Right after the Weather by Carol Anshaw

Author:Carol Anshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The nap is a fiction. In these suddenly busy days of her work life, Cate needs to steal every spare minute, even down here, to refine her sets.

Just a few years ago, if she were going to work away from her shop, she would have had to bring drafting tools and a tube of rolled drawings. Now she slips into her backpack a laptop thin as a magazine. Her ideas are now liquid, trickled into a design program, then shot into the cloud. She can work anywhere Wi-Fi hovers.

* * *

Seneca is late to dinner, then finally comes through the archway, placing a hand on the plaster in such a graceful way a stranger might not notice she is steadying herself. She has suffered from balance issues for years. At dinner she often wears a light caftan and heavy jewelry, a rolled scarf as a headband. She moves slowly. Her approach is like that of one or another of the three wise men.

As soon as she has made apologies and taken her seat, the door to the kitchen opens for the cook, who bears a salad of nopalitos. Juana is small and elderly in an extreme way. By now she has lost a hard-fought battle with the sun. Her face resembles that of an apple doll. She has abandoned speaking for muttering. Initially, Cate interpreted this as something ancient and important, a blessing on her maybe.

Juana greets Cate the way she always does, with a violent embrace, which is a little awkward because Cate is seated, so the gesture winds up being a hug of both Cate and the chair. Juana then takes Cate’s bad hand and kneads it then rubs the bumps, which are what remains of her lost fingers. All the while of this, she murmurs something that’s not Spanish but rather some indigenous language. The first time this happened, Cate thought she was being prayed for to some specialty saint. But when she asked about this, Seneca set her straight. “Oh no!” Then laughed in a spilling way. “It’s for good luck. To rub any deformity—a hump on the back, the stump of what was once a leg—is supposed to bring good fortune. You get a lottery ticket on a day this happens. I’m sorry to tell you this. How can it not be offensive? But she is from an older world than ours, one filled with magic.”

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