Aftermirth Read Online Free PDF Page A

going. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
    I T WAS UNSETTLING at first, having a copilot after more than two years of flying solo. Elena was a smaller, quieter presence in the car than Jess had been, and her perfume was stronger and flowerier. I kept my eyes on the road, hyperaware of her beside me, but she seemed totally at ease, and after half an hour or so I started to unclench a little. She asked me about my family and I sketched the basics: second son of two Yuppie doctors, one an orthopedic surgeon and the other an English professor at NYU; Upper East Side, upper middle class, mediocre test scores and grades unbefitting a Larssen; cut-up and chronic underachiever until my early twenties, when I’d discovered comedy.
    â€œSo did you go to college?” Elena asked.
    â€œOf course. I majored in beer and girls, but I managed to graduate.”
    â€œHuh.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œJust the way you said that. So . . . offhandedly.”
    Good job, Michael, I chided myself . Elena’s father had been a factory worker. College wouldn’t have been an “of course” for her, and she wouldn’t have diddled her way through it like I had. “I must sound like an entitled jerk,” I said.
    â€œNot at all,” she replied, fairly convincingly. “That’s just how you grew up, in a world where college was no big deal.”
    â€œWere you the first in your family to go?”
    â€œYes. I had a full scholarship to Wellesley.”
    â€œWow. Your parents must have been incredibly proud of you.”
    Elena didn’t answer, and I glanced over at her. She was biting her lip, fighting tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like the world’s biggest ass. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”
    She shook her head. “It’s all right. I want to talk about him. If you don’t mind listening.”
    â€œTell me,” I said.
    And so she told me about her father, Julio Santiago, Santa to his friends. He’d grown up dirt poor in a small village in Puebla, where he’d met and married Elena’s mother. He’d emigrated illegally to the States in 1981, leaving his pregnant wife in Mexico, and worked whatever jobs he could get—busboy, farmhand, janitor—sending money home to support his wife and daughter. Elena hadn’t even met her father until she was six years old, when he became a citizen under the Reagan amnesty and was finally able to send for them.
    â€œHe sounds like an amazing guy,” I said.
    â€œHe was. He’d have given you the shirt off his back if you needed it. That’s one of the reasons everyone called him Santa, because he was so generous. That, and because he was always laughing. He was a small man, but he had this big, booming laugh. You couldn’t hear it and not laugh with him.”
    I thought of Jess and was silent.
    â€œI never understood that,” Elena went on. “His joy, I mean. He worked so hard for so long and had so little to show for it.”
    â€œHe had you.”
    â€œYeah, his malcontent of a daughter, who wanted things he couldn’t give me and a life that made no sense to him. How could I be happy without a husband, a family? He didn’t understand it, because he wouldn’t have been. My mother and I were the center of his universe.”
    â€œSo . . . do you not want to get married and have kids?”
    â€œSure I do, but I’m not even thirty. I’ve got plenty of time.”
    â€œYeah, I thought that too, once,” I said, around the balled-up sock lodged in my throat.
    Elena touched my shoulder. “Hey—” she began, but I cut her off.
    â€œI really don’t want to talk about it.”
    â€œOkay, then we won’t talk about it.”
    She retrieved her hand and sat back, but if she was stung I couldn’t sense it. The silence between us was surprisingly comfortable, and after a while I realized I was no