Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [108]
She squeezed by him again and handed him his beer. “Now you,” she said. “Will you tell me about you?”
He obliged. He told her about his early memories of the tiny town in the mountains where he’d been born. He was the youngest of four, the only boy.
Carmen cut in briefly to say that she too was a youngest child, and immediately realized that in every factual sense she was lying. But Roberto didn’t hold her to it.
He explained that his parents had been hippies. They’d both been raised by educated families in Santiago, but soon after they got married decided that his father should be a farmer and his mother should be a poet, and they should live off the fruit of the land and their good minds. After a few very lean years, they finally accepted the fact that they were city folk. His father didn’t know how to be a farmer and his mother didn’t especially know how to be a poet. They went back to Santiago and eventually his father got a job in manufacturing in Bogotá. They didn’t starve after that, but nobody was terribly happy either, he told her.
He took up his parents’ discarded dreams, as children will do, he said. He wanted to be a poet. He got involved in politics, somewhat disastrously. He spent two weeks in jail and then dropped out of the whole scene. He moved to Costa Rica and learned how to surf. He got good at it, he said, which she took to mean he probably became world champion. He taught surfing to rich tourists at a fancy resort and discovered he was growing stupid. He moved to Mexico City and enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma. He studied economics and literature, got a degree, and then an advanced degree. That was where he met his wife, Teresa.
At this point his face changed. His story ended somewhat abruptly, as maybe hers had done. He looked out the window at the nearly full moon, and she looked at the side of his face, wondering. She felt she would have known if he wanted her to ask him a question, and he didn’t.
She drew her feet up under her. She heard the conductor announce a station stop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She thought of Bee and her grandmother Greta, who lived not so far from here. She wondered where Bee was, and she missed her as she hadn’t let herself do since the day in Greece when their world had ended.
After a long silence, Roberto started up his story again in a slightly different-sounding voice. She found herself wanting to touch him. Not in any sexual or inappropriate way. She wanted to make contact with him, offer him her support for she didn’t know what. For the tense of a verb.
Teresa was Mexican American from Texas. She was a literature student and a ceramicist.
Was, Carmen heard, was.
They got married in El Paso. He looked for a job. They lived with her parents. They had Pablo. Roberto told these parts with strangely little affect. He had wanted to move back to Mexico, where he could teach at the university, but she had thought he should become a citizen first, which he did. He had managed a carpet store. They’d had Clara.
He stopped again. She put her hand on his. There was something coming and she was scared of it. “You don’t need to tell me any more,” she said. She felt the ache in her throat, the tears rising, and she didn’t even know for what. They had moved past the happy parts. She knew where it was going.
What kind of night was this, where they needed to say everything? They’d be in New Orleans in the morning, and it felt like the last night on earth. The miles were grinding away. It felt like they needed to say it all to each other before they said goodbye. Their paths crossed for this one stretch of hours and then fate would send them hurtling apart again. It was only this chance to say it all, to win a stranger’s empathy, to earn a stranger’s absolution.
“When Clara was six weeks old, we went to Mexico City so she could meet her grandparents. Teresa went out to dinner with friends.” He stopped. She could hear his breathing, no longer smooth. “She came home late. She was struck by a car on the Paseo de