State of Grace Read Online Free PDF

little girl,” Father says.
    I push away from him. My hair runs out between his fingers. My clothes are dripping in the shower. I had hung them up and they were dry but then I’d taken a shower with them hanging on the rod and now they were soaked.I look through the Venetian blinds at Fred. He is an old man, beating on a mourning dove with a garden rake.
    “Come over here and sit beside me,” Father says. I do. I lie between the bedspread and the blanket. He takes a brush from his suitcase and begins to brush my hair. “When you were born,” he says, “I brought you phlox in a white china mug.”
    “There aren’t any phlox down here,” I tell him. “The climate’s not right for them.”
    A clock is ticking on the dresser. It lies face down and works only when it is placed like that. I dropped it myself as a child and it broke in that manner. In Spain, I hear, there’s a place full of old, expensive clocks. A palace and a room in the palace where they bring all the clocks of value that don’t work. The room is zealously guarded. They have guns. They’d kill you if you tried to steal one of those clocks. Father always used to say that keeping time was an affront to God. I am surprised that he has brought this with him.
    “What are those flowers outside the door?” he asks.
    “Bird of Paradise. Century plants,” I say. It is an erotic desert flush against these rooms. A little joke.
    “You’ve been here before, haven’t you,” he says convincingly.
    “Oh no, Daddy.”
    “Yes. You’re one with the art of harlotry and self-deception. You came all the way down here just to prove that you were common as any of them.”
    My head bobs with the pull of the brush. His hands are long and cold, with a tumble of veins visible. He is ageless. Once I was young but I am growing so quickly now … soon I will be of his time and then hardly linger there until I am beyond it.
    “Haven’t you,” he says.
    “No, not this one.”
    “You don’t know anything about love. I’ve tried to teach you but you don’t know. What do you think you can give to a man? Or woman? Your mother was … the only thing your mother gave me was you.”
    “There’s nothing I can give, Daddy. I was just hoping that I could take a little. A little warmth for a little while.”
    “You’re everything to me,” he says. “You’re everything short of dying.”
    “Dying’s not so much,” I say.
    “To those that don’t do it. You killed your mother.”
    My hair is snapping and curling around his fingers. He raises his hand. It follows him.
    “Why of course you did, sweet,” he says. “She died because she had an evil heart, a vicious jealous eye. We’re all weak, I won’t deny it, but it was the Devil himself who gave your mother strength to curse me the way she did. I won’t accuse you of it, really. She died of rage.”
    “I think she died by her own hand, Daddy.”
    “No, love,” he says, “she died giving birth. She died by God’s own felon’s fist. She was always wanting to have children. Can you imagine, she wanted to start them in accordance with the planets. She wanted someone to avenge her, but your mother got no relief and why should we, darling? No relief and no release.”
    Beside me on a little table is my gum from the night before. I put it in my mouth. In moments it’s soft again. Quite usable. With this and a stick I could muster a quarter out of any grate. Were there a grate. Were there a quarter. What would I do with so vast a sum? My thoughts are a child’s thoughts. I am a child, lowered into Daddy’s lap.
    My head rocks backward with the brushing. Lips brush my ear anonymously. I cannot see him. I see instead the open bathroom door where my clothes drip wine-red drops onto the concrete block of the shower stall. The dye gathers in unsightly puddling. I have arrived in this place. All myeclectic studying, worthless. All my babbling with the girls, the bleaching of my black-sheep ways. After my year