The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende Read Free Book Online Page A

woman. Their photos speak worlds: dark, oily skin, naked torso, and the first inch or so of their fly unzipped to reveal the beginnings of pubic hair. The tone of the e-mail dialogues goes more or less like this.
    TABRA : Ordinarily I don’t go out with men younger than my grandson.
    BOY : I’m more than old enough to fuck.
    TABRA : Would you talk like that to your own grandmother?
    If someone of a more appropriate age for her shows up, he will turn out to be like the Democrat who lives with his mother and keeps his savings in silver ingots under the mattress. I’m not exaggerating: silver ingots, like the pirates of the Caribbean. It is strange that the Democrat in question would divulge on the first—and only—date information as private as where he hides his capital.
    â€œAren’t you afraid to go out with strangers, Tabra? You might draw a criminal or a pervert,” I commented when she had introduced me to a frightening type whose only allure was that he wore the beret of a Cuban comandante.
    â€œIt does make me think that I need a few more years of therapy,” my friend admitted on that occasion.
    Once she hired a painter to freshen up her walls, a fellow with a mane of black hair, something she really likes. On the basis of the hair Tabra invited him to lounge with her in the Jacuzzi. Bad idea; the painter began treating her like a husband. She would ask him to paint the door and he would answer, “Yes, dear,” with visible irritation. One day he ran out of turpentine and announced that he needed an hour of meditation and a joint to get in contact with his inner space. By then Tabra was fed up with the black hair and told him that he had one hour to paint the interior space of the house and get the hell out of her life. He was no longer there when I arrived with my suitcase.
    The first night, Tabra and I dined on fish soup, the only recipe my friend knows how to cook except for oatmeal with milk and sliced bananas. We got into the Jacuzzi, a slippery wood tub hidden among the trees; it had a sickening stench because an unfortunate skunk had fallen into it and simmered on a low flame for a week before it was discovered. There I unloaded my frustration like a bag of rocks.
    â€œYou want my opinion?” Tabra asked. “Sabrina won’t ease your pain; grief takes time. You’re very depressed, and you have nothing to offer that little girl.”
    â€œI can offer more than what she’ll have in a foster home for very sick children.”
    â€œThen you’ll have to do it alone, because Willie won’t help you in this. I don’t know how you plan to look after your son and your grandchildren, keep writing, and on top of that raise a little girl who needs two mothers.”

Powerful Circle of Witches
    A RADIANT S ATURDAY DAWNED . Spring in Tabra’s forest was already summer, but I didn’t want to meet her and go for a walk, as we usually did on weekends. Instead, I called the five women who with me compose the circle of the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder. When I joined the group, they had already been meeting for several years to share their lives, meditate, and pray for people who were sick or in need of help. Now that I am one of them, we exchange makeup, drink champagne, stuff ourselves with bonbons, and sometimes go to the opera: spiritual practice alone is a little depressing to me. I had met them a year before, the day the physicians in California confirmed your diagnosis of no hope, Paula, exactly what I had been told in Spain. There was nothing that could be done, they said, you would never recover. I drove around keening in the car and I don’t know how I ended up at Book Passage, my favorite bookstore, where I do a lot of my press interviews; they even keep a mailbox for me. There a Japanese lady almost as short as I am came over to me with an affectionate smile and invited me to have a cup of tea. She was Jean Shinoda Bolen, a