Grace Read Online Free

you about it. To you intellectuals, anything that doesn’t come out of a book is some mindless jerk’s scribbling. Mindless or not, I believe him.”
    “Do you hear yourself, Sally? You believe him? Some anonymous …” He struggles for a word. “Wall-defacer,” he spits out.
    “Yes, I believe him.” She repeats the line she saw on the wall. “‘It takes strength to be happy.’ I want that strength, Justin. I want the strength to go after my happiness. I don’t want to take the road of least resistance.”
    The word
road
stirs another memory of another conversation. “God, you fill your head with all that psychobabble.”
    “It was a good book. I learned a lot from it. It helped me.”
    “It helped you become dissatisfied with what you have. It helped to make you unhappy. We have so much, Sally.”
    They are locked in silence.
We have so much.
Both of them know it is true.
    They are sitting in the spacious kitchen of a duplex apartment they own, in a converted brownstone in gentrified Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Trees line their street, and in the spring there will be flowers in the concrete barrels on the pavementsand in the flower boxes under the windows of parlor floors of the other refurbished century-old buildings on their block. On one end of their street—comfortably distant from the squalor of Fulton Street, which in their area has already begun to change, replaced by boutiques and charming restaurants—is an old stone Methodist church, itself under renovation. At the other end is Fort Greene Park. Mothers take their children there, lovers lie in the grass in the summer. Spike Lee lived here not long ago, in one of the brownstones that border the park.
    Justin had been clever enough and lucky enough to have bought this duplex before Park Slope became crowded and expensive, before young white professionals with dotcom incomes moved in and sent real estate prices soaring, displacing black families who had lived here for years never dreaming their landlords would sell. But Fort Greene was a stone’s throw from Manhattan Bridge, and the Yuppies knew it was a matter of time (and enough of them willing to be pioneers), before it would go the way of Park Slope: another oasis for liberal whites, Asians who had crossed over, and a sprinkling of over-educated but harmless blacks.
    It is not lost on Justin that many of his colleagues consider him one of these harmless blacks, but he chalks this down to envy. The fact is he had bought the duplex when many of his black friends thought Long Island was the place to escape the spreading urban ghettoes. With his college professor’s salary, he could never have returned to Brooklyn later if he wanted to, as so many people he knows tried to do when the long commuteon the Long Island Expressway taxed their aging bones and loneliness set in for the gossip at the corner store.
    There are three rooms on the top floor of their duplex, a master bedroom with its own bathroom, a smaller bedroom for Giselle with a bathroom adjacent to it, a den with a huge dark-wood desk, bookshelves stacked with Justin’s books, and a comfortable sofa. When they were first married, Justin invited Sally to share the den with him. She turned down his invitation. “I don’t want to disturb you,” she said. It was what he had hoped she would answer. The den is his alone, his own private space.
    Downstairs in the kitchen where they are sitting at a round oak table, light pours through the huge windows on sunny days. Today is not a sunny day, but the kitchen is cheerful. Sally has made it cheerful. The walls are creamy, the cabinets a rich brown, the square tiles on the floor large and white. Sally hangs her orange pots on steel hooks that drop from the ceiling and puts green plants and purple and white African lilies in ceramic pots near the windows. Under the table is a colorful woolen rug. Giselle loves to sit on the rug when Sally is in the kitchen, especially when she is working at the table