Free Saving Grace by Jane Green Page B

powerless over her, she thought, walking out of the hostel and heading for the car.
    ‘Well?’ Seeing Patrick was comforting, safe, and it was only when she sat in the passenger seat, closed the door, and turned to Patrick to try and talk that she found she couldn’t.
    Shaking her head to dislodge the lump, instead tears leaked out of her eyes and Patrick leaned over and took her in his arms as she sobbed.
    ‘I’m okay,’ she said, attempting to smile when the sobs had calmed down. ‘I should know by now that I can’t ever expect anything. I should know by now that nothing has ever changed, nothing will ever change. I can’t help her. I’ve spent my life trying to help her, but I can’t.’
    Six months later, Sally was dead. A heart attack. Shocking in someone so young, but the alcohol abuse had aged her and worn her body down to the point where it couldn’t tolerate life.
    Relief. That was what Grace felt when she got the news. Swiftly followed by guilt. She never told anyone about her mother. Not even Ted. It is, she supposes, her guilty secret. The shame of having a mother who was mentally ill, and the fear that this too may happen to her.

Nine
     
    ‘W here have you been?’ Ted is thundering up the path from his barn, his face a mask of frustration, as Grace gets out the car. Immediately, she feels her body start to tighten. Tingling starting in her arms and legs.
    It is exactly what used to happen to her when she was a child, in the face of her mother’s rages. Grace is well aware that each time this happens she regresses to that same, scared child, but there doesn’t seem to be anything she can do to change it.
    Ted’s anger, his dissatisfaction, his rage, even when it has nothing to do with her, even though she should be used to it after all these years, still causes her to tighten, her breath to shorten as her throat constricts, as her mind searches for the perfect words that will calm him down.
    ‘Is everything all right?’ she calls, her arms filled with shopping she picked up after Harmont House.
    ‘Does everything look like it’s all right?’ he says, disdain and derision in his voice as Grace concentrates on keeping her breathing steady, on staying calm, for one of them has to remain the adult here and it is never, ever Ted.
    ‘What can I do to help?’
    ‘You can buy some goddamned ink for the goddamned printer,’ he says. ‘I needed to print my first draft today and it ran out after twenty-eight pages.’
    ‘Did you look in the office supply cupboard?’ Grace says. ‘Ellen usually kept spares in there.’
    ‘Of course I looked in the office supply cupboard. What do you think I am,
stupid
? There’s nothing there. No one has replaced the cartridges since last time.’ He fixes a glare on Grace, as if it is her fault, for Grace is quick to shoulder the blame if it will appease him.
    ‘Did you order new cartridges?’
    ‘No, I did not order new cartridges.’ His voice is like ice. ‘I don’t know the passwords to any of the websites.’
    ‘Aren’t they in the family book?’
    ‘What family book? What the hell’s a “family book”? And where am I supposed to find it?’
    He is a child, Grace thinks. This is a child’s tantrum and this has nothing to do with me. She keeps the focus on her breathing, noting that her heartbeat is coming slowly back to normal, the tingling in her arms and legs almost gone.
    Thank God
, she breathes, closing her eyes for a few seconds. When Ted gets into one of his rages, often set off by something as small and insignificant as the ink in the printer running out, there is no telling where it will go.
    There are times when it escalates, growing and pulling in anything and everything in its path; other times when, like today, he will lose steam and slowly go off the boil.
    His face is now a sulk as Grace expresses sympathy for his confusion and hardship. ‘That must have been so frustrating,’ she says, watching him nod, grateful that she