The Years That Followed by Catherine Dunne Read Free Book Online Page B

stay with you. Please, you have to rest.”
    María Dolores nodded and closed her eyes. Pilar watched as sleep overtook her. She couldn’t help her sense of disbelief. She tried to find a sign, any sign, of long-ago, youthful passion in her mother’s wearyface. Mamá had loved another man, and she, Pilar, had known nothing about that other life, suspected nothing.
    Did Papá know? Surely he must. Santa Juanita was small, a tightly wound, suspicious community, where need and want and envy made everybody scrutinize their neighbors’ every move. This sudden suspicion of Pilar’s made sense of her father’s jibes, the throwaway remarks that he spat around the room when something had, once again, catapulted him into one of his rages. Pilar felt a swelling sorrow for her mother. Mamá had been an educated girl, one of the few in the village who had gone to school until she was eighteen. The nuns in the nearby convent had spotted potential in María Dolores, encouraged her in her studies. Mamá’s own mother, Loló—Pilar’s tiny ­grandmother—had cleaned for those same nuns, making her way on hands and knees up and down the stairways and the parquet floors of the convent, polishing the holy surfaces until they gleamed. Loló adored her only daughter, was determined to give her all the opportunities she herself had never had. And María Dolores had loved school, loved learning.
    Pilar still remembers Mamá’s wails of anguish when, one inexplicable afternoon, Papá had wrenched tumble-loads of books off the olivewood shelves that Paco had just finished crafting. He ripped the spines off each, one by one, tossing them into the already blazing fire. She remembers little else apart from the dark, burnished swirls of the wood and the way the pattern had caught her eye. That and her father batting away her mother’s flailing arms as though they had been made of string. When Papá turned his rage on Pilar, she fled through the door and across the frozen yard, where she hid in the barn until her father’s storm had blown itself out.
    Pilar knew nothing of the circumstances of her parents’ courtship—­not even how they’d met, or how long they’d known each other before they married. In some of the other village houses, there were one or two awkward, wavery black-and-white photographs on display: the happy couple, snapped outside the door of the village church. The men all looked the same: scrubbed, embarrassed, wearing ill-fitting suits. The women, for the most part, wore pretty dresses—some of them a cut above the rest with a pearl button or two, a little bit of lace, here and there some satin ribbon. But there were no photographs in Pilar’s house.
    All Pilar knew was her mother’s prayer over the years that Pilar’s life must not be as hers had been. She’d insisted on Pilar’s staying at school until she, too, was eighteen—a battle she had managed to win; her weapons were years of tenacity and lacemaking, along with the money she’d earned cleaning for the nuns. Just as her own mother had. “Not for a third generation, though,” María Dolores had warned Pilar, shaking her head, her eyes aflame. “You must break the cycle. You will clean floors for nobody.”
    And so Pilar had left. When she took the overnight train to Madrid, she had two addresses in her pocket: that of the nuns’ hostel where she would live for the next eight years of her life, and that of Señor Don Alfonso Gómez, who would help her transform the rest of it.
    * * *
    He comes out of his office to greet her. Alfonso Gómez is a tall man, an imposing one, with elegantly graying hair and kind eyes. This man might have been my father, Pilar thinks, and that strange possibility fills her with wonder. She gazes at him, searching for some memory of Paco, some shadow of resemblance in the face that is now beaming