Free Saving the World by Julia Álvarez Page B

a term he disliked even before he met her. One of the things Alma found attractive about him on their first date.
    â€œCome on, I’m not that stupid. It is my country, you know.” She feels a competitive need to remind him of her authority over all things Dominican. True, he knows many more facts about her native land and can answer dinner-party questions about the size of the population, the gross national product, the amount of aid flowing into the country. But she has got the language and the intuitive feel for how that world works. If he ends up on a desolate mountain farm, surrounded by campesinos, he will need her help, for sure.
    â€œSo why would I get AIDS?”
    She can feel his gaze trawling her face for an answer. “I had this weird call today,” she begins, then blurts it all out: the woman’s accusation, the curse at the end.
    â€œWhen was this? Did you get her name? How did she say she knew me?” Richard is cross-examining her, as if she were the guilty party.
    Suddenly, Alma is aware of how ungrounded her suspicions will seem with so few details to back them up. She remembers reading an article about magical realism, the writer saying that the only way to convince a reader that there are elephants flying in the sky is to use details, to say that there are seventeen elephants with garlands of yellow flowers flying in the sky. Why didn’t she even think of asking thewoman’s name, especially since the whole issue of names had come up? “She called me Mrs. Huebner. She pronounced it right.”
    Richard has been heading toward the phone, as if to confront the caller, but now he turns to confront her. “You’re not telling me you believe this, are you?”
    After a slight pause, Alma shakes her head.
    â€œGood.” He has to have noticed her hesitation, but he is letting it pass. He doesn’t want to risk not going on this DR project. Knowing Emerson, owner and director of a highly successful green consultancy company, international troubleshooter par excellence, who doesn’t suffer hesitation and delay easily, Richard probably has until tomorrow morning to make a decision. A bad fight could ruin it all. “Did you call anyone else?” Richard asks, picking up the phone and punching in some numbers.
    â€œWhy?” And then Alma remembers Helen’s telling her about a way to call back a missed call, a feature Helen often uses as she can’t get to the ringing phone fast enough on her walker. Richard will be annoyed if he knows that she called Tera. He does not like Alma sharing their personal problems with a best friend who will influence her thinking. She shakes her head, then nods.
    But Richard is already barking into the receiver. “Hello? Who is this? Paul? Paul Vendler? Oh, Paul, I’m sorry, I was just checking something on our phone.” Richard turns and gives Alma a withering look, all the more unpleasant for the discrepancy of his pleasant tone of voice. “We’re fine, fine. Sorry to bother you. Things okay? Good, good. Same here. Sure will. Hi to Tera.”
    Richard puts the receiver back slowly and stands with his head bowed, as if he were praying over it. He is not one to lose his temper in any way that would register on the Latina telenovela scale Alma is familiar with. But after a decade together, she can read anger in the tight jaw, the big ears that seem to darken and perk up, the thin line of his mouth stretched tight when he finally lifts his head. Maybe he will risk a fight tonight after all. Then stomp off in a huff for five months to the Dominican highlands.
    â€œI tried to tell you that I had made a call,” she says lamely, not sure which of her sins he is finding most unpardonable: her talking to Tera, her equivocating about it, her mistrusting his fidelity, her not being overjoyed about his virtual acceptance of an assignment that holds her over a barrel: either she must desert her work or