Free This Too Shall Pass by Milena Busquets Page B

happy, the relaxed, tired bodies and dreamy eyes of a day spent boating, in the sea and the sun. We share stories, the same ones repeated a thousand times by people who have spent large portions of their lives together and still like one another. For a fleeting moment, I consider having a quiet coffee and not responding to the message. Nina, my goddaughter, is sleeping in her mother’s lap. Edgar is trying to sneak a little swig of beer, but he stops when Elisa looks at him threateningly. Nico is paying attention to the adults’ conversation while little Dani is playing with his collection of trains. Hugo accuses me of being a bore. Carolina comes out in my defense and Pep starts telling stories of Hugo’s poor girlfriends, left behind every morning while he goes out for his sacred run. I can’t imagine life having any meaning without these summer nights. I get another text from Santi and he proposes that we meet up in front of the church so he can give me a good-night kiss. I get up, as if I had been sitting on a spring.
    —I have to go out for a minute—be right back.
    Everyone looks at me with surprise.
    —Anything wrong, dear? Are you OK? Carolina asks with a worried expression.
    —Yes, I’m fine. I’m just going out to buy cigarettes, I say with a giggle.
    —Yeah, Sofía says.
    Carolina looks at me from the other side of the table without smiling. She’s the only one of us who has had a long-term relationship with a really wonderful man, and though she’s never expressed it, I know she considers my dating a married man not only a waste of time but also in some way a bit of a betrayal of her too.
    Hugo picks up and wiggles a half-full pack of cigarettes at me, which he had put out on the table a little while ago.
    —That tobacco’s stale. Seriously, it’s totally unsmokable, I say.
    He laughs. —When you told me you fib a lot, I imagined you’d be a little better at it.
    —I do what I can.
    —Don’t take too long, we’ll be bored without you, he adds.
    Sofía accompanies me to the door.
    —You don’t really like him that much, huh?

I skip down the hill with a spring in my step. You always said I walked like my father, as if there were something pushing me upward, as if our feet barely grazed the ground, and how before seeing us you already knew we were coming by the unmistakable pattern of our gait. I still recall how angry you got that one time when I was near the end of my pregnancy and you saw me lumbering.
    “Please don’t tell me you’re going to change the way you’ve walked your entire life, just because you’re pregnant.”
    If you were to see me now, you’d know perfectly well that I’m on my way to meet a man. But you never tried to stop me. You believed that love justified the type of quirky behavior that under normal circumstances you would have roundly disapproved of. If a waiter brought you the wrong dish, or spilled soup on you, and in response to your complaint the maître d’ would say that it’s on account of his being in love—you alone were able to squeeze these kinds of intimate details from others—you would have looked at him with a kind face and said, “Oh, well, in that case…” And gone back to eating, happy as a clam, with a soup stain on your skirt. But if someone dared give you information, assuring you it was right, and it turned out to be wrong, or showed up late for a meeting, you’d stare at them as if stupefied, and they’d lose your respect forever. I spent my entire life fighting to gain that respect without ever knowing whether I succeeded. I still run late, no matter where I go.
    Unexpectedly, I find the beautiful stranger approaching me in long strides. He’s alone, walking a little hunched forward, like most tall, reedy men do, as if protecting themselves from invisible gusts of wind, as if it were always a little blustery up there in the air they inhabit. I’m walking so fast and feeling so restless that one of my flip-flops accidentally