“OK,” I said. I reached into my back pocket for my notebook.
“Be kind,” she said. “This is not a crime scene.”
“I don’t have such a good memory.”
“You reporters are so full of it.” She tapped two fingers on her chest. “Imprint what you see and hear on your heart. The story will be much clearer.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. For now, I left my notebook in my pocket. “Are we on the record?”
“You can write whatever you like. But for the sake of the women in my care, I don’t want to see my name in your paper. I’m already having enough trouble with my landlord.”
“What’s the problem?”
“None of your business. This way.”
The inside of the house was clean and sparsely furnished but obviously lived in. In the living room, another afghan like the one Mom had made me-identical to the one I’d seen in the Zamboni shed-lay in a bunch at one end of a sofa. An unlit lamp stood on an end table. An armchair faced the sofa across a coffee table. A television perched atop a mostly empty bookshelf. On the mantel over a fake fireplace stood a framed black-and-white photograph: Gracie and Darlene stood with their arms around each other at the end of a dock, smiling and squinting against the sun, ripples of lake water glinting behind them.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“What?”
“Why would Gracie leave all this stuff here if she was moving back to Starvation?”
“Good question.”
“I mean, did she have to leave suddenly or something? Was she in trouble?”
“Well,” Trixie said, “if she wasn’t in trouble before, she obviously found it. I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t know if she wanted to move up there permanently. Grace didn’t tell me everything. Let’s go in here.”
The kitchen smelled faintly of Murphy’s Oil Soap. My mother used up a big bottle of Murphy’s every few months and said its lingering aroma was her favorite in the world next to that of a cinnamon cake baking.
There was a breakfast table with two chairs covered in flowery green vinyl, white cabinets, Formica counters the color of bananas. The table held an empty schnapps bottle sprouting a bouquet of dried hydrangeas. Lacy cotton curtains dressed a window over the sink that looked out on a tiny backyard, a concrete side drive, and a one-car garage. In the dish drainer rested a chipped black coffee cup embossed with a Detroit Red Wings logo.
It was the cup more than anything that made me silently marvel: Gracie had had her own house. I pictured her standing in that kitchen, sipping coffee from that cup, looking out the little window to see whether the morning promised sun or rain or snow. Was it really hers? That wouldn’t be too hard to find out. I made a mental note to check before I went back up north.
I opened a cabinet next to the sink. There were half a dozen each of plates, bowls, coffee cups, and milk glasses. I looked in the next cabinet, saw a platter, two serving bowls, an empty shelf. I crossed to the other side of the sink and opened another cabinet. Inside I glimpsed a collection of flower vases before Trixie’s hand appeared and pushed the cabinet shut.
“Hey,” she said. “Are you looking for something?”
“Booze.”
“You won’t find it here.”
I looked over at the schnapps vase on the table. Peach schnapps, I noticed.
“Ancient,” Trixie said. “Come on.”
A hallway off the kitchen led to a pair of facing bedrooms. The door on the left stood halfway open. The door on the right was closed. Trixie stopped just short of where I could see into the rooms and placed her big body in front of me.
“How did you know to find me?” she said.
“Someone told me.”
“Who?”
She seemed determined to know. The implication seemed to be that if I didn’t tell her, I wouldn’t see the rooms. I had no idea what I might find in there, but I definitely wanted to see.
“Darlene Esper,” I said. “A friend of Gracie’s. Do you know her?”
“I know of her. She’s the wo-the girl-in the picture in the living room.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been in love with her your whole life.”
Her certainty startled me.
“Isn’t that right?” she said.
“Pretty much.” I nodded toward the rooms. “Which was Gracie’s?”
“Wait,” she said, stepping forward and placing a hand against my chest. “Do you know what Grace did when she came to Detroit? Have you ever really given it any thought-a girl of, what, eighteen or nineteen, leaving her tiny little town up north to come to the big city?”
“Forgive me, but what’s the big deal? Lots of kids leave up north every year to go to college downstate. I did. And they do fine. And they don’t have rich benefactors paying their tuition for them like Gracie.”
“So your answer is no, you have not given it much thought.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Grace’s benefactor? You mean the man-it could only be a man, or more than one-who promised her an education? She got one, all right.”
She told me about it.
Gracie had enrolled in the freshman program at Wayne State University in the fall of 1980. She had hoped to declare her major as English. One semester of tuition and room and board had indeed been paid for in full. But no money had been provided for her required texts. At the campus bookstore Gracie learned that the bill for those would come to nearly $350. She had saved barely half that from her summer job at Dairy Queen. Her appeals to her mother for the rest met first with promises, then with lectures about saving money, then with unreturned phone calls. Grace started classes without books.
Finally she contacted her anonymous benefactor. The only requirement the donor had was that Gracie write a short letter at the midpoint and the end of each semester reporting on her academic progress. There was a post office box to which she was supposed to mail the letters. Now she wrote explaining her book dilemma. In the letter she apologized for her ignorance and promised to repay any book money provided.
Soon Gracie heard from a man. He didn’t say whether he was her actual donor, but he had a job for her waiting tables. Late one afternoon she showed up for her first six-hour shift. Although it served food and drinks, B.J.’s Office wasn’t a restaurant. B.J.’s was a strip club on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, about a fifteen-minute drive from Gracie’s dormitory. When she drove up to the place, she thought maybe she’d gotten the address wrong.
“I’m aware that Grace was no angel in her youth,” Trixie said. “But even she was, shall we say, taken aback.”
“But she took the job,” I said.
Trixie shrugged. “This wasn’t some smoky pit frequented by guys missing teeth and stuffing dollar bills in G- strings. This was a gentleman’s club. A jacket was required. You had to pay twenty-five dollars just to get in the door. The girls were from everywhere but here.”
“Canada? Poland maybe?”
“How did you know?”
“Just a guess.”
“Hm. Well, on a good night, Grace could make two or three hundred dollars in tips. So she really only had to work one or two nights a week, which left her more time to study.”
“And I’m sure she used it for that,” I said.
“I didn’t know her then, of course, so I can’t say for sure. But she told me she tried, and I’ll take her word.”
“Did she dance at the club?”
“No. She waited tables.” Trixie folded her arms and gazed down at the floor. “But she might have been better off dancing.”
