Love on the Road 2015 Read Online Free PDF Page B

famous for butterflies and orchids, no military and a good school system. Floridians event flew to San Jose for cheap elective surgery. How bad could it be?
    We settled in Nicoya, Costa Rica’s answer to the Wild West. I sent back letters filled with stories about scorpions in the bedroom, iguanas in the toilet and chickens in the kitchen. I said how cold showers could be really refreshing. I thought I was pretty funny and let Richard read my letters. He thought I was complaining – nothing funny there. I was re-educated with a two-hour monologue on family values. He did like the one about Maria, our next-door neighbour, who sent over arroz con pollo containing one of their few, precious chickens, because she said the Americanos were like helpless children who didn’t know a plantain from a banana, and she didn’t want to see the family go hungry.
    I made one last swipe at Laurie’s face, smearing rather than clearing the oily, tan spread that kept my daughter from starving. Back in Baltimore, this would have warranted a stop for soap, water and a paper towel or two. But now, clean enough.
    ‘Daddy, make us go sideways again,’ Laurie squealed into Richard’s ear, her dimpled arm around his neck like a sausage necklace. He kissed her sticky fingers.
    ‘Get back into your seatbelt, Baby Girl. I’ll see what I can do.’
    I looked over at my husband. His pulsing right temple told me what I needed to know: he was in charge; he would take care of us. Nothing to worry about. I loved that about him. I had gone from my parents’ house to Richard’s house with only a summer vacation between college and marriage,and neither my parents nor my husband wanted me to worry. I agreed with them. We drove on in silence, passing walled compounds topped with razor wire guarded by armed sentries. Nicaragua was not Costa Rica. Mostly we saw shacks with dusty bodies – difficult to differentiate rib-defined children and dogs – scrabbling together in barren yards. Every now and then an orange-and-gold lantana bush rose out of the jaundiced dust, like a lamp that had no visible power source.
    ‘Daddy, I need to go pee,’ said Chloe Kate, our seven-year-old.
    ‘Cara, didn’t I tell you to take them when we stopped at the border?’
    That tone again. I turned my hand, palm up, and swiped my ring across my lap. It left a dirty streak, like a layer of itself, only the wrong colour, on my favourite pink skirt, the one that swished around my knees like an upside down tulip gone soft on its stem.
    ‘I’m sorry. With all those kids begging around the car, I forgot. Maybe we can stop at the next town.’ A bit of blue night-sky peeked out from between my fingers balled up in my lap. I must have been squeezing pretty hard, because when I unclenched, the ring had left behind a perfect pink imprint, like a negative. It matched my skirt.
    He was quiet for a moment. Then, with a tight smile, he said loudly enough for the back seat to hear, ‘You sound just like your mother with those damn excuses, Cara.’
    ‘Daddy said a cuss word, Daddy said a cuss word,’ Chloe Kate chanted, bouncing up and down, her stubby braids flying like small blond birds.
    ‘Hey, CK,’ Richard said, reaching back to tickle our middledaughter, ‘sometimes grown-ups say things to show how they feel. When you’re twenty-one, you can use that word. Until then, it’s only for Daddy.’
    ‘How about Mommy? She’s twenty-one.’
    ‘I don’t need words like that. I have other ways to share my feelings,’ I told our daughter quietly.
    ‘Yes, Mommy has other ways, don’t you, Cara?’
    Richard delivered his rhetorical question with his loaded eyes aimed at me, invisible to the back seat. I silently leaned away and looked out at a walled compound, almost elegant, except for odd circular pockmarks. I saw them on several more buildings, until the whole town seemed the victim of an unfortunate, scarring rash. I wondered if the random pattern was intentional, a native