Chosen Read Online Free PDF Page A

Starbucks!”
     
    “H OW WAS YOUR DAY ?” Chloe asks Dan as she carries their dishes to the sink. He is behind her, putting the leftovers in the fridge. Their elbows and shoulders bump comfortably in the narrow galley kitchen.
    “Shitty. I need a new job. I need a car.”
    Chloe nods; this is an old conversation. In the four years they have been together, two in Tarifa, two here in Portland, Dan has never had his own car. “What kind of job were you thinking, for the winter?”
    “One of the guys does mountain bikes in the summer, then teaches snowboarding up at Mount Hood.”
    “But it’s practically winter now. Don’t you think those jobs are snatched up early on?”
    “God, why are you always so negative?”
    They never argued in Spain; here it seems like every week.
     
    C HLOE HAD STUMBLED ON Dan in a wind-whipped town in southern Spain at the end of her backpacking tour around Europe after college graduation. Sipping sangria at an adjacent table in the Intercontinental Café, in sun-bleached Birdwells and a hulking Bull jacket made of windsurfing sails, he was the most edible thing she’d ever seen. When he opened his beautiful mouth and spoke casual, perfect, California-grown English, she leaned over and kissed it, so tired of mangled, deeply accented pickup lines over the past three months.
    He was a bit of a pothead, she thought, but so were they all, back then. He was older, twenty-five, and had lived in Tarifa for several years, teaching windsurfing, working part-time at the Bull sail shop, banging everything from cute tourists to skinny-legged local goat-herd girls. He fell hard for Chloe too.
    Her friends left, bored with Dan’s surf buddies, longing for serious relationships, convenience, fast food back home, but Chloe stayed on, renting an efficiency at El Beaterio, a former thirteenth-century convent. Dan joined her, moving out of the grungy grotto of rooms down by the fish factory where he lived with Kurt and Paolo from the shop, hanging his damp surf shorts over the towel bar by her curiously small square bathtub.
    Chloe took a job training horses for a beach riding operation by the hotels. She never got used to the rats that ran underfoot like cats or the rudeness of the German girls who led the tours and treated her like a stable mucker instead of a trainer.
    A year passed. During the windy season, even her eyebrows were being blown into disarray by the poniente wind. Chloe went to the Internet café more and more, browsing social work jobs back in the U.S. She attended the Escuela Hispalense on the edge of town and learned enough Andalusian dialect to give tours at the stable. The German girls laughed nastily as she lisped her way through the monologues about the wind farms, Guzman El Bueno, pointed out the coastline of Morocco across the straits.
    That February, the wind changed direction for a week. Just as the verb conjugations in her second semester were getting complicated and she thought the way the relentless levante wind blew her hair against her cheeks might make her crazy, Chloe bought a tarjeta telefónica and called her father from the pay phone at the edge of the cobbled town square.
    “I’ve applied online for a position at a small adoption agency outside of Portland,” she told him, and as she spoke, she loved the way the English language tumbled out of her mouth, tasting like a home-cooked meal, like mashed potatoes and roasted chicken.
    “Might be good to put your degree to use,” Dr. Pinter agreed, his toddler twins from his new marriage screaming in the background.
    “That’s what I was thinking,” she said, smiling, and she wanted to tell him more, how she would be the director of the entire domestic program, but he excused himself to help put the twins to bed.
    Two weeks later, she was in an Extended Stay America outside Portland, loving American shopping (“J.Crew has stores now!”), Starbucks coffee, and, more than anything, her brand-new job at the Chosen