The Family Hightower Read Online Free PDF Page A

news. One of the Andersons was promoted to a managerial position in an insurance company. Another went to Buenos Aires last month. Her drink warming in the glass while her free hand waves in the air. Sylvie punctuates Muriel’s speech with just the right interjections— how nice, I see, that’s wonderful —then gives Peter a sideways glance. She knows he can’t wait for it to be over. He’s grateful to her for not calling attention to it. But she gets Muriel to wrap up the visit fast, follows them out with a large bag of gardening tools slung across her back, a lopper in one hand, a pole pruner in the other.
    â€œYou still do all that yourself?” Muriel says.
    â€œOf course,” Sylvie says.
    â€œYou know, you can get someone to help you. It’s so much to maintain.”
    Peter is angry on Sylvie’s behalf. Muriel has started to annoy him. But Sylvie smiles instead, that same small, unreadable gesture.
    â€œI love it,” she says. “I really do.” And then, when Muriel’s already in the car, to Peter: “Come back sometime and visit, whenever you want.” She drops her guard all the way down for a second, not a trace of deception, of politicking. So unlike the rest of the family for a second, and Peter feels a little guilty for not wanting to be there. He doesn’t quite see that Sylvie’s way ahead of him, as she always will be. She knows he’s not ready to grasp all their family history. It’s a rocket that curves high in the air, then explodes into a million pieces. He’s not ready to see everything he’s involved in, by association, either. But that will change, she knows, and if she lives to see it, she might just tell him whatever he needs to know.
    â€œWell?” Rufus says, when Peter comes back. “How’d it go? How’d you like the family?” He feels bad for not being able to keep the sarcasm out of his voice when he knows his boy so well, knows when there’s too much kicking around in his son’s head to let him speak. They never get around to talking about it.
    Four times between 1986 and 1994 , Peter leaves and comes back to his father. He stays away for longer and longer every time. First he just goes somewhere else in West Africa; that’s where he picks up his French. Then across Central Asia to China. To Indonesia. To Central America by ship; he disembarks in Colón, Panama, works his way across the isthmus. He hears the stories of the revolutions, the things people did to survive them, the things people are still doing to carry them out, even if they lost. Teaching math to kids in my village, a Guatemalan man with a quiet voice and hair slicked back beneath his hat says to him, this is my revolution. He writes a story about this man that ends up in a local activist English-language paper. Another story he writes, about a dispute on a finca in which unpaid workers take over a plantation and end up under siege from police, even as they win a court case, appears in a left-wing magazine in the United States. He meets other journalists working in the country, who see something in him and pass his name along; he’s the guy who’ll get the stories other people won’t get. That’s when he gets his first wire service pieces. He also gets a bit of the leftist politics that it’s hard to leave Latin America without. He feels an urge to do something, anything, to not walk through his entire life looking the other way. He’s tempted to stay; in a weird way, the tin shacks, the roads covered in mud and paper, the loud, rattling buses, are as close to home, to belonging somewhere, as he’s ever felt. But then he starts to worry about his father. He’s always worried about him, though Rufus never says anything to make him think anything’s wrong. I’m in Cairo now, Rufus says. What a marvelous place. But Peter doesn’t believe it, feels all the more right for not