About Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

living it. They’re not giving up.
    â€œI’ve just been feeling everything too much. I don’t know. Can you feel things too much, David?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI shouldn’t tell you any of this. I shouldn’t tell you anything.”
    The film had entered a chase sequence and the varying colors of a burning city strobed across Sandy’s eyeglasses. She closed her eyes.
    â€œThing is,” she whispered, “Herman doesn’t have any sperm. We got him tested a few years ago. He has none. Or basically none; no good ones. When they called, they gave the results to me. I never told him. I told him they said he was fine. I tore up their letter and brought the little scraps to work and hid them at the bottom of a trash can in the ladies’ bathroom.”
    On-screen Logan careened down a crowded street. Suits in the closet, Winkler thought. The guy with the birthmark?
    In his memory he could traverse months in a second. He imagined Herman crouched like a crab on the ice, guarding the net, slapping his glove against his big leg pads, his teammates swirling around the rink. He imagined Sandy leaning over him, the tips of her hair dragging over his face. He stood outside their house on Marilyn Street and above the city, streamers of auroras—reds and purples and greens—glided like souls into the firmament.
    Now a soft hail—lump graupels—flew from the clouds. He opened all his windows, turned off the furnace, and let it blow in, angling through the frames, the tiny balls rolling and eddying on the carpet.
    Near the middle of March she lay beside him in the darkness with a single candle burning on his sill. Out beyond the window a trash collector tossed the frozen contents of a trash can into the maw of his truck and Winkler and Sandy listened to it clatter and compress and the fading rumble as the truck receded down the street. It was around five and all through the city, people were ending their workdays, mail carriers delivering their last envelopes, accountants paying one more invoice, bankers sealing their vaults. Tumblers finding their grooves.
    â€œYou ever just want to go?” she whispered. “Go, go, go?”
    Winkler nodded. Without her glasses, that close to his face, her eyes looked trapped, closer to how they had looked in the supermarket, standing at a revolving rack of magazines but trembling inside; her whole body, its trillions of cells, quivering invisibly, threatening to shake apart. He had dreamed her. Hadn’t she dreamed him, too?
    â€œI should tell you something,” he said. “About that day we met in the market.”
    She rolled onto her back. In five minutes, maybe six, she would leave, and he told himself he would pay attention to every passing second, the pulse in her forearm, the pressure of her knee against his thigh. The thousand pores in the side of her nose. In the frail light he could see her boots on the frayed rug, her clothes folded neatly beside.
    He would tell her. Now he would tell her. I dreamed you, he’d say. Sometimes I have these dreams.
    â€œI’m pregnant,” she said.
    The flame of the candle on the sill twisted and righted.
    â€œDavid? Did you hear me?”
    She was looking at him now.
    â€œPregnant,” he said, but at first it was only a word.

7
    He parked the Newport in a drive-up lane and tugged a deposit slip from the slot.
    Can you get away?
    No.
    Only for an hour?
    He could just make her out through the drive-up window, wearing a big-collared sweater, her head down, her hand writing. The pneumatic tube clattered and howled.
    This is not the time, David. Please. Wednesday.
    Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.
    He couldn’t work,