Read Online A Peculiar Grace by Jeffrey Lent - Free Book Online

enough.”
    She studied him, her frown deepening. She said, “You’re frightening me. I think you should leave me alone.” The bog gone all out of her now, stiff and clear.
    He made another attempt to smile, this less successful and she knew it was because he was trying. “I will if you want. But would you giveme another chance? I could introduce myself and we could walk back to Frank’s where your friends are and we could talk there. I’d make an attempt at explaining myself.”
    Mary Margaret looked hard upon the man before her. He wasn’t as old as she’d thought, perhaps in his early or middle thirties. His face was creased with weather and cares and his eyes freighted as he blinked under her scrutiny. She said, “If you’re a true artist you’d be a madman to want to draw the likes of me. And I’ve had enough of the bar tonight. If you had it in mind to walk and talk I’d be willing to do the same. If nothing else, you’re a story needs out.”
    T HE LONG HOURS of night following the afternoon when Hewitt’s father died and he sat with his mother in the basement room next to the wine cellar, the locked room with its old rolltop desk and the wall of wide shallow steel map files, his sister Beth waiting in the Charlotte airport for a flight to New York and the train up from there, Mary Margaret told him all she learned that long-gone night but also of how little; how the stories that came out did so over the next year; of how Thomas Pearce would come into her life for days at a time, then weeks gone, and how she knew even from that first night that it would be this way until one way or another it would not. And she was prepared to await that answer.
    S HE SAT FOR him and he tried to draw. His studio was a cheap gutted apartment far down on the East Side, work tables of planks on sawhorses with cans and thick tubes of unopened paint, stacks of blank stretched canvases leaned against the wall, a pair of spotless easels. An old worn velvet daybed with a heavy mahogany scroll at one end, a mattress on the floor behind a curtain strung on a wire, a small gas cookstove and a sink. None of it quite new but nothing like she’d expected; the only color, the only pigment, the only paint was not the speckles and smears she’d expected the first time she went there but a broad oval on the plaster wall that even her untrained eye couldsee was nothing more than deep blue paint squeezed straight from the tube into a palm and then the hand working in furious swirls streaks and daubs upon the wall. She contemplated it as she sat for him and slowly the obvious rage began to make sense to her; a man had been forsaken by old and trusted tools. Or as he sat perched on a tall stool with a pad on his knees and a handful of sharpened pencils in his shirt pocket and after fifteen minutes or three or an hour and a half would rip the sheet from the pad and hurl it crumpled onto the floor all this wordless unless she moved when he spoke his frequent command “As before, as before.”
    He saw her as what might save him long before she understood this. By the time of that comprehension on her part she knew it was true. And believed she would.
    In the end it didn’t happen in New York although those years were as necessary as the two visits over two years when they took the train to Vermont to spend unholy weeks of manic infused vacation with his mother where Mary Margaret understood it was the place as much as the woman he wanted her to learn but also knew his mother saw her very differently than Thomas Pearce did and both women knew nothing was to be done about that although Lydia Pearce did outright ask if Mary Margaret was sleeping with her son and why bother with the charade and extra work of separate bedrooms. This over tea and cookies with thimbles of sherry on a summer afternoon when Thomas was wandering the woods above the majestic house.
    The summer after that they went to Nova Scotia and the vast pile of the rest of their