Full of Grace by Dorothea Benton Frank Read Free Book Online Page B

elegant, privileged, and they were highly sought after among the bastions of Charleston’s elite societyfor every event of the season. But then his father died suddenly in Michael’s seventeenth year. Heart attack. Just forty. What a sin, everyone said. The world stopped after the funeral, the flowers and the procession of obligatory visits, and Michael thought his mother would never stop crying.
    Michael went off to college at Duke and returned that first Thanksgiving to find his mother withdrawn and distracted, her voice reduced to whispers. By Easter the principal trustee of his father’s estate recommended a full medical workup for her. The best diagnosis the neurology team at the Medical University of South Carolina could offer was that she was extremely depressed, and so Laura Higgins became another guinea pig in the emerging medicine of psychotropic drugs. The private nurses, the extensive visits to sanitariums, the experimental medicines didn’t matter except that they depleted his father’s estate and his mother disappeared into her own world anyway. Every time Michael visited his mother, he was filled with self-loathing that he was unable to stop her deterioration.
    But Michael persevered as I did, him doing his duty, me doing mine and neither of us discussing it too much. Discussing our families at any length would have made Michael’s mother and my family real and three-dimensional, an extension of our own relationship. There was only miserly space in our world for all the trouble and ill health of Laura Higgins, Al’s patriarchy and the unending peculiarities of the entire Russo clan. It was too dangerous.
     
    Later, at home, Michael flipped through the four hundred stations on our television and I called Eric Bomze.
    “Bomze? It’s me. Is this a good time to talk?”
    “Ah! La Principessa! I’m with the Baroness, and as we uncork this very excellent bottle of Pétrus, I have a special favor to ask you. Tell me yes right now!”
    “Yes! Of course the answer is yes. What do you need?”
    “Well, there’s good news and bad. Which do you prefer?”
    “Bad first.”
    “Missy Belton in the Atlanta office was in a terrible automobile accident and broke her leg in fourteen places.”
    “Oh! God! That’s awful! Is she gonna be all right?”
    “Of course! She’ll be fine after a year or two of physical therapy and hopefully she won’t limp for the rest of her life.”
    “Good Lord! What can I do? Can I send flowers?”
    “What? Oh, of course. If you want to. But she’s not in a room yet, so I’d wait a few days…”
    “She couldn’t get a room? That’s awful! What exactly happened?”
    “What happened? An eighteen-wheeler came flying down an exit ramp in the pouring rain and didn’t see her little Toyota. Mashed it like a bug. And a Honda and a minivan loaded with gospel singers. She’s lucky to be alive. They all are. But apparently it caused a lot of commotion at the ER. Anyway, she was supposed to take a group of execs and their families to Sardinia next week for five days. I need you to take her place.”
    I swallowed hard. I hated what Bomze was asking of me. I didn’t know the clients, I hadn’t planned the trip, and suddenly I was supposed to step in and take over? I knew Missy from annual sales meetings and liked her well enough, but I also knew her well enough to look into my mind’s eye and see an itinerary peppered with black holes of unfinished details.
    “Of course I’ll go,” I said. “But I’ll need the entire folder first thing in the morning. Bios on the guests, food allergies—the whole thing, okay?”
    “Done, done and done! You’re an angel!”
    I’m an idiot, I thought, and hung up. I turned to Michael. “Want to run away to Sardinia with me for five days?”
    “You know I’d love to, but—”
    “Right, I know.” I leaned into our refrigerator and pulled out a carton of orange juice. I poured myself a glass. “Results of a test study due and blah,