Free Saving the World by Julia Álvarez

glass of whatever wine is already open.
    â€œA toast,” he says when she sits down. “To new adventures.” He winks before drinking.
    Suddenly, Alma realizes that she’s not the only one with a secret to report. The last time Richard came home with that sheepish smile and a toast to adventure, he had just bought a boat. He had gotten it for next to nothing from a colleague leaving for Ethiopia.
    â€œBut you don’t know how to swim,” Alma had reminded him. On their first date, Richard had confessed that his dreaded way of dying was by drowning. He hated even watching pirate movies. Now he was going to sail the seas?
    â€œNot the seas, just the lake.” He had grinned, pleased with himself. “And it’s a motorboat, not a tall ship.”
    Alma had gone along with it, why not. Let him enjoy being a boat owner. Better that than a mistress, she’d thought, a thought that now glides across her consciousness like some evasive and deadly microbe on a slide.
    â€œSo, what’s up?” She studies his face, the heightened color in his cheeks. She has always loved how coloring betrays him. Unlike many Americans whose faces seem so deadpan when compared with Latin faces, Richard’s is … not exactly expressive but transparent. Alma has always believed she can see right through him.
    â€œOkay, here’s the deal. If you agree, only if you agree—and I told Emerson I had to run it by you—we can go live in the DR for a while! Wait, wait, don’t say anything yet, let me finish. HI just got this really exciting contract to start a green center in the mountains. And Emerson’s asked me to supervise the start-up. Five months max on site. That’ll take us through the worst of winter. You won’t have to plow the driveway,” he teases. This is a gift he is offering her, a chance to return to her native land, to get away from everything she has been complaining about in his country.
    â€œYou’ve been saying that you really feel like you need to go back to recharge yourself. How you need some downtime to just find out who you are anymore.”
    It sounds like her. Richard wouldn’t invent talk like that. Alma sighs, speechless before this incontrovertible proof of her own petty self in full complaint.
    â€œI thought you’d be excited.” His face has fallen, the color draining. “I am, I am. It’s just that I’m working on my novel.” Moving involves distraction, meeting new people, reinventing your self again.
    â€œWhat do you mean? You can write anywhere.” Why do peoplealways assume this? Why does Richard assume this? He should know better. Last summer in an effort to resuscitate her saga novel, she had painted her study bright salmon to bring the tropics to Vermont. Within a week, she painted the walls back to off-white because the new color was drowning out her characters. “Oh, Alma, don’t you see? This is just the change you need.” When Richard is so sure, he is the husband equivalent of those salmon walls, drowning out her qualms. “You could get away from all this.” He waves his arms, meaning, she knows, the world of book biz, the faxes and phone calls, the plague of e-mail, Lavinia gently but firmly reminding her that the saga novel is overdue.
    â€œWe can easily fly to see your parents. It’s closer to Miami from there than from here.” Richard’s voice has turned plaintive. He is running out of arguments, and she is still not convinced. “And David and Sam and Ben will love to visit. Do you realize they have
never
been to their stepmother’s native country?” Alma doubts that this bothers her stepsons as much as it does Richard. “Oh, Alma, please think about it, please?”
    Were she to think about it in her present state, the thought would get lost in the moody mazes of her mind, like Mamasita in the entrails of customer service. Too many ifs, ands,