Grace by Elizabeth Nunez Page B

don’t like you to go to McDonald’s.”
    “But Aunt Anna said …”
    “I wasn’t going to let Anna take her to McDonald’s.” Sally is speaking directly to Justin.
    He senses a truce in the offing. “Did you get a chance to have anything to eat?” he asks her.
    “Giselle had a sandwich at lunchtime.”
    “I’m not hungry,” Giselle says.
    “Then it’s off to bed with you, young lady,” says Justin. “When you wake up, I’ll fix us all a huge breakfast.”
    Giselle falls asleep before Justin can read her a bedtime story. He comes downstairs and finds Sally still sitting at the table. She is intently tracing stencils on colored sheets of oak board.
    “Aren’t you tired?” he asks.
    “Yes, but I have to finish this for my class on Monday.”
    “Don’t you want something to eat?” he asks her again. “You said Giselle ate, but what about you?”
    “I’m too tired to make anything. Have you eaten?”
    “I was at Mother’s,” he says.
    “Ahh.”
    “She made me a huge brunch. Pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs.”
    “How is she?”
    “She asked about you.”
    Sally is bent over the oak board, coloring the spaces in the pattern she has stenciled. It is a basket of fruit. She is coloring carefully, the apples red, the pears green, the grapes purple. No color runs into the other. “And you said?” she asks.
    He takes a deep breath. “Sally, I want us to work out whatever it is that is bothering you,” he says. “I don’t want to lose my family. I don’t want Giselle to come from a broken home, her mother one place, her father another.”
    She does not look up from the pattern she is coloring. “Neither do I,” she says.
    He turns and walks toward the cupboard. “I’ll open a can of soup,” he says.
    “That would be good. I think I may be getting the same cold Giselle has.”
    He is opening a can of soup when he tries again. “I think we said things to each other last night that we should not have said.”
    “Things happen for a reason,” she says. She has stopped coloring and is facing him.
    He does not understand.
    “I mean the snow. Giselle’s cold,” she says.
    He is trying hard to be patient. “Things don’t always happen for a reason, Sally.”
    “Well, last night we weren’t talking to each other,” she says, “and now we are. If Giselle didn’t have a cold, and I didn’t catch it from her, you wouldn’t be feeling sorry for me and you wouldn’t be making me soup right now.”
    His effort to exercise restraint comes to naught. He loses his temper. “For God’s sake, Sally, what is the matter with you? Do you think everything in life can be reduced to some simple formula, some mindless cliché? Read Auden. You used to. Suffering happens willy nilly. It has no rhyme or reason. It happens. Shit happens.” He is unaware of the irony in his choice of these last two words. For him, too, the terseness of subway graffiti expresses precisely what he wants to say. “You used to read books, complex books, dammit. Giselle has a cold. Her cold has nothing to do with what’s going on between you and me.”
    Later, as he is brushing his teeth, she comes into the bathroom to explain.
    “I know I’m losing it, Justin,” she says. “You are right. I used to be able to handle complexities, but now I can’t. I need things to be simple. I can’t deal with grays anymore.”
    She is crying, but her face is unchanged. Her brow is not furrowed, her mouth is not upturned. Only tears roll down her cheeks in sad little rivers. The sadness penetrates his heart. He reaches out to her and wipes away the tears. She presses her head against his chest and he folds her into his arms.
    He does not sleep in the den this night.

EIGHT

    He knew her story before he married her. He had read her poems. He wanted to know if his rival still owned her. They blinded him. The passion in them was searing. Bordering on insanity, he would think later. And she would lose control of her mind when her beloved