Tender Grace by Jackina Stark Read Free Book Online Page B

seemed pleased.
    It was almost dark when I left the mall. As I walked over to ride the elevator to the top of the Tower of the Americas and view the lights of the city from 750 feet, I thought how nice it was to have Ginger helping me this afternoon. A gentle breeze made the heat tolerable when I stepped out on the observation deck, and I found places for an unobstructed view of all the points of interest. If it wasn’t a feast for my eyes, it was a nice Sunday meal, and a good way to end a day that started so badly.
    Or it would have been.
    When I came back to my room and tossed my keys into my purse, I noticed my sack of makeup wasn’t in the large outside pocket where I had placed it for safekeeping.
    What could I have done with it?
    When I left Ginger, I went straight to the tower and then to the hotel, except for a quick stop in the parking lot to get my shoe bag from the car.
    I dumped the contents of my purse on the bed, thinking I might have put the sack inside the purse and not remembered doing it. I found a pair of earrings, a laminated bookmark Kelsie had made me in kindergarten, a ticket stub from South Pacific, and salt packets, but not a sack of cosmetics. I checked the shoe bag in case I had put it in there for some crazy reason. Nothing. I was so disgusted. I had spent a ridiculous amount of time selecting that makeup, and besides that, I needed it.
    I decided to check the car. Maybe it had fallen on the floor when I grabbed the shoe bag. I even checked the trunk, though I hadn’t opened the thing. By the time I finished ransacking the car, I was agitated beyond reason. I retraced my steps to the tower, willing the little package to be waiting for me on the floor in a dark spot along the railing somewhere. I walked around the circumference of the deserted tower twice, but if I had dropped my sack of makeup there, someone had already returned the lipstick for something with more color. I stood there trying to calm down, telling myself there was no reason whatsoever to be so disgusted, frantic even, about losing some makeup.
    Can someone explain why I leaned against the wall, looked out at the lights of San Antonio, and sobbed as though I had lost something very dear?
    I walked into the hotel hiding my swollen, bloodshot eyes behind sunglasses. I rushed to my room, washed my face, and lay down with a cold washcloth on my eyes, trying underneath the soothing terry cloth to fathom what the last hour had been about. I had been a runaway train, crashing at the top of the Tower of the Americas. There was no making sense of it.
    I finally stood up, hung the washcloth in the bathroom, put on my gown, and picked up Tom’s Bible on my way back to the bed. I flipped to a highlighted passage in John 4 and had the patience to read all of one verse: “My food,” Jesus says, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”
    What is my food? What nourishes and satisfies me? What can I not live without? The madness of the last hour suggests the answer is makeup.
    Doing God’s will is the last thing I’ve been concerned about lately.
    Or is it?
    Perhaps his will for me right now is to learn how to live without Tom, to learn to live with what is left, to somehow quit mourning “the tender grace of a day that is dead” and instead embrace and celebrate “the tender grace of a day,” each one a gift from an eminently good God.
    Could I get that intravenously?
    August 21
    I like to ease into the morning. Dawdling suits me.
    Not Tom. He liked to get up while the birds were still warming up for their early morning concert. He would have his shower taken, the paper read, and his cereal eaten before the Today show began. He saw a good many sunrises in his lifetime. I’ve seen few and have wished embracing the morning was as natural for me as it was for Tom.
    He was always the first one to school. He was usually in his office thirty minutes before anyone else arrived, setting a fine example for the faculty