The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Read Online Free Page A

daughter, Naomi, a small, pretty girl with a skin tone closer to mine than her mother’s.
    “She’s beautiful,” I told her.
    “Yes. You’re right. She is,” she said. She rubbed her hands over her daughter’s head and then whispered something into her ear. The girl leaned her head back, looked up at her mother, and smiled. I could see the resemblance then. It was in the narrow angle of their faces, both of which sloped down into a smooth, pointed chin. When the girl turned back around and faced me I felt a hint of embarrassment and shame come over me. I knew I was being judged by this child as she refused to avert her gaze from mine.
    The cab I had called to take me to the wedding pulled up then. It was an expense that I couldn’t afford, but one that had nonetheless been demanded of me by the occasion. Judith and I said good-bye, it was nice to meet you, and then I was off to my cousin’s wedding—a woman ten years younger than me, and of no real relationship to me beyond an affinity that our fathers had shared for each other in Ethiopia. After the wedding the photographs were taken at the National Botanical Gardens, most inside the greenhouse, in the shadow of yellow, purple, and red flora so large as to seem comical. There my cousin and her new husband met another newlywed Ethiopian couple also posing for pictures. They took three together, the two brides and two grooms standing on opposite sides of a blooming purple bush. And later that evening, during the reception, we heard that the same groom who had been standing on the opposite side of that bush only two hours earlier had died in the middle of his own reception.
    Everyone grew somber when they heard the news whispered at their table. If there was one thing we all knew how to do, it was pay our respects to the dead. We all shook our heads, mumbled parts of the same prayers we had used for our fathers and friends, and then moved on, grateful in the way only other people’s tragedies can make you.
     
    Once construction on Judith’s house had progressed far enough for her to move in near the end of October, I began to see her around the neighborhood more often. I often saw her reading on one of the benches across from General Logan on a late fall afternoon, undisturbed by the drunk men sleeping or stumbling around her. A whirlwind of fallen leaves and trash would occasionally rise around the base of Logan’s statue and flit about in the air as if deliberately calling attention to itself. Judith, however, looked as indifferent to her surroundings as General Logan did on his horse, her legs properly crossed, one shoe dangling just slightly from her foot as she turned her head with the flip of each page. I admired her from a distance; the way she sat, confident and oblivious to the world, her hair sometimes caught in a gust of wind to reveal the long, elegant lines of her neck. She would sweep her hair back with one clean gesture that suggested unbroken concentration on whatever was in front of her.
    She began to stop by the store on random afternoons to pick up a carton of milk or a piece of candy for her daughter, and we would chat briefly about the weather, the neighborhood, children.
    “Do you have any?” she asked me once.
    “None that I’ll acknowledge. But I’m working on it.”
    “Too bad. It’s easier if you know them.”
    “I’ll try and remember that next time.”
    We waved to each other from across the circle and extended our conversations with each other whenever our paths crossed coming in or out of our houses. I wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood to notice her. Of all the white people who had moved into Logan Circle over the past six months, she was the most visible, and not just because she spent her afternoons reading in the circle, or because she occasionally shopped in my store. It was Naomi, with her lighter than black but darker than white skin, sitting next to her on a bench, or walking with her hand in hand, who made