Free one hot summer by carolina garcia aguilera

last of their cash they bought inventory to stock the shelves. They invested every penny they owned in that first drugstore, and they knew that failure was not an option.
    They were fortunate to have established credibility with American suppliers they had dealt with in Cuba, who extended my family a line of credit and extended favorable rates in inventory. Papa soon realized he was reaping the benefits from decades of paying his bills on time. He and his brothers worked hard, and adapted to their new market. They figured that, since conditions were getting worse in Cuba, there would be a continued influx of new exiles who would need pharmacy supplies. They would cater to this group which, although penniless at the moment, would eventually establish itself into a loyal customer base. They extended credit to fellow Cubans, and payment plans with no interest. Sooner or later, every single customer paid his or her bill in full.
    Many a parent left the Santos Pharmacy with medicine for a sick child that they had taken on good faith. That kind of compassion didn’t go unrewarded. Even now, more than forty years later, the same customers come to Santos—only now, they pay with American Express platinum cards. No one would ever go broke from counting on the Cuban work ethic.
    Things went so well that my family opened a second pharmacy within a year of the first; within the decade, there were several more. Papa and my uncles have since retired from working full time, but they maintained an office in the original building and stopped in at least once a week. My cousins were now in charge, and still upholding the family tradition of increasing profits. As a result, the Santoses were one of the wealthier exile families.
    Lately my brothers and cousins had contracted a chemist to start research into developing our own line of pharmaceutical products and, from initial reports, it looked as though we were going to be expanding our business yet again. We had already established a bilingual Web site—one of the first in the country—from which customers could order products to be delivered within twenty-four hours.
    I tried not to take our success for granted. After all, I was born in the United States, and I had no real notion of how much they had lost when they left Cuba. There were no photographs to provide me with a mental picture of their old life, so I had to rely on the verbal descriptions my parents offered up on the few occasions they chose to talk about life before exile. My parents, in a sense, left their souls behind on the island. Mamá and Papa were talkative by nature, but they rarely spoke about Cuba to my brothers and me. It was too painful, even after four decades. Time clouds memories, and leads to exaggeration, but from what little I knew I imagined them living a golden existence in a breathtakingly beautiful land that had nurtured our family for generations. I felt the loss of a country in which I had never set foot.
    My parents’ house was on North Greenway Drive, in an upscale part of Coral Gables. The place was two-story, light pink, built in the old Spanish style with lots of balconies and wrought-iron embellishments. In the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, most of the beautiful old trees that shaded the place were lost—pulled from the ground by the force of the winds. Papa and Mamá had had new ones planted, but they couldn’t match the majesty of their predecessors. Rather, they were a raw reminder of a late-August dawn a decade past when the skies opened up over South Florida.
    I waited for the light to change at the intersection of Le Jeune Road, so I could turn left for the final stretch to my parents’ house. This was the point at which, like clockwork, it struck me how much my life had changed since I married Ariel and moved to Miami Beach. My life in Coral Gables seemed tainted with conformity and convention. Since moving to the Beach I felt freer and more in touch with my true self. When I