About Grace by Anthony Doerr Read Free Book Online Page A

off the pillow.
    â€œI do not.”
    â€œYou do. Last night I found you in the kitchen standing at the window. I said, ‘David, what are you doing?’ but you didn’t say anything. Then you came back in here, put on socks, took them off, and climbed back into bed.”
    But it was Sandy, Winkler thought, who woke and disappeared from the bed several times a night, walking the house or descending into the basement, and although she told Winkler it was pregnancy keeping her up, he guessed it was Herman. She didn’t want to answer the phone or doorbell; she never got the mail. At dusk her eyes went to the windows. As if from the growing shadows, at any moment, Herman might clamber onto the porch, aflame with retribution.
    â€œMy Crock-Pot,” she’d say, staring into a cupboard. “I left my Crock-Pot.”
    â€œWe’ll get you a new Crock-Pot, Sandy.”
    She looked at him but did not answer.
    Eventually she regained color and energy. She scrubbed the sinks; she cleaned out the basement. One evening he came home and found new dishes in the cupboards.
    â€œWhere did you get these?”
    â€œHigbee’s.”
    â€œHigbee’s? That’s twenty miles from here.”
    â€œI hitched.”
    He stared at her. She shrugged. That night she served him lasagna, the first meal she’d cooked since they’d moved.
    â€œThis is delicious,” he said.
    â€œMarry me,” she said.
    He said yes. Of course. Tremors of happiness rose through his chest. He kept his imagination fixed on the future: the child, the thousand small rewards and punishments he imagined fatherhood would bring. There were the customary preparations: painting the upstairs room, shopping for a crib. The questions were obvious: “Are you going to divorce Herman? Won’t you be technically married to two men?” But she was washing dishes, or staring at the TV, and he was afraid to ask.
    In the basement she began welding, cannibalizing sheets of metal from the house itself: the furnace cover, the front of a kitchen cabinet. Weekends he drove her to salvage yards and garage sales to claim anything metal: the hood of a Ford Fairlane; forty feet of copper pipe; a brass captain’s wheel. At night he’d hear her banging around down there, the clangor of the aluminum hammer, the hiss and pop of the welding torch, a smell of singed metal rising; it was like living on top of a foundry. And at night she’d slide into bed, sweating and wide-eyed, her whole body hot, her coveralls hanging on the closet door. She’d splay her legs on top of the comforter. “The TV says the blood volume of a pregnant woman increases fifty percent,” she said. “Same body, fifty percent more blood.”
    â€œAre you being careful?” he’d whisper. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
    She’d nod; he’d feel the heat pour off her.
    A six-foot-six Indian magistrate married them; a half dozen Channel 3 employees sidearmed rice at them on their way out. For a honeymoon—Sandy insisted they have one—she filled the empty dining room withhouseplants she’d bought at a moving sale: ficus, philodendron, a dozen hanging ferns. He took four days off and they went to sleep each night on a blanket in the center of the floor, surrounded by plants. “We’re in the jungle,” she whispered. “We’re on a raft on the Amazon.” When they had sex, she wept. Each morning he brought her eggs, scrambled and chopped, and a bowl of Apple Jacks with a half cup of milk. Inside her now the fetus had eyes, four chambers to its heart, neuroelectric pulses riding the arc of its spine.
    By July, Sandy was spending five or six hours at a time downstairs in her workshop. She had settled on a project, she said, a “Paradise Tree,” something he sneaked downstairs one morning to glimpse: a single, nine-foot pole, partially rusted, with the beginnings of shapes