Read About Grace for Free Online Page B

name?”
    Winkler spoke only to Sandy. “I was hoping to get my car worked on. Whatever you like. Make it”—he gestured to his Chrysler and they all looked at it—“more exciting.”
    Herman clasped his hands behind his head. There were acne scars on his jaw. “I’m not sure you’ve got the right house.”
    Winkler retreated a step. His hands were shaking badly so he stowed them behind his back. He did not know if he would be able to say any more and was overwhelmed with relief when Sandy stepped forward.
    â€œOkay,” she said, nodding. She snapped the towel and folded it and draped it over her shoulder. “Pull it into the garage. I can do whatever I want?”
    â€œAs long as it drives.”
    Herman peered over Sandy’s head then back at her. “What are you talking about? What’s going on here?”
    Winkler’s hands quivered behind his back. “The keys are inside. I can come back in, say, a week?”
    â€œSure,” she said, still looking at the Newport. “One week.”
    One week. He went to Marilyn Street only once: creeping on foot through the slushy yard and peering through the garage window toward midnight. Through cobwebs he could just make out the silhouette of his car, hunkered there amid boxes in the shadows. None of it looked any different.
    What had he hoped to see? Elaborate sculptures welded to the roof? Wings and propellers? A shower of sparks flaring in the rectangular lens of her welding mask? He dreamed Sandy asleep in her bed, the little embryo awake inside her, turning and twisting, a hundred tiny messages falling around it like snow, like confetti. He dreamed a welding arc flickering in the midnight, a bright orange seam of solder, tin and lead transformed to light and heat. He woke; he said her name to the ceiling. It was as if he could feel her across town, her tidal gravity, the blood in him tilting toward her.
    In his road atlas Ohio was shaped like a shovel blade, a leaf, a ragged valentine. The black dot of Cleveland in the northeast corner like a cigarette burn. Hadn’t he dreamed her in the supermarket? Hadn’t he foreseen all of this?
    Six days after he’d visited their house, she telephoned him, whispering down the wire, “Come late. Go to the garage.”
    â€œSandy,” he said, but she was already gone.
    He closed his savings account—four thousand dollars and change—andstuffed whatever else he could carry—books, clothes, his barometer—into a railroad duffel he’d inherited from his grandfather. A taxi dropped him at the end of the block.
    He cased the panels of the garage door up their tracks. She was already in the passenger’s seat. A suitcase, decorated with red plaid on both sides, waited in the backseat. Beside it was the television box stuffed with welding supplies: the torch still in its packaging, the boxes of studs unopened. He set his duffel in the trunk.
    â€œHe’s asleep,” she said when Winkler opened the driver’s door. He dropped the transmission into neutral and rolled the car to the end of the driveway and halfway down Marilyn Street before climbing in and starting it. The sound of the engine was huge and loud.
    They left the garage door open. “The heater,” was all she said. In ten minutes they were past the airport and on the Seward Highway, already beyond the city lights. Sandy slumped against her door. Out the windshield the stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.

8
    The convergences of a life: Winkler on an airplane, fifty-nine years old, St. Vincent receding behind him; Winkler waist-deep in a flood, his chin at the gunwale of a rowboat, men prying his drowned daughter from his arms; and Winkler again at thirty-three, speeding toward Cleveland with someone else’s wife—this, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that