Mourning Glory Read Online Free

her morning routine washing down her
estrogen replacement pills with orange juice.
    It was dangerous to let imagination run away with itself.
But there were just too many examples of people left at the post in southern Florida. All it took to set her thoughts going was a trip to any mall where the army of the
aging bored marched in endless battalions. It took all her willpower to keep
from falling over the edge into heavy depression.
    For a while she took refuge in the idea that she was too
busy devoting herself to raising Jackie to have any time for a new
relationship. But that was a cop-out. Jackie was reaching new levels of
worrisome independence by leaps and bounds. She was losing her and knew it.
    In a year or two she would consider Grace, except for a
marginal financing machine, irrelevant, worthy of lip service but little else.
The reality of parenthood was getting through to her hard and fast, the end
result would always be the ultimate conclusion that parents loved and worried
about their children far more than they could ever love and worry about their
parents.
    She no longer blamed other people for her failures. She had
married in the midst of her first year of junior college, a mistake compounded
by a mistake. During her marriage, she had been a bank teller, a secretary, had
worked in boutiques and other department stores, but, because of her husband's
itchy foot and quixotic view of life, she hadn't been around long enough to
make much of a mark. Jason, chasing his own impossible and indefinable dreams,
had taken her and Jackie to points north, west and then south. In Florida she had taken a three-month cosmetician's course, had landed this job in the makeup
department at Saks Fifth Avenue Palm Beach store and had been slowly building
up a modest clientele.
    The telephone near the register rang and she knew instantly
that it would be Pamela Burns, the store manager, on the other end of the line.
The gnome had struck.
    "Can you see me for a moment, Grace?"
    "Of course," Grace replied, reaching
unsuccessfully for an optimistic lilt to her tone. She hung up and proceeded on
rubbery legs to Mrs. Burns's office.
    "Mrs. Milton-Dennison told me you insulted her,"
Pamela Burns began directly, playing with the triple string of pearls that hung
over her pink silk blouse. She was older than Grace, well-groomed, with hawk's
eyes that hid behind high cheekbones and jet-black hair parted in the center
and brushed straight back. Her lipstick, eye shadow and earrings glistened
brightly as they caught the light beams from the staggeringly brilliant
sunlight that blasted into the room from a high, round window behind her desk.
    "I should have, but I didn't," Grace said.
"She was rude and insufferable."
    "Customers are never rude and insufferable,
Grace," Pamela Burns lectured, talking slowly, enunciating clearly,
illustrating her version of how a successful manager deals with anger and
recalcitrant personnel, undoubtedly Grace. "Shopping at Saks is either
therapy or fantasy fulfillment. But however you define it, there is only one
object in mind as far as we're concerned. We check our egos and other
unnecessary hubris at the employees' store entrance. We smile. We ingratiate.
We flatter. We agree. Our mission, the sole objective of this enterprise, is to
move merchandise."
    "I move merchandise, Mrs. Burns," Grace declared
with a feeble attempt at showing indignation.
    "For which you are appropriately commissioned,"
Mrs. Burns shot back. "At the highest rate allowable in this
company."
    With commissions, Grace had averaged during her three years
with Saks, a sum which, after deductions, barely qualified her for the working
poor.
    "Mrs. Milton-Dennison is a major consumer of
merchandise. It is her addiction. We keep her supplied with the drug she
needs."
    "Merchandise?"
    "Exactly."
    Mrs. Burns looked at a paper on her desk and tapped it with
long, polished fingernails, which also glistened in the sunbeams.
    "Have you any idea what