An Unexpected Grace by Kristin von Kreisler Read Free Book Online

her . Though well meant, their subsidy was hard to accept. Every day in Cristina’s house, Lila would have to talk her pride off a tenth-story window ledge.
    Also, secret longings made Lila hesitate to house-sit.
    Five years before, she’d been with Cristina and Greg when Rosie had refused to be born. After nine hours in labor, Cristina was gripping her watermelon stomach, and despite the counting and breathing they’d learned in birth classes, she was moaning with pain. Nevertheless, as Lila draped Cristina’s shoulders with the Italian flag she’d bought for her, Lila would have traded places with her in a finger snap. Greg was massaging and kissing her arms and telling her he loved her, and she was about to have his baby—and Lila was living with baby-disdaining Reed, with whom her good judgment had been urging her to break up, but she had not yet gathered the conviction to do it.
    After seventeen hours, Rosina Patrizia Harrison presented herself for their devotion. Her eyes were puffed closed, her hands looked like small starfish, and her skin was an extra-deep shade of rose madder. When she howled at being squeezed out into the world, her lips curled up and exposed endearing little gums. To Lila, she was the anointed queen of the universe; she would rule the sky and wind with one nod of her charming head. As her godmother, in the next few years Lila would buy her princess costumes at the thrift store, invite her teddy bears to tea, paint her face like a cat for Halloween, and play five thousand games of Go Fish with her.
    But Lila was not Rosie’s—or anybody’s—mother, and she had no husband. Reed was out of her life for reasons she didn’t think she could ever forgive. She also had no financial security or beautiful home of her own, as did Cristina, whose life was a sophisticated version of a Norman Rockwell painting
    If Lila stayed in Cristina’s house for six months, everything around her would be shouting about what she longed for but was missing. The photos in every room would underscore this feeling: Cristina and Greg stuffing wedding cake into each other’s eager mouths and sledding down a hill in matching red parkas. Rosie toddling across the living room or sitting in a Shaker rocking chair in her pink sweat suit and looking cute enough to smother in a hug. Rosie was everywhere—in the mouse drawing on the refrigerator, the step-up platform to the bathroom sink, the tiny green galoshes with frog-face toes in the mudroom. Evidence of a happy marriage was also all over the house. You couldn’t miss it in the silver Victorian tea set that Greg had bought Cristina just because she liked it.
    Lila’s envy came to life only when provoked, such as during Rosie’s birth or on the afternoon when Cristina showed Lila a dime-size clamshell that Greg had given her.
    On its smooth interior, Greg had written with a ballpoint pen, “I love you.”
    Cristina said, “We were on the beach. He acted like he found the shell in the sand like that. Isn’t it the dearest thing?”
    Indeed, it was. Envy flew into Lila’s face like a hornet, but she swatted it.
    Despite Lila’s longings for security and family, though, Cristina was right: Lila wanted to paint. It was essential for picking up the pieces of her life. For months she’d been planning a series of doors, gates, and windows. When a new idea for a painting came to mind, her fingers ached to curl around a brush. Painting had been the heartbeat of her life, and she had to get her heartbeat back. Cristina was making an offer Lila could never refuse.
    â€œYou’d take the poodles?” she asked.
    â€œWe’d never leave behind those preciouses,” Cristina said.
    â€œAnd that golden retriever?” Lila pointed across the room at Grace, who was lying on her back with her legs flopped out, like she was working on her stomach at a tanning salon. The fur there was more