Sweet Water Read Online Free PDF

brothers in Chattanooga finished college, and they sentme books to read, thick hardback books with small type, not those paperbacks with the bosoms and burning houses on the covers. Real books. Oh, I read the other stuff too, when my attention was short and the babies sapped my energy. I took words when I could, any words; I wasn’t picky.
    Words never came easy in our house. I’d fight for them, coax, plead. I kept a dictionary in the front room by the Bible, and if I ever heard a word I didn’t know, I’d write it down on a napkin or a scrap of paper and save it to look up. I taught the children to do that too, but Amory didn’t set a good example, and Ellen was the only one who stuck to it. She mined words like gold.
    “The sky is iridescent, Ma,” she said once when she was five, and Amory turned on me in a rage: “What the hell are you doing, teaching that girl to talk so we can’t even understand her?” He knew, of course, exactly what I was doing.
    I don’t read much anymore, and I keep my stories to myself. But even now the smell of chalk makes me dizzy, and the feel of a new book makes my heart drop.

A fterward, except for our breathing, there was silence in the small room. It was almost dark. I lay without moving on the damp cotton sheet, staring at the outline of a framed museum print. Four flights below, the noises of the city blended like an orchestra. I strained to hear each instrument: the rumbling of heavy trucks and buses, the muffled hum of cars, the blare of horns and the faint wail of a distant siren. I studied a crack in the wall, watching how it splayed into branches across a corner of the ceiling.
    “Christ, Cassie,” he said. “You might have feigned a little interest.”
    I inhaled thin, cool air from the air conditioner in the window above, its breeze mingling with the smell of our sweat. Flecks of light fell into the room, sprinkling the white sheets and my bare, pale arms. Moving my fingers, I watched the light slide over them like mercury.
    “I’ve decided to leave,” I said.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I’m going to Tennessee. I wanted to tell you first, before you heard it from anybody else.”
    He sat up and looked at me, rubbing his short dark hair with his hands. When I reached over to touch his shoulder, he flinched as if an insect had landed on him.
    “Look, I’ll help you find someone for the gallery,” I said. “I won’t leave until you’ve got somebody trained.”
    He swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for hisstriped boxer shorts on the floor, putting them on in one fluid movement.
    “Adam—”
    “It’s a big gamble,” he said, standing up stiffly, his eyes flat and expressionless. “Good luck.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “I’m not saying anything. You’re taking a big risk, that’s all. I admire you for it.”
    “What’s so risky?”
    “Well, this is it, right? Make it or break it. What if it turns out that all that talent you’ve been keeping on a back burner isn’t there?”
    “That’s not the point. That’s not why I’m going.”
    “Oh, really?”
    “I just need to get away. It’s not a matter of proving anything.”
    His mouth turned up at the corners. “Look, Cassie, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. It’s just that usually when people pick up and move they’re either going toward something or running away.”
    “It’s not like that.”
    “You sure?”
    “For God’s sake, Adam, if you’re not going to even try to understand—”
    “I am trying. I just think you need to be certain that you’re doing the right thing. For yourself, I mean.”
    I drew back. “I wasn’t really asking for your approval. I just wanted you to know. For the gallery.”
    Adam picked a T-shirt off the floor and turned to leave the room. I watched him make his way down the narrow hall, switching on the light with his shoulder as he veered into the living room at the end. After a few seconds I could hear a canned