Grace Read Online Free Page B

Sally’s school and picked her up at her lunch hour and they bought the present together. A Barbie doll. It was what Giselle wanted.
    In those days there was not much Sally and Justin didn’t do together. They shopped for furniture together, they bought the weekly groceries together, they did the unpleasant chores together: the laundry, the dishes, the bathroom. When Justin needed clothes, Sally went with him to the store. When she shopped, he accompanied her. Their friends said it was a recipe for disaster. Familiarity breeds contempt. Or boredom. Too much of anything is good for nothing. You’ll get tired of each other, they warned them.
    But Sally and Justin could not imagine a time when they would be tired of each other.
    It was a marriage that had come relatively late in life for them. He was thirty-nine when he met her, forty when they married. She was thirty-five. Both were experienced enough, smart enough, to know what they had. They treasured this marriage, safeguarded it.
    They had met by accident. The heart, Sally said, will find its way, no matter the obstacles. And there were so many, it was a miracle they were together at all. Justin would have to travel almost four thousand miles to be where she was. Even with the scholarship to Harvard that took him from Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, something had to cause him to move to Brooklyn, and even then the fates had to intervene to put him on a bench in the Fort Greene Park at three o’clock, on a certain Wednesday afternoon when Sally, an American, black, born and raised in Harlem whose residents rarely, and if so, then reluctantly, journeyed across that strip of water, which to their way of thinking could be an ocean, to thatpeninsula that began with Brooklyn, stretched out to Queens and then to that no man’s land in the Hamptons (no man’s land that is, except to rich white people), would walk past that exact same park bench, at the exact same time when he was sitting there. And though it may not have been unusual for Sally to be in the park at that time, since she was a primary school teacher and her day was already over, it was unusual for him to be there, for, except for the rare occurrence of a conversion day when Wednesday became Tuesday at his college for administrative reasons, he would have been in a classroom that Wednesday afternoon.
    Every pot has a cover, Justin told her. Whether he was the pot and she the cover, or the other way around, he did not say, but what he meant was clear enough to Sally. They were a match.
    Indeed they were. Justin was a professor of English literature. Sally had majored in comparative literature at Spelman. Justin liked to read. Sally’s bookshelves in her apartment were crammed with books. Justin wanted to be a novelist, Sally a poet. Justin had not succeeded in becoming a novelist, and neither had Sally become what she hoped. He believed, he convinced himself, that as he was reconciled to a career in teaching, so was she, content, since not writing poetry herself, to be helping little ones find the music in words, the image to express their feelings.
    If Justin had to find a marker, a day he could point to when he was certain beyond any doubt that Sally loved him, it would have been the day he and Sally celebrated Giselle’s half birthday, that day after the cake and ice cream, after the opening ofthe present which so delighted Giselle she would sleep with it curled into her tiny arms all night, it would have been that night, when they were in bed, in each other’s arms. The memory stayed with him not only for the perfection of those hours with Sally, but because, in his mind, after that night, their life together began a seemingly inexorable slide downward to this moment, now, when his head mocks him with words he cannot silence and he soothes himself with a lie:
Justin does not care.
    They had just made love. Sex between them was always warm and comforting, passionate sometimes, but not