Girl in the Mirror by Mary Alice Monroe Read Free Book Online Page B

doors.
    He stepped straight into a frigid blast of wind that gusted from Lake Michigan. It took his breath away and whipped his long hair back from his forehead.
    “Damn this Chicago weather,” he cursed. The Windy City was aptly nicknamed, and this close to the lake, the gusts were strong enough to push along even a man as big as he. He’d never get used to it. Michael hunched his shoulders, turned up his collar and rammed his hands into his pockets before joining those few foolhardy enough to walk the sidewalks this arctic night. He thought of the warm breezes of California and fingered the envelope in his pocket.
    Michael quickened his pace to Michigan Avenue where, with luck and a piercing whistle, he might catch a cab. He’d just ducked out of a small wedding reception for a fellow architect at city hall. Frank and his bride seemed so happy, so sure of their decision to spend the rest of their lives together. Their happiness left him feeling hollow, reminding him how empty his own life was.
    Michael fingered again the envelope in his coat pocket. He had received the letter from his father early today and carried it with him, rereading it several times. His father hadn’t written him more than three letters in his whole life. Most of the letters he’d received were from his mother. Her English was better, and she would kindly include his father’s opinions. “Your father and I are proud of your good work at school.” “Your father sends you his love.” “Your father and I wonder why you don’t come home more often.”
    His father, however, rarely lifted a pen to write a letter. Michael never judged him harshly for it. Truth was, he understood that his father was too exhausted from lifting a shovel all day to even consider lifting a pen into his large worn and callused hands.
    He had received his first letter when an essay he’d written on the Constitution was published in the local newspaper. The second when he graduated from college. “A college graduate!” his mother had crooned, her breast as puffed as a hen’s. The first ever from his family. Michael’s entire extended family had gathered to celebrate the occasion at a noisy fiesta with plenty of singing and laughing. He remembered with chagrin the suspicious glares from the “gringos” neighbors. And now this one. In this third letter, his father, Luis, had called Michael home.
    “My hands,” he had written in his own hand. “They are bad now. They no do what they must do. And the customers, they are not happy. So many young men come with new ideas. Ha! They know nothing of the soil. Of the plants. But they draw pretty pictures for los gringos who know even less nothing than they do.
    “I need you now, ” he wrote, underlining now. “To help the family. You know how to draw those fancy pictures. You know how to talk the English good. Most of all, you know the soil. I need you. Tu. Miguel. My son.”
    Michael shivered as a cold blast shot down his spine. Mi padre. He loved his father. And he missed him. Yet his father was asking him to give up his career as an architect to return to California and the landscape business that his father had started thirty years earlier. Asking him to return to his roots.
    Michael closed his eyes against the memories. Roots. The soil. Black dirt under his nails. He ground his teeth. What did he want with roots? He was an architect. He built skyscrapers. Madre de Dios, he swore under his breath. He strove higher and higher into the sky. Miles—years—away from the soil. Away from the time he was scurrilously considered just another spic with a shovel. Wasn’t that why he’d left California? To sever the roots? To break with the culture that grounded him?
    Michael lifted his chin and laughed loudly into the bitter wind. Fool, he was! Such roots could not be severed. He would return. He knew it. Like poison ivy, the roots of his family were invasive. They dug too deep. No matter how he fought to deny it, he was