Umami by Laia Jufresa Read Free Book Online Page B

not? I’m going to sign everything I write here under Widow Ducky, Lord Amaranth. Let’s see if I remember how to save things. At what point, I wonder, are they going to change the symbol for saving files from a floppy disk?
    By the way, Ms. Simone, I should probably clarify that I’m not on a real sabbatical. On paper it might be a sabbatical, but let there be no mistake: in mind and in spirit I’ve retired. If I gave up work officially, on my measly pension I’d starve to death. Starve! Me! The world expert on sacred amaranth. The man who introduced the concept of umami into the national gastronomic dialog! Starve! And all because the old fool hasn’t tended his milpa since 2001: corn is hardy stuff, but it’s not invincible. Even corncobs need their little drops of water. Even a widowed duck needs love. Come on.
    What else?
    Laptop. Triceratops. Doo-wop. What’s the research topic for the new machine going to be?
    It’s going to be Noelia.
    â€Œ
‌ 2001
    I’m crawling around under the trees singing ‘camu-flash flash flash’. I want to find mushrooms. I do not want to find any slugs. I just learned the word ‘camuflash’. It means no one can see me. I’m like the mushrooms and the slugs, hidden under the leaves. The leaves fall off the trees. They’re brown like nuts. The green balls with little spikes that Grandma Emma says have nuts inside fall off too. They only fall off once, then they stay there on the ground until they go brown and rotten and camuflashed with the mud. A family of trees is called a grove. This grove is Grandma’s neighbor. Kind of. In Mexico our neighbors all live in the mews, but here neighbor is anyone who lives more or less near. Near you or near the lake. You have to go everywhere in the car here, and everything is camuflashed. For example, Granddad is camuflashed in the lake. Well, his ashes are. And Grandma chats to them when she goes walking along the shore, and she flicks her cigarette ash in the water, to keep him company. I don’t remember Granddad but my sister does. She says he had a really red nose and said our names like this: Ann, Tee-yo, Olmou, Loose.
    Before he was ashes, our Granddad was a pilot and that’s why we get free tickets and that’s why we fly a lot like birds, but without the feathers or the fun. Well, it’s a little fun because you can watch movies and they bring you these cheese triangles on your food tray. Mama says that when her dad the pilot died, Grandma cut up all his sweaters and sewed them back together again until she’d made sweaters for all of us. Olmo calls them our woolly dead pilot sweaters.
    Mama starts whistling and squeaking her boots together to make music. The song makes Grandma laugh. Mama has a basket hooked on one elbow and Grandma hooked on the other. And she has a white rag wrapped around her head. She calls them rags, those things she puts on her head. Mama’s basket is full but that’s because she collects everything she finds, which is cheating. Grandma doesn’t approve of Mama’s picking technique. Those are the words she said and that’s why she won’t let go of her arm, no matter how pretty her squeaky song is. Every time Mama collects a mushroom, Grandma says:
    â€˜That one’s poisonous,’ or, ‘That one’s OK, but it tastes awful,’ or, ‘Don’t even touch that one, please.’
    She doesn’t say anything to me because I’m not cheating. When we got to her house this time, Grandma called me Peanut.
    â€˜Last summer you were just a peanut,’ she said.
    I liked that. But then Ana said, ‘She means you were still a baby.’
    I didn’t like that.
    â€˜I’m almost six,’ I told Emma.
    â€˜Five is a lucky number,’ she said.
    Today, the boys went camping and us girls stayed behind to pick mushrooms. Emma gave us baskets and plastic bags and told us which