The Third Grace by Deb Elkink Page B

now and so many chores waiting for him. But did her father miss the touch of his daughter?
    She thought about yesterday and the enveloping security of Eb’s office. She didn’t know two men as different as her father was from her boss. Dad let her know he loved her long after he stopped cuddling her, when she grew breasts; it was an awkward time, her puberty. And he still gave in to Tina’s insistence and called Aglaia occasionally, though he hated using the telephone for anything other than agricultural dealings—to order diesel fuel, perhaps, or ask how the neighbor was making out with his new-fangled baler. But he found words themselves extravagant. Dad was a meat-and-potatoes man in more than his diet.
    Her dignified boss, on the other hand, was profoundly communicative, with every utterance full of connotation, often cryptic but always meaningful—always accompanied with a glint of his eye, a challenge to dig deeper, to come closer. But closer to what?
    Recently Eb embroiled her in a discussion regarding names. He said that each costume, like any artist’s painting, was incomplete until it was christened. “Take my name, for example,” he said. “It originated when the Israelites subdued the giant Philistines. Samuel set up a megalithic monument—a ‘standing stone’—and called it Ebenezer, meaning ‘Thus far has the Lord helped us.’ ”
    But she was reticent to talk about given names since she’d so thoroughly rejected her own, and so Eb turned back to the costume. “Agonize over the choice,” he coached her when she’d been ready to settle for the generic “Bunch of Grapes” for her purple padded fabrication. “An artist must name her piece deliberately, imputing meaning, knowing that creation. Call him out, Aglaia.” She’d opted for “Dionysus” and earned a cluck and a rueful smile from her boss.
    Yes, Eb was full of bonhomie. Good will radiated from him, but it was accompanied by another quality—astuteness, maybe, or a sharp awareness short of cunning. A person wanted to sidle up next to him even though dressmaker headpins often bristled from his sleeve if he’d been helping one of the seamstresses with her work. A person wanted to hug him, but didn’t.
    Aglaia returned to the kitchen to refill her mug. Her cat stretched on the couch and yawned, his elfin tongue curling around a lazy “Meow” before he bounded over to rub against Aglaia’s housecoat.
    She picked him up and he climbed to her shoulder and arranged himself around her neck like a fur collar, his purring idling against her ear as she opened a fishy can of breakfast for him. The tabby was a barn cat, picked up at the ASPCA shelter last fall after her former cat lost his four-year battle against city traffic. She’d never buy one of those snooty Siamese or Himalayan breeds, and not just because of the price.
    â€œHere you go, Zephyr,” she said as he sprang to the floor.
    What Eb had said about names was true, she thought; they told a lot about a person and even about a pet. The farm crawled with cats when she was young but for some reason the Klassen family never labeled them “Fluffy” or “Snowball,” instead talking about them in general terms like “the mama cat” or “that mean tri-color” or “the stray.” Dad liked them around to keep down the rodent population, and Mom always made sure, in the coldest part of winter, to set table scraps outside by the step.
    On occasion one cat or another made a mad dash into the kitchen, and Joel would always smuggle it into the basement for a quick snuggle.
    Aglaia dubbed each of her cats “Zephyr” now—all three cats in turn that she’d owned since they formally named the first one on that perilous summer day in the hayloft.
    Mary Grace hunts for the boys for an hour. She calls their names into the machine shop