Grace's Table Read Online Free PDF

‘She was an old-fashioned woman, I suppose.’
    â€˜And your father’s excuse?’
    Susan stopped cutting the mango she was working on and looked at Grace. ‘He was old-fashioned too. It’s not fair to blame the person. Blame the era.’ She went back to her slicing but with more force than was necessary for the delicate fruit.
    It disappointed Grace to think Susan could justify Des’s shortcomings in this way. With this thin excuse for bad choices. And Des had often chosen badly.
    â€˜All things considered,’ Susan added, clearing the last of her mango, ‘he was a good man.’
    Grace took her board to the sink and turned on the tap, pretended not to hear. She rinsed board and knife under running water then made a show of seeing every orange fibre washed down the plughole.

4
    The temperature in the kitchen rose incrementally with the level of activity needed to prepare a meal for twelve. Grace opened the window to move some of the hot air.
    A soft Sunday hum drifted in. It was her favourite day of the week; the closest she got to her childhood quiet. She could hear insects going about their business among the star jasmine flowers on her back patio; birds making friendly conversation from the jacaranda’s branches. Somewhere, a few backyards away, she picked up the rhythmic pop of someone hitting what might be a ball in a game of totem tennis. On the second-floor balcony of the unit next door, a woman was hanging washing over a clotheshorse. Grace watched as she snapped creases from a pillow case, shorts, a towel. Each action cut the air like a pistol crack.
    On weekdays these sounds were lost. The city swallowed them up in its wakefulness, its business: wheels turning, braking; car engines accelerating, decelerating; clip-clopping shoes and conversations on the move. There were the sounds of progress too: drills, hammers, angle grinders. And those of harm or danger: sirens, alarms, unknown crashes and bangs.
    The smaller fibres of sound – those Grace could hear today – were the ones she liked best because they were the ones that revealed the true fabric of people’s lives. It was odd to think that on weekdays they were mute. At Harvest, she remembered such noises – wind-cracked sheets drying on the line, the distant thunk, thunk of a fence-post driver – as the defining sounds of any given day of the week.
    The eleven o’clock news broadcast came on the radio. Grace already knew what the headline would be – the same as it had been for close to three weeks now. But habit forced her hand to reach across the kitchen bench and turn up the volume anyway.
    â€˜Still no change to the state of residents’ footpaths overnight,’ the reporter began. One look out the window that morning had told her that. ‘With waste reported to be chest-high in some areas …’
    Chest-high? Grace tried to imagine it. It could be fairly called thigh-high in parts of her street, and that seemed bad enough. Still, leave ten or a hundred bags stacked long enough in the February heat and the smell was terrible.
    â€˜Union officials and local government members have been in crisis meetings overnight but there’s still no sign of a resolution to the dispute.’
    â€˜Nothing new there then,’ Susan said, and turned the volume back down.
    Grace went to the fridge, took a cauliflower and bag of parsnips from inside and sat each on the bench.
    â€˜Kath will hate having to come here today.’ Grace thought of her old friend on the outskirts of the city, as she started cutting the cauliflower into florets.
    â€˜It’ll do her good to get off her mountain. See what’s happening in the real world.’ Susan took the second pot of potatoes from the stove. ‘Not too small,’ she said to Grace on her way past to the sink.
    Grace ignored her. ‘The world’s as real as she likes it where she is.’
    â€˜Each to her own,