Read Online The Art of Stealing Hearts by Stella London - Free Book Online Page B

hope
you did as well.
    He
had a great time! I feel like doing cartwheels, like I’m
back in middle school.
    Be
cool, Grace, be cool.
    I
did, I text back. Paige would be proud.
    It’s
a beautiful sunny Sunday morning, a rarity for North Beach, so I
throw back the covers and get out of bed. I’m
feeling good, basking in the warm glow of this week. Even if things
didn’t
go exactly as I’d
planned, I feel happy and hopeful about my new opportunities,
Carringer’s
and St. Clair too. After feeling trapped under a dark cloud for so
long, it finally feels like there are blue skies ahead.
    He
texts again as I’m
getting out of the shower. Looking forward to seeing you again .
    “I
want to see so much more of you next time, preferably out of your
clothes” is
not an appropriate response, so instead I write back, Can’t
wait .
I give up on removing the sappy grin from my face, and decide to use
this positive energy for more good.
    I
get dressed and pack my sketchbook as well as some of the leftover
dim sum from last night and take the bus up to the Legion of Honor
Museum, one of my favorite places in the city. The bus takes a
winding dirt road up a steep hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay
and drops me off in front of the gorgeous museum building, done in
the French neoclassic style. There’s
a big white stone archway with intricate carvings, huge stone lion
heads with majestic carved manes on the pillars as guards, columns
ringing a courtyard with Rodin’s The
Thinker poised atop a pedestal in the center.
    The
other tourists all head into the museum, but I wander through the
archway that leads out back to the lawn. Here, the cliffs overlook
the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge: one of the best views in the
city. I stop as soon as I see the blue expanse of the ocean. It takes
my breath away every time—and
today is a rare treat, shimmering sunlight dancing on top of the
cerulean water, sparking like fireworks under the massive orange
bridge.
    It
was winter when I scattered mom’s
ashes in this exact same spot. Mom didn’t
want to be buried. She always said she didn’t
want to be put in some grave in the middle of nowhere that I would
feel obligated to visit, so she left instructions in her will to be
cremated, and for me to scatter her ashes in a place I loved. I could
almost hear the unspoken suggestion: someplace we both loved,
somewhere we loved going together.
    I
deliberated for months after the cancer finally took her. It happened
so fast, Mom didn’t
even tell me about the diagnosis at first, she thought she’d
have more time. I was already away at college on the East Coast,
settling in to the demanding schedule and trying to keep up with my
classes and my part time job. Mom didn’t
want to ruin my college experience, so she kept quiet about it during
our phone calls, delaying the inevitable as long as she could.
    But
she couldn’t
put it off forever. Near the end of my freshman year, a neighbor
called me and said Mom had collapsed while out grocery shopping, that
she was too weak to keep taking care of herself alone. I was so
confused. “What
do you mean?” I
asked.
    “With
the cancer, dear,” she
said.
    I
couldn’t
even say the word out loud. “She’s
sick?”
    I
was on the next plane back to Oakland that same day. But the cancer
was already advanced too far to treat. “There’s
nothing the doctors can do,” Mom
told me, looking so pale and weak, laying on the sofa. “There’s
nothing you can do.”
    But
she was wrong. I could be with her for the time she had left, so she
wouldn’t
go through it alone. I came home, giving up my summer abroad in
Italy. I did my best to care for her body and keep her spirits up. I
would drive us up the Oakland hills to vista points so she could see
the view from the car windows when she was too weak to walk, and take
her on trips into the city for architecture tours. I fed her clam
chowder in bread bowls at the pier, and listened to the bark of the
piles of sea