Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil by Rafael Yglesias Read Free Book Online

more espresso or grilled another pancake. This time she hunched over, peering into the refrigerator; she did something inside it, probably testing the firmness of her vanilla pudding with the tip of her pinky. “Yes. The natilla is almost ready. You can have natilla for dessert.”
    “But not the biftec for lunch. I’ll go get you a Cuban sandwich,” Grandpa said eagerly to me as if the problem of keeping me at home was that Jacinta’s bribes of food weren’t sufficiently tantalizing. “You like the Cuban sandwich—they press it flat.” He held an invisible iron in his hand and ran it over something. “You like the Cuban sandwich, right Mickey Mantle?”
    “No, no. He wants the biftec palomillo.” Grandma had moved beside me. She stroked my forehead, lifting up my bangs. The palm of her hand felt cool. “The Cuban sandwich is so greasy.”
    “I’m going to get some, woman!” Pepín stood up and waved his arm. “Frankie is going to be hungry from the plane and he loves the Cuban sandwich.”
    Of course it was my grandfather who truly adored the Cuban sandwich. This delicacy consisted of nothing extraordinary to my boy’s palate, merely glazed ham, a slice of fresh pork, cheese, and sliced pickles in a light Cuban bread that was then flattened and heated by the final step in its creation: smashing it in a hot press.
    “If Rafael wants to come, he can come. His Daddy’ll be thrilled to see him waiting at the airport.” That was my mother talking. She wasn’t eating and she had refused a second cup of espresso. She smoked a Marlboro with the openly indulgent pleasure that people used to display before cigarettes became a symbol of moral turpitude and death. Above her head, illuminated by the bright Florida sun beaming through a window over the sink, the smoke swirled into a brilliant yellow cloud.
    Grandpa appeared in the cloud. He leaned over and whispered in my mother’s ear.
    “Shh, shh …” Jacinta created white noise to cover Pepín’s talk with a mischievous smile. She made no attempt to disguise her desire to keep their conversation a secret from me. She also moved to block my sight of Mom and Grandpa.
    “Oh,” I heard my mother say loudly over Grandma’s sound barrier. There was dismay in her tone. “You think so?” she added with a tremble in her voice.
    “I don’t wanna go,” I called out, to interrupt their heavy-handed conspiracy to keep me at home. I was sensitive to their feelings, although I didn’t understand what worried them. I still don’t know for certain why they didn’t want me to go to the airport; presumably, they thought there was danger because of the crank calls to the Miami radio stations. “I wanna watch the game,” I said, which after all was partly true. I had never managed to last for an entire nine innings, but I liked to try.
    “I told you,” Grandmother said. She resumed lifting my bangs off my forehead, soothing me with the cool compress of her approval.
    Mom and Pepín left early to go to the airport. In fact they departed before my father’s plane took off in Miami. This was a tradition of the Neruda family—always at the airport two hours ahead of time.
    The Game of the Week wasn’t due to begin for another hour. I took a pink rubber ball and my baseball glove outside. Pepín and Jacinta’s home was a two-bedroom one-story clapboard house with a patch of lawn stretching no more than seven or eight feet forward and hardly any wider than the structure. Only a child would consider it a lawn at all. Their street had duplicates of my grandparents’ house up and down the block. It was paved, of course, and they were off a busy avenue, but there was hardly any traffic. Therefore I was allowed—not without many warnings—to stand in the middle of the street and throw my rubber ball against the three concrete steps leading up to their porch.
    This was another example of my grandmother’s indulgence of me. She kept precise and immaculate care of her