”

The room is silent, deafening, and she feels nauseous, feels surreal, like she’s not really living in this moment, like it’s some sort of elaborate dream. Except it isn’t, and Frankie’s hand is still in hers, and she’s not saying anything, not reacting. Grace wants to run. “Say something,” she pleads.

“Jacob said if I came back we were over,” Frankie says, finally. “He said that if one phone call from you was enough for me to up and leave him, that I needed to seriously consider where my priorities lied.”

“What did you do?” Grace asks.

Frankie shrugs. “I’m here now, aren’t I?” she tells her, and she smiles. “I went on and on to you before I left about how I needed to fly and soar and see the world, to have a life that was filled with a bunch of different things but,” Frankie crinkles her nose, “with you I’m already flying, I’ve already got a bunch of different things, our things. I’ve got Vybrant and Del Taco and Cinnabon, and that’s enough. It’s more than enough. Grace, you are more than enough.”

“Really?” Grace says, voice small and eyes teary.

“Really,” Frankie replies. “God, you’re a loon. But you’re my loon, and I love ya, Grace Hanson.”

Frankie leans in and kisses her, and for the first time in her life Grace sees fireworks.

It’s like a part of her has been awakened, like this version of herself that she’s never known existed is now real, alive, tangible. Everything makes sense, all the pieces fit into place and she can see the full picture, see the real meaning. She’s living in the movie she never thought she’d get to see.

She’s in love.

She barely recognizes herself in the mirror now, can’t believe that this is actually her life, that she gets to be with the person she loves like this forever. She wakes up every morning to Frankie in bed beside her and she feels light, full, content as Frankie holds her in her arms, the sun rising over the ocean.

It had been a change, at first. She was still reeling from the discovery of her sexuality and Frankie was still dealing with the loss of her relationship with Jacob, but they took things slow, guided them along, made sure to be careful with something that was fragile, delicate, worth it. A year later and Grace can’t stop saying the word lesbian, can’t stop reading and learning and realizing more and more about herself. It’s like she’s making up for lost time.

She thinks back to her and Frankie’s first date, the one where Frankie had insisted they go rollerskating. To her, it seemed like a broken hip waiting to happen, but Frankie said she deserved to go on every date she never got to when she was young, to experience the things she’d missed out on. So they’d gone, and Grace had held onto the wall of the rink the entire time, Frankie’s hand in her back pocket as she pulled them along. Rollerskating wasn’t for them, turns out, but the dinner afterwards on the deck back at the house, where they watched the sunset and breathed in the air of possibility, of promise... it was everything she could've ever dreamed of.

The kids had gone ballistic when they’d found out, a family meeting that had dissolved into confused voices shouting over each other, and Grace remembers making eye contact with Mallory over the chaos, mouthing an ‘I’m sorry’ and a ‘thank you’ as she squeezed Frankie’s hand in her own. She remembers the way her daughter looked at her, like she was in awe, like she was proud, like Grace was her hero. Grace wraps up that feeling, stores it away for safekeeping, carries it around in her heart.

She’s still the same woman after everything. She’s still competitive, organized, sometimes harsh in a way she doesn’t mean to be, but she’s also genuine, real, true to herself like she’s never been before. She’s not perfect, and yet Frankie knows all these things about her, knows every part of her, knows where she’s come from and where she’s been, and she chooses to stick around anyway. No one in her life has ever stayed around, even the ones that loved her, but Frankie’s still here, still holding her at the end of the day, still getting Cheeto dust handprints all over her every time they make out on the couch.

It makes her feel like maybe things happened the way they were supposed to happen. The love of her life had taken seventy years to get to her, sure, but she wouldn’t trade the journey for anything. Wouldn’t trade the person she is, the people she’s met, because in the end it all led her here, to this moment; her head in Frankie’s lap as they sit on the couch and watch a dog show on TV.

“Maybe we should get one of those,” Frankie says, combing her fingers through Grace’s hair.

“A dog?”

“No, some guy to leash us up and take us on walks around an arena,” Frankie says, rolling her eyes. “Yes, Grace, a dog.”

Grace smiles to herself. “That would be nice,” she says.

It would be nice, and it is nice, the easiness of their lives together, the feeling of giving love and getting it in return. This happy ending she’s been given isn’t lost on her, and she thanks whatever god there is for it every day, every hour, every minute.

“You’re leaking again,” Frankie tells her, wiping away the tears Grace didn’t know she was crying. Frankie’s used to this by now, Grace crying for seemingly no reason, like during lunch or at the bowling alley, in the car on the way to Robert and Sol’s. “What is it now?” she asks, and Grace just smiles, at a loss.

“I think I’m happy.”

fin