The Fresco Read Online Free PDF Page A

you haven’t. When Angelica needed help with reading, you had her read to you while you fixed supper. When I needed help, you had somebody at school do it!”
    She stared at him, unbelieving. “Angelica was in the second grade, you were in fourth. All she needed was practice.You had a problem with dyslexia. I can listen while someone practices, but I don’t know anything about helping dyslexia. The school had a specialist who knew all about it. Equal doesn’t mean identical! It’s impossible to treat different people as though they were identical.”
    Again the sulks, the depression, the endless hating silences.
    Goose asked what was the matter, and she told him. “He’s digging up old, silly resentments from when he was seven or eight years old, Goose. And it’s been two months. It’s like breathing poison gas, being around him. He’s perfectly capable of keeping it up for months, even years, and I can’t take it.”
    â€œWell, I can’t stand to see you this upset,” Goose drawled in his lofty, patrician voice. “It’s extremely enervating. I’ve got some family contacts in California. Let me see what I can do.”
    He came up with the name of a Latino foundation that provided loans, tutoring, and counseling for less-than-perfect Hispanic candidates for college. Carlos hyphenated his last name, charmed the committee—like his dad at that age, he could charm anyone when he tried—and was accepted. Since he was twenty, he chose to share a house with several other foundation beneficiaries, while Angelica, only eighteen, lived in a dormitory.
    For Benita, it was the tape at the end of her race. She had a day or two of exhilaration, then she deflated slowly and inexorably, like a soufflé taken out of the oven. She had never considered what she would do when it was over, never planned for afterward when the thing was done. Mami hadn’t ever mentioned what she would do then. The worst was the unforeseen fact that with Angelica gone, not just to college but away to college, Benita had no one to celebrate with or sympathize with or mourn with. With both of them gone, she couldn’t stay busy enough not to think, and over all those mostly solitary years at the bookstore, she had learned to think.
    It seemed to her that up until then, she had been two people, one at work, one at home. The work Benita was decisive,crisp, intelligent, capable. She spoke to people directly, simply, without strain and without later self-recriminations over wrong words, wrong emphases, wrong ideas. The home Benita, on the other hand, was tentative, common, an ignorant woman who used a small vocabulary and bad grammar, who ventured comments on nothing more complicated than the dinner menu, a sort of wife-mother-sponge to soak up Bert’s rages and Carlito’s sulks.
    When the kids went away, however, there was no need for a mother-sponge anymore, no reason for that person to take up space. Perhaps it was time to let bovine Benita go. The planning that had kept her going all these years was over, so maybe it was now time to make another plan.
    She joined a women’s support group. She signed up for an aerobics class at the Y. She began going to work even earlier and—if it wasn’t group night—staying even later. Half a dozen fast food places were within a few blocks of the store; her little office was quiet and private; she had a comfortable old recliner chair and a little TV back there. She continued putting money away, for her own use this time, for sometime three or four years from now, when she couldn’t stick it anymore. She knew she would leave Bert eventually, the time just hadn’t come yet. She managed to encounter him only over occasional breakfasts or sometimes very late at night when he staggered in and fell on the couch. She kept food in the refrigerator for him. She did his laundry. Up until the house arrest, they’d