Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,2

apply their professional skills to getting along. You said it, Antonia agrees, so as not to append something negative and quotable that will get back to the others, bring on more bickering.

Anyhow, sister, screw them. How are you doing?

I’m okay. Antonia’s mantra of the last year. Somewhere she read that okay and Coca-Cola are the two most universally understood words. It depresses her to think the ties that bind are so flimsy. Even silence would be better.

But silence is all she gets when she addresses Sam these days. What she wouldn’t give for his voice coming from the afterlife, assuring her that he’s okay.

Her neighbor Roger is at the door. If I can be of any help? he offers. Kind of late for that, she thinks. Sam’s death was last June. Maybe the news just now reached him, like the light from stars?

I’m good, she tells Roger. A turn of phrase borrowed from her students. She always feels slightly bogus parroting them, as in her first years speaking English, tossing out an idiom, pretending she’d been born to it. Dream on. A phrase from her own student days.

Been hauling over to Ferrisburgh. Got to take what comes. Pays the bills anyhow. Roger is partial to sentence fragments; Antonia has to supply the rest. Every encounter, homework, a fill-in-the-blank test.

Broken English. The phrase once leveled at her and her sisters. She mended her broken pieces and ended up teaching Americans their own language, four decades total, three at the nearby college. What now, now that she has retired?

We shall see, her mother used to say. Que será, será.

Been meaning to stop. Them gutters—Roger nods at the pipe running the length of the house, right under the roof, full of twigs, leaves. Runoff from the roof, stuff collects.

I thought those were nests, Antonia says, laughing. Of course, she didn’t really think so, but Roger gets such a kick out of knowing more than the smarty-pants professors over at the college. One of her ways of being neighborly. Letting him have the last word—it worked most times with Sam.

In fact, Antonia doesn’t know how half the things in the house work. All state-of-the-art net-zero conservation systems Sam was so proud of. It’s like flying a 747, she’d complain every time he tried to guide her through all the levers and dials in the furnace room.

And you call yourself a feminist! her sister Mona is quick to point out. Mona’s default ringtone is sci-fi. The world is crazy, baby sister insists.

It’s The world is ugly, / And the people are sad, Antonia is tempted to tell Mona, from a Stevens poem I used to teach. But it has never worked to treat her sisters like her students. I don’t give a fuck who said so, Tilly has told her more than once.

I’ll get them cleared up for you, Roger offers. A complete sentence, his way of being neighborly, instead of a sympathy card.

Later that morning, there’s a knock at the door. Antonia checks the peephole, a new habit she’s not likely to break since she is alone. She can just make out a head of glossy black hair. Mario, one of the Mexican workers next door. She opens to the boy-size man, his soft brown skin unusual in pale-faced Vermont. Rare also for Antonia to feel tall in this country. For a moment she understands the self-assurance of those who can look down at another’s face. What comes with health care and good nutrition.

Mario doesn’t look old enough to be doing the milking next door. Roger might be breaking the child-labor laws. But then, he’s got bigger problems, like the immigration status of his farmhands.

Hola, do?ita. They’ve met before. Soon after his arrival early this year, Mario cut his hand on a saw he didn’t know how to use. Lots of blood and Roger afraid to take him to the hospital, where the ER might call the ICE office. Instead, Roger called her. Didn’t he know about Sam’s death? I’m no doctor, she reminded her neighbor.

Not for the cut. To talk to him, calm him down, Roger explained. Small town. Everyone knows Dr. Sawyer’s wife is Spanish.

Not really Spanish Spanish, she used to correct them. But she’s given up trying to explain the colonial intricacies of her ethnicity. Soon after she and Sam married, one of his elderly patients stopped her at the grocery store to ask if he’d brought her back from one of his volunteer surgery trips, always written up in the