Free The Canterbury Sisters by Kim Wright Page B

drive. So I didn’t, and when I finally got back to Texas, it was almost as if I’d forgotten how. I remember sitting in a car that first time, sitting there in the driver’s seat behind the wheel. It had been two years, maybe a little more, and for a second I couldn’t even remember how to crank it. I hadn’t truly forgotten, of course. Driving is such an automatic thing, like swimming or breathing, but at first . . . well, the point is that Guatemala was a different world, and there was good and bad in that. Allen left every morning after breakfast with the driver and then Antonio would come back and take the kids to their little school. He had to drive them, even though it was just down the street. The level of fear was that high, you see, and then Antonio would return again, in case there was someplace I wanted to go.”
    Another pause. Her face is red and she is panting gently. The chore of walking and talking has taken something out of her, just as Tess predicted it might do. Jean is a woman who unravels easily, I think. The sort of woman who might come completely apart if you found a certain thread and pulled it.
    “Of course,” Jean says, regaining her poise, “the trouble with Antonio waiting on me is that there was never anyplace to go or anything to do. Five servants sounds like a fine thing, until you have five servants. So I flitted around the house all day and then somehow, at some point, I heard of a church that was doing a ministry in the dump. For there are these enormous garbage piles, you see, in the cities of Central America, and people actually live in them. Whole families, from grandparents to infants, and it’s appalling, but that’s how they live, scavenging among the garbage for food and clothes, anything they can use for shelter. This church had plans for a clinic and a school.”
    “Mom,” Becca says sharply. “That isn’t part of the story.”
    “Isn’t it? I’m not so sure. Because that’s something else I blame myself for. Everyone warned me that it was dangerous to work with the ministry. The other women who lived in the enclave tried to tell me. You go through those gates, they’d say , and you take your chances. If there’s anything you need from the outside, can’t you just send your driver? For some reason they never suffered with the isolation like I did. They were happy with the situation, or at least happy enough, and they played bridge and had dinner parties and changed clothes three or four times a day. You would have thought we were living in one of those British manor houses in an Agatha Christie mystery—you know, one of those books which start out so peaceful and then someone gets knifed? But the point is that the other wives were far more clever than I was. They found ways to fill their days. Are there manor houses near here, Tess?”
    “A few,” Tess says. “Old family estates.”
    “And are they lovely?”
    “We could stop at one if you like. There won’t be much to see in the gardens this time of year, I’m afraid.”
    “I would very much like to tour the gardens.”
    “Come on, Mom, focus,” Becca says. “You’ve been talking for twenty minutes and nobody has the slightest freakin’ idea what this story is even about.”
    “It’s about how I killed my husband,” says Jean. “Or rather, how he died trying to protect me. Me and Rebecca and the boys.”
    “That’s not what happened, Mom.”
    “Of course it is. Where was I? Where in the story, I mean.”
    “You found yourself in a land that managed to be simultaneously dangerous and boring,” Tess says gently. She must be used to prompting people in their stories, used to nudging them back onto the trail of the narrative when they have wandered off.
    “And it was all my fault,” Jean says, blinking back tears. “Allen knew from the start that the kids and I shouldn’t come with him, that a family like us would be a target. But yet there I was every morning, traipsing around the