The Time Keepers

Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17 Long Island, 1979

G RACE LEFT THE MOTHERHOUSE PROMISING S ISTER M ARY Alice she would come at least twice a week to help tutor B?o and the other children with their reading. She could do that easily and also maintain her own household obligations. It was a chance for her to give back in a meaningful way. But she also knew that seeing the Sisters at work had awakened her own yearning to do more than the daily drudgery of cooking, cleaning, and driving.

She had stored many of Katie and Molly’s old picture books in the attic, and Grace knew if she made a few calls around the neighborhood, she’d be able to fill the whole Pontiac wagon with boxes of old books and toys.

That afternoon, she was eager to share the good news with the girls when they came home from school. But to her distress, Katie didn’t seem to have any interest at all in her mother’s new volunteer endeavors, and Molly seemed more concerned about how nuns could actually shelter men inside the motherhouse.

“They’re not sharing rooms with the nuns, sweetheart. All the families are living in a separate building.”

“Oh.” Molly seemed mildly disappointed.

“Can you do me a favor and go to the attic and bring down some of those boxes of your old picture books? You too, Katie.”

Katie was buried in the open refrigerator, pulling out snacks of Jell-O pudding. She didn’t bother responding to Grace.

Grace felt her chest tighten. No one had told her it would be this difficult to raise a teenage girl. Every day she wondered how Katie would act once she got home from school. Her moodiness was often unleashed on Grace. The little girl who used to rush off the elementary school bus into her mother’s arms had long since vanished, transformed into a sullen, sarcastic young woman. Grace missed the old Katie.

“I need you to help your sister with the books, Katherine. Those boxes will be heavy.”

Katie licked the chocolate off her spoon. “In a second, Mom. I need to relax. I just got home.”

“Fine, but once you’re done eating …”

Katie rolled her eyes. “Okay, but first I need to call Amy about history homework and Maggie about …”

Grace bit her lip. Her daughter had a thousand excuses ready just to avoid helping out. And Grace thought even one was too much.

Grace had not been prepared for a snarky teenager at home, a body that had grown soft in various places, and her own racing mind that often made it difficult for her to sleep.

It felt like some sort of cruel joke that she would feel her own attractiveness slipping away just as her two daughters were coming into their own. Although Katie had yet to recognize her nascent beauty, Grace could see it pushing forth like a spring bulb, each day closer to its full bloom. Katie was tall and slender, and her years of swimming at the local beach club had made her shoulders broad and her legs lean. With her blond hair pulled back into a high ponytail, it was easy to see the strong chiseled features of Tom’s mother, Rosie. Her high forehead and small, straight nose.

Grace desperately wanted to take a washcloth and scrub off all the Maybelline mascara and raspberry-pink lip gloss that Katie put on whenever she went out with her friends on the weekend. Didn’t Katie realize how beautiful she looked without it? She wished her daughter would appreciate how lucky she was to just be able to roll out of bed and run a comb through her hair.

Grace now viewed her own face like a daily science experiment. She never had bags under her eyes before, not even when the girls were in diapers and she would spend all night trying to soothe them back to sleep. Yet here she was with little pillows underneath her eyes, and though she tried to encourage her teenage daughter to embrace the face God had given her, she spent increasingly more time each morning armed with her concealer stick in hand.

She heard a voice in her head telling her how shallow she was to be so preoccupied by maintaining her appearance. The women of her childhood village never spent time in front of mirrors appraising every inch of their faces or their figures. She had no idea if her mother had even owned a tube of lipstick.

She told herself perhaps she wasn’t busy enough. Everyone seemed to need her less and less these days. Molly was no longer a baby, and middle school had catapulted her closer to being a teenager like her older sister. The math was easy enough to do on her fingers. In six years, she and Tom would have an empty house, and she’d be that much older, approaching her midforties. Her mother had died when she was barely fifty-five. That age had seemed neither old nor young to Grace when she returned to her village, pregnant with Molly for her mother’s funeral. On that trip, it seemed to Grace that nearly every young woman in the town was pregnant. Even her shy baby brother, Joe, had managed to find himself a wife, and her sister-in-law greeted her with a big round belly and a cup of tea.

It was a strange and painful trip to be home, despite the excitement of her second pregnancy, the wounds of never having made peace with her mother still ran deep.

“How can you do this to us, Gracie?” her mother had sobbed on the telephone when she first shared the news of her engagement to Tom. A terrible pause followed, filled with the static of the long-distance connection.

“I already lost one daughter.” Her mother’s voice heaved with pain. “Now I’m losing two.”

Grace knew it would upset her parents when they heard she was marrying outside the Church. But she still retained her optimism, hoping that when they met Tom, they’d both recognize what a good man he was.

“You’re not losing me,” she insisted. “I am still your daughter. I will still go to Mass. Still go to confession.”

“And your children?” Her mother’s voice was now all but inconsolable. “Without a baptism, do you know where they’ll end up?”

Grace’s throat tightened.

She wondered if her mother had forgotten how not a single person in the village—except for Delilah—would help bury Bridey, despite her having two devout parents.

How Christian had every one of the other men and women of Glennagalt been when they cast out an innocent child? Not very Christian at all.

In their shared family house, her brother Joe’s fishing jacket hung on a peg next to her father’s. Two pairs of tall rubber boots stood beside her nephew’s smaller pair. When they buried her mother, it was next to Bridey’s small grave, now weathered from so many years of wind and beating rain.

Her father’s stoic veneer vanished during her mother’s funeral. Standing in front of the two tombstones, he seemed to finally realize that life, no matter how many years you lived, always seemed far too short in the end.

Tom had quietly shadowed Grace during the trip, making sure she took rests so her feet didn’t swell and reminding her to eat despite her lack of appetite. Their baby had just started to kick, and when they lay next to each other at night, tucked together in the room of the small bed-and-breakfast, Tom told her how meaningful it was for him to finally see where Grace came from.

“I can almost taste the salt in the air,” he said, turning to her and placing a palm on her belly. “And it’s so easy to imagine you as a little girl picking flowers in the glen.”

She smiled, warming at his touch. “I’m glad you’re here with me now. It’s so hard to be pregnant and burying my mother at the same time. And my dad … he looks at me with such sadness.…”

Tom lifted his hand and caressed the side of her cheek. The sound of his wristwatch ticked in her ear.

“This has to be tough on him, Gracie. I saw your mother’s wedding portrait today, and I had to do a double take—for a second there, I thought I was looking at your twin.”

Grace closed her eyes. “People used to tell me that a lot when I was a teenager.”

“I bet there’s a part of him that sees your mother.…”

He found her hand and squeezed her fingers. “You’re pregnant and you’re at this exciting new crossroads, and he’s not looking forward at all, Grace. He’s looking backward, and, God, it must be gutting.”

She knew Tom was right, so in the few days they had left in the village, she let her heart soften and put aside the pain of how her parents, particularly her mother, had reacted when she and Tom announced their engagement.

On their trip, she felt she witnessed her father’s heart cracking open just far enough to realize that she had married a good man.

“Take good care of my Gracie,” he told Tom the night before they departed. “She’s the only girl I have left.”

Four years after her mother’s funeral, she returned to Ireland to bury her father. His death felt harder somehow than when they had buried her mother. As she stood in the rain—clasping the hands of both of her girls, Tom’s umbrella held over them—it struck Grace, as her father’s coffin was lowered into the ground, that she would never be someone’s little girl again. Her daughters’ warm fingers wiggled inside her own, and she gripped them even more tightly. The girls’ restlessness, their vitality that rose from their every pore, seemed so precious to Grace at that moment. The weight of death and the cycle of life flowed through her as the priest read the burial rites. The torch had been passed on, and she knew one day her daughters would be mothers themselves, and if she lived long enough, she would find herself with aching bones and liver-spotted skin just like everyone else.

Grace took comfort in that last trip to Ireland before her father passed away. She was grateful that Tom had encouraged her to have empathy for her dad, to try to heal the wounds between them. During her final days in Glennagalt, she had gone down to the docks with Joe and her father and helped them paint the family’s old fishing boat. It was positioned on cement blocks, its wooden belly no longer submerged in the icy Atlantic waters, and had already been stripped and sanded.

They bought two cans of bright blue paint and a smaller yellow one for the trim. They each clasped the handle of a single fat brush to coat the wood with the exact shade Grace had picked to match the bluest sky.

“Dad wants to finally put a name on the boat when we’re done painting,” her brother whispered in her ear that afternoon. It was something her father had always mocked when they were younger: “A boat is just a boat,” he’d answer whenever asked if his skiff had a name. Now, after all this time, she assumed sentimentality had gotten the best of him. Grace imagined that perhaps her father would now choose to call it Bridey , to show her sister’s name had finally managed to rise above the sea after all these years. Or perhaps name it after her late mother, in honor of her quiet endurance. But when Joe finally offered him a jar and a thin brush for the dedication, her father’s weathered hand wrote the five letters out carefully. He named the boat Grace .