Chapter 9
Danny
“So, how are you?” I ask, while she stuffs her face full of my fries she didn’t want.
“How are you?” she echoes incredulously, a tiny piece of potato falling from her lips.
Bewitching, my Gracie girl. A fry predator, but bewitching nonetheless.
“How…are you?” I parrot.
She stops chewing. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry, I thought we were repeating each other for the bit you started.” I shrug and take a sip of my pop. “I’ve got to be honest, it’s not my favorite bit we’ve done.”
Gracie rolls those angelic, multicolored eyes at me and takes a sip of ginger ale. Ginger ale is her favorite pop. It’s also something I didn’t know existed outside of airplanes until I saw her chugging a can of it freshman year of high school.
“I’m simply wondering why that’s the first question you’re going with,” she explains, like an alternative is obvious.
“Which question should I be going with?”
She raises an eyebrow. “I don’t know, maybe ‘why are you here after ten years?’”
I roll my shoulders back to release some tension. “I’m just happy you’re here. Does it matter why?”
Her eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
Exhausted from the back and forth, I rub the back of my neck. It’s clear that we’re at odds with our goals. Gracie, who wants to do whatever she came to do and leave again, and me, who is desperately clinging to the hope that she might stay for more than one night.
My chest rises on a deep breath. “Honestly, Gracie, I don’t care why you’re here. Just that you are.”
“Well, that’s not really—”
“I’m grateful for whatever force of nature or string of decisions that brought you here, more grateful than you know.”
A flicker of sadness flashes in her eyes before she takes another bite of her burger.
Focusing on the steady rhythm of my heartbeat, I add, “But now that you are here, all I want to know is, well, everything about you. In painstaking detail. I want to know all of it.”
She chews thoughtfully. “I guess it couldn’t hurt, catching up. You know, while I’m here. Just for the night.”
“Exactly. Now you’re getting it.” I nod, a little too eagerly.
I know there’s plenty between us to overcome.
But our friendship was always something special, something more.
By the time we were eighteen years old, we’d faced more hardships than most do in their entire lives.
And we faced them together. We can get there again—I just need time to prove that to her.
It only takes about ten minutes for Gracie to eat all the fries and most of her burger.
She takes a slow sip of ginger ale, and her eyes wander.
I’ve been cataloging her bland reactions to the interior of my house.
She doesn’t appear excited by my “accessible beige” walls.
I haven’t taken her on a house tour yet, but I know this woman has the patience of a toddler in an ice cream shop.
Now that her plate is clean, she starts swinging her feet back and forth and tapping them softly against the island.
Grinning at her restlessness, I decide to put her out of her misery. “Do you want me to show you around, Gracie?”
“Obviously.”
And with that, she walks out of the kitchen. To give me a tour of my house, apparently.
We make our way to the sunroom first. Next, we visit the laundry room and then the game room. I stay close to her side, shadowing her as she tests out the no-touch sink in both of the first floor bathrooms.
“I feel like I’m trying to pass a home inspection right now,” I joke.
“You’ll need to pass a health inspection if you keep hovering,” she retorts.
I dramatically place a hand over my heart. “Oh, I’m so sorry to disrupt your forensic sweep of my home.”
Gracie avoids eye contact with me, but her lips turn up as she continues to weave in and out of each room.
She pauses before we meander upstairs to check out the guest bedrooms. “You know, this place could do with a little personality.”
“What I missed most about you, Gracie, is the way you were always so subtle with me,” I tease.
The truth is, she was only bold with me.
If teachers or classmates were asked to describe Gracie, I have no doubt they would have said “shy” or introverted.
Neither of those terms apply to the girl I know.
If she was quiet, it was out of necessity.
She was constantly assessing who was safe and who would make fun of her for something out of her control.
The list of people she fully trusted growing up was limited.
Me, my little sister, Mae, my mom. Later, Ben.
And regardless of what she said when she ended things with me, I never took that trust lightly.
“In all seriousness, you can take as much time as you’d like touring this place.
” I slow my pace. Gracie slows down, too, as she approaches the last guest room, the one she’ll be staying in.
After years of trailing each other around, I know better than to rush her.
Hurrying Gracie only ever triggered her stutter.
Questions I don’t have the right to ask leave me wondering how she copes with rushing today.
Who reminds her to blow out the candles?