The Third Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

sciences—her chance at full validity as a scholar. She strategized her plan, buffering herself with a wall of professional peers—senior colleagues, department heads, and point persons within the political structure at PRU. To situate herself in the hierarchy and carve out her own area of interest, she developed a socio-anthropological program cementing the departments of art and social science through women’s studies. She could boast of a sound body of work appearing in top-tier journals in her field, she carried a respectable class load, and she regularly presented papers at conferences. She even volunteered as chair of several visible committees. Everything was ticking along nicely.
    But then Yates came on board—hired, Lou surmised sourly, mainly for fundraising skills that brought to the university multiple large research grants from the federal government. She was fast-tracked by the administration, and Lou’s own prospects for academic security began to dissipate. Then simultaneously several journals rejected Lou’s latest papers without even asking her to resubmit, and the members of her tenure committee—now prejudiced by Dayna Yates—started criticizing the adequacy of her research. She was being shut out.
    Lou ground the heel of her red-soled Louboutin into Aglaia’s living room carpet, fuming as she thought about her failure to stop the snubbing.
    In order to get tenure, she needed to gain some sort of social capital, and she had an inkling that she’d found it in the most unlikely person of Aglaia Klassen. She conceptualized her opportunity that day at the gym when she saw Dayna—who usually wouldn’t give Lou the time of day—chatting up the cute blonde on the stationary bike beside her. Lou maneuvered an introduction to Aglaia and the girl jumped at her overture. Over coffee the next day, Aglaia told her about her renewed acquaintance with Dayna, whom she’d met years ago and not seen again until recently. The two younger women seemed to get along famously, and Dayna even asked Aglaia to her home for a back-yard barbeque that was attended as well by the provost of the university. Lou had not been invited. However, she hoped a three-way friendship would soon remedy her status.
    The fortuitous reunion of school chums would further work in Lou’s favor if Aglaia succumbed to Lou’s employment scheme, which was truly inspired if she had to say so herself. She’d exaggerated when she insinuated that, as wardrobe consultant, Aglaia might deliver a classroom lesson or two; no unaccredited teacher took the lecturn at PRU. But in Lou’s economy, exaggerations didn’t really equate with lies.
    Lou drained the last drop from her glass but Aglaia, whom she heard closing a cupboard door in the kitchen and turning on a tap, hadn’t offered to open a second bottle. Never mind, Lou thought; they’d be sharing many more evenings like this if Aglaia accepted her proposal. She was growing fond of the girl and wanted to spend more time with her. Despite Lou’s coolness—her clinical inquiry about Tina, for example—she was anything but unaffected by Aglaia’s ingenuous charm.
    But all the talk of mother-daughter relations earlier tonight did nothing to curb Lou’s ongoing disquietude in her personal life, which she traced back to the day she lost all respect for her own mother—the day her father left. Lou reviewed again that last morning in her childhood before theirs became a “broken home.” It might suggest how she could breech Aglaia’s rigid exterior. She didn’t have much other experience of family to reference.
    In retrospect Lou didn’t think that her mother and father had been arguing with any more vehemence than usual, but on that morning in her first week of grade school the housekeeper pushed her out the door with gentle urgency. Lou still heard her parents’ verbal slashing and the way