Graceless (Grace Notes #2)

“Get it together,” she ordered herself as the sobbing finally subsided. “Stop blubbering like a stupid baby.”

The scolding worked. She scrubbed her face with wet hands and sighed, contemplating the bathroom around her and the bedroom beyond. It was huge. It was beautiful. Cassidy genuinely didn’t care. All that mattered was that she was safe, she was out of it all, and she was alone.

Despite her anger and resentment, seeing Savannah had shaken her to her core. For so long she’d nurtured the fantasy of coming face-to-face with her sister and watching her perfect face fall as she realized her mistakes. And yet when the famous sibling was finally in front of her – glowingly pregnant, radiant with luxury and her eyes full of tears at the sight of her little sister – Cassidy had lost the moral high ground by coming across like a petty brat.

It was mortifying. She wanted so badly to prove her righteous point, but Savannah had all but refused to fight her, denying her the explosion she had hoped for. Add in the emotions of her hideous day, and she’d practically cried and begged to stay with her. God. Between Savannah’s snooty authority as she lectured her on her attitude and her wife’s ridiculous over-protective support, Cassidy had felt reduced to a child all over again.

She’d taken her humiliation out on the nanny. Of course Savannah would have a cool, trendy nanny who wasn’t a boy or a girl. It was so fitting for her rich and famous, edgy lifestyle and so predictable Cassidy wanted to scream. It was just unfortunate that Lane actually seemed like the one person who might genuinely bring themselves to care about what had happened to her, and Cassidy hadn’t been able to snap out of her shitty feelings to respond in any way other than what Lane had correctly identified her as: an asshole.

Too much of an asshole to be trusted to speak with her own damn nephew, as it turned out. Cassidy saw herself through the eyes of someone entrusted to care for a young child and felt a wave of shame. Well, too bad. She wasn’t here to build relationships. She would get what she came for and then she’d leave. Cassidy lay back in the bath and tried to figure out a plan.

Dinner that night was a tense affair. Savannah remembered waking that morning and looking forward to a blissful day with her family as they finished settling back into their routines before the whole circus creaked to life again the following week. She’d yawned and stretched and kissed her wife, then Tucker had barrelled into their room to jump in the bed with them. She’d leaned against the pillows, gazing at the two people she loved the most and felt the slow roll in her abdomen as the baby awoke too. In that moment, it had seemed like her blessings were truly too many to count.

She’d never have dreamed that by evening, they’d all be sitting rigidly around the outdoor table as the sunset faded, making awkward small talk with a little black storm cloud seated amongst them.

“Chicken?” Brynn offered the plate toward Cassidy, who shook her head silently. She’d filled her plate with nothing but potato salad and was eating at such a rate that Savannah eyed her thin frame with new alarm. She was dying for Cassidy to unburden herself and explain why she’d turned up on their doorstep. Until then, Savannah’s active imagination was working overtime, each scenario worse than the last. She also badly wanted Cassidy to spell out why the hell she was so damn angry at her.

Savannah had done her best, hadn’t she? She’d left home – at her parent’s behest – when she was seventeen years old. Cassidy had been just three, the child born to their mother’s marriage to Savannah’s stepfather Randy. One of her biggest heartbreaks was leaving her youngest sibling behind at an age that she knew she would not be remembered.

The next time she’d seen her was the first and only time she’d seen her family since they’d expelled her. They’d had intermittent contact in the intervening years, but it had been clear that her family still viewed her by the terms her mother had hurled at her as a teenager – sinner, pervert, against God – and so Savannah had tried to guard her broken heart and fragile sense of self by staying away. But a few years later when her success arrived – suddenly elevating her status and her financial position light years from what she’d grown up with – she knew she could never sleep under some fancy roof knowing her own family barely had food on the table.

She’d spent one week with her mother, shopping for a home for her, Savannah’s stepfather and young Cassidy. Her two brothers were in their twenties by then and out of home, so Savannah made sure they were set up too, but Cassidy had been just twelve. She’d blushed and stuttered in Savannah’s presence and Savannah had done what she could to try to put her little sister at ease. But when the week ended – the house and new car signed over and the monthly stipend set up with her accountant – her mother informed her that now that her duty was being fulfilled to her family and Savannah was married to a man, they had decided to forgive her for her sins if she would just repent them.

Savannah had politely informed them she was still, in fact, bisexual, and that she had no wish to be forgiven for that. Then she’d walked away feeling as bruised as her stepfather’s idea of discipline had always left her as a child. There was no discussion of any need for forgiveness on that end.

She’d had a phone call with her mother twice a year, every year for the last twelve years, briefly checking if all was well, paying for miscellaneous requirements without question and that was the extent of the relationship. They did not ask to meet her son. They did not offer support during her incredibly public and traumatic divorce. They certainly did not offer congratulations when she remarried this summer. But Savannah checked in just the same.

It had been during one of these conversations almost seven years ago that she’d tried to push the college option for Cassidy. Her mother had told her that Cassidy was simply not interested. Savannah had offered to come and talk with her in person, steeling herself for the prospect of seeing her family again, despite everything in her own life beginning to fall apart. Her mother had rejected the offer in no uncertain terms.

Which brought them to today, when a mysteriously pissed off adult Cassidy had materialized at her front gate with no warning and still no explanation.

“Can we talk?” she asked Cassidy as the meal ended and the table was cleared.

“Here it is,” muttered her little sister. “The catch for letting me stay.”

“Well, yeah.” Savannah shrugged mildly. “We’re sharing a home and I’d like a conversation with you so I can understand what’s going on.”

“And I’d rather not.” Cassidy gave an exaggerated mimic of her shrug. She stood up abruptly and pushed back her chair, disappearing into the house. Savannah leapt – rather, she tried to leap, but it was more of a slow heave – out of her chair to follow her. Brynn laid her hand on her arm.

“Just let her be,” she suggested. “Let her sleep off her day and try again in the morning.”

Savannah sank back into her seat. Brynn was right. She looked at her wife and smiled a tired smile, grateful for her steady presence. She looked across the table at her son, merrily spooning the remains of ice cream into his mouth, clearly untroubled by the appearance of a new grouchy relative, then at Lane, who was looking thoughtful.

“Well,” she said. “This is going to be an adventure.”

Chapter Three

The next morning Cassidy awoke feeling simultaneously rested and troubled. At first, she didn’t know where she was. Then, feeling the softness of the big white bed beneath her, she buried into the buttery soft sheets, reveling in the peace and safety of her surroundings. It only lasted a moment before the previous day leapt into her mind and a tsunami of rage, fear and humiliation swept through her. She lay rigid for several minutes, before the plan she’d cobbled together last night returned and a new sense of confidence propelled her up and out of bed.

Freshly showered, her hair smooth and fragrant, clean – if slightly crumpled – clothes on, she ventured out of her bedroom into the wide hall outside her door. She’d known her sister was seriously rich, but it was a whole other thing to experience it directly. Glimpsing the house as she’d walked the long drive yesterday had just about given her a heart attack. Not only was it massive, but it was the strangest house she’d ever seen – more glass than walls, glowing in the afternoon sunlight, held together with slabs of polished concrete.

From the glassed in hall she could see out over the big sparkling swimming pool, to the green fields and vineyard beyond. Holy shit, was that – yes – horses grazed about a mile from the house. Savannah had horses too? Of course she did. Cassidy located the stairs and found her way to the ground floor.

For the first twelve years of her life, Cassidy had lived in a cabin just behind a trailer park. They’d had no heating or cooling and no indoor plumbing. Sometimes there was food and sometimes there was not. It all depended on Randy. Randy was her dad, but Cassidy had long ceased to call him that. Some weeks he worked, some weeks he disappeared, returning angry and defensive, and if there was food at all, it was because her mother had managed to figure things out around him. Her mother was sometimes banned from employment at all – her place was at home to be a wife and mother – and sometimes berated for not working hard enough to bring in cash. Cassidy, on the other hand, had secretly gone to work at age eleven, skipping a day of school each week to wash dishes and spirit the handful of cash to her mother so they could eat.

Then, one day, when Cassidy was not quite in her teens, Savannah had swooped in, plainly dressed but still looking somehow expensive. She’d been beautiful, kind, effortlessly cool, a successful country singer, with money and fame. After years of hearing of her sister only as a cautionary tale, Cassidy had been completely star struck. Seemingly within moments, Savannah had them installed in a real house two neighborhoods over. There’d been two whole stories, a big green lawn, a flower garden out the front and Cassidy had her own bedroom, neat and clean and as large as the entire cabin had been. She’d started a new school, with new clothes and made new friends; food stayed on the table and the lights stayed on. For a time, things were good. She couldn’t wait to see Savannah again, to ask her advice about life, go and see her perform on a big stage, visit her in her fancy house… but Savannah had never once returned.

Then the bad times had hit and Cassidy began to finally see the wreckage Savannah had truly wrought upon their lives.