Small Damages by Beth Kephart Read Free Book Online Page A

says. “Bruno, with the two dead wives. Rafael, the son of a knife sharpener. Arcadio, the lover. Angelita.
Please.
Who can stand Angelita? Look at that woman. Her size.”
    She’s not much bigger than you, I think, don’t say it. I wait for her to tell me what she’s really doing here.
    “You write back to the boy,” she says. “After you finish your soup.”
    “I can’t,” I say.
    “Can’t what?”
    “Write back.”
    “Why not?”
    “Twenty-one words,” I say.
    “And that’s your reason? He’s the boyfriend, no? He’s the father? You love him?”
    “He’s on the other side of the universe.”
    “So. You love him, or you don’t love him. Distance doesn’t matter.”
    “Is that a fact?”
    “It is.
Sí.
It is a fact.”
    “What do you know about it, Estela?” I say, and she gives me a long, hard look, like she’s deciding what to tell me, deciding who I am.
    “You know Triana?” she says, at last. “You know flood year in Triana? February 1936?” I shake my head, but it doesn’t matter, because now that Estela’s started, she can’t stop—she’s going on about Triana and a Spanish river and the Arabs and that Spanish river—how they dammed it and diked it and made the soil so rich that the birds made milk in their nests.
    “Milk in their nests?” I ask.
    “You listen,” she says. “The Christians ruined the river. Let it spill and fall and go wherever it wanted. In the summer, the river was nothing but waste. In the winter, it was a stinking stretch of swamp. Triana: the city of floods.”
    “The city of floods,” I repeat.
    “Triana,” she says, like I haven’t been paying attention. “On the other side of the river from Seville.”
    “Got it. Triana.”
    She turns around, stares at me, stares back out through the window, goes on. “In February 1936,” she says, “the flooding was worst. The river was swimming in kitchens, washing shirts down the streets, floating shoes in alleyways, sinking trees. We put the chickens on the rooftops and the animals too, and sometimes we’d hear the popping off of pistols, the ‘please somebody help’s:
Get me the butcher. I need a midwife.
But the rains still came, and things washed loose and free—train engines and pier planks, turtles and flower boxes, baskets and horse carts and sometimes the horse, the hooves upside down, the neck broken.”
    “Okay,” I say, so she remembers I’m here.
    “We were captures on the river,” she goes on. “Captives.” Corrects herself. “Prisoners on top floors, no roofs on our heads. Above heads.”
    There were people in boats, she tells me. People tossing loaves of bread to the rooftops, and for a week at least, that is all, Estela tells me, she had to eat—wet bread. Wet bread like a nightmare, only wet bread, thought she’d die of wet, wet bread, and that’s when Luis showed up in his boat. “Young,” she says. “And handsome.
    “Wasn’t he handsome?” she asks, but it’s not really a question. It’s Estela remembering.
    I look through the window, into the night, at Luis—an old man in a stuffed chair, his hair white, his nose a lump, the cuff of his pants riding high over his ankles. He’s leaning over, toward the foot he taps. There’s air between the buttons of his shirt.
    “He threw us candy,” Estela says. “Glitter paper. Butterscotch. You know what time is?”
    “What?”
    “It’s distance.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Distance isn’t the end of love.” She touches her heart and closes her eyes. “You write to him, Kenzie. If you love him.”
    “Maybe he doesn’t love me anymore. Maybe that’s how it is.”
    “Know your own heart first. Be careful.”
    “Estela,” I ask, “who are Javier and Adair?”
    “You will meet them,” she tells me. “Someday.”
    “I want to meet them now,” I say. “I want to know at least one thing.”
    “Everything in its time,” she says. But not like she actually means it.

FIFTEEN
    All through the night, the Gypsies make