Free Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon Page A

been pressuring Merilee to retire as well.
    When the storm of tears was over, the nose blown, Merilee said, Saying Grace / 53
    “He’s found a house he wants to buy, where he can fish. That’s all he likes to do, besides work. He likes to fish.”
    “What about you?”
    Rue knew without asking that what Merilee liked was her garden and her job and her church. None of them portable. “We’ll be closer to the children…” said Merilee in her kind, piping voice, and started to cry again. The children were both in Massachusetts.
    “I can’t imagine the school without you,” Rue said, and meant it.
    “What will I do?” She was wondering equally what would Merilee do. Retirement struck her as an awful prospect, if you loved what you were doing. As she knew Merilee did.
    Merilee said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Why don’t you give the job to Mrs. Goldsborough?”
    “Brilliant,” said Rue. “That’s brilliant. Oh, Merilee.”
    E mily sat in a deep chair in Rue’s office, looking defeated.
    “I knew I wasn’t doing very well, but I didn’t think I was going to get fired.”
    “I’m not firing you. I’m offering you a job that pays better.”
    “But I wasn’t doing well, was I?”
    Rue let a moment pass. “No.”
    “I don’t know how to be a secretary—”
    “You’re smart, and you’re sensible. You’ll be my backstop…. I make mistakes, and I need a friend to catch what I drop and point me in the right direction. I can teach you what you don’t know.”
    Emily was not used to being found wanting, especially in her own eyes, and lately she was getting a steady diet of it.
    “I feel like I got called to the principal’s office and expelled.”
    “That happened to me,” said Rue.
    Emily had expected Rue to comfort her, which would have annoyed her. This, however, was interesting.
    “You got expelled?”
    “Yes, from boarding school.”
    Emily looked at Rue with new eyes. “ You did? What did you do?”
    “I thought the school was a wicked place. It was encouraging all our snobbery and self-importance and not teaching us all that much.
    And the rules were irrational, designed to make us easy to handle, not to teach us anything about being decent members of a community. So I decided to try to break them all.”
    Emily didn’t know what to think—of her own boarding school self, who indeed had been a “good” girl, quite satisfied with the status quo, or of Malone, who was showing signs of becoming quite a burr under the saddle as her hormones kicked in.
    “And did you? Break them all?”
    “Most of them. But I didn’t mean to get caught.”
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    “Were your parents furious?”
    “Let’s say they were in character. My mother was embarrassed…as if something had happened to her, not to me. I remember her saying
    ‘Rue, ever since you were a little girl, you’ve seen everything from your own point of view. You can never see till it’s too late how much you are annoying people.’”
    “Oh dear,” said Emily.
    “Of course, it hurt so much because it was true. I hope it’s less true now.”
    “What did your father say?”
    Rue smiled. “He, who always did see other points of view, saw that apart from being stunned and angry and ashamed of myself, I had never failed before, and I was frightened. I thought my life was ruined. No other school would take me, I wouldn’t get to go to college, and my whole life would be blighted by one mistake. So he came to me that night after dinner, when I was holed up brooding, and he stood in the door and said, ‘Rue, it’s silly for a girl like you to worry what to do with her life. You should just become queen of a small country.’”
    Emily laughed. Rue laughed too, her wonderful rich, deep laugh.
    “What school was it?” Emily asked.
    “A New England one where my mother had gone. I was the first person from our town to go away to school. Maybe the last.”
    There was another silence. Rue sat quietly.
    “I think I