Free one hot summer by carolina garcia aguilera Page A

took the causeway to Miami Beach and crossed the waters of Biscayne Bay, I left behind more than just the city of Miami. I shed the more restrained, traditional side of myself. It was liberating, and I liked it more and more.
    I thought of Luther just then. The old me never would have.
    I spent the first two-thirds of my life in Coral Gables, but now whenever I went back I felt like a visitor to a place that was only vaguely familiar. I had no bond with the stately tree-lined streets, or the homes of my friends in which so many scenes of my life had been played out, or the parks where I had spent the sun-bleached afternoons of my childhood. I was little more than an observer now of a place that had once been everything to me.
    This detachment almost frightened me. If I could feel this was about the place where I was born and raised, it might mean I could shed other crucial components of my life, too. There could be another new self inside me, waiting to come into being, which was capable of abandoning the places and people that made up my life as I knew it.
    But I was probably getting way ahead of myself.
    I wasn’t an unfeeling person. If anything, I was feeling too much. Luther’s reappearance in my life had showed me that my sense of equilibrium was more delicate than I had imagined. I warmed at the thought of our lunch at Nemo’s the afternoon before; when we parted, I had promised Luther that we would see each other again. It was a quiet, civilized parting, but the undercurrents had been deafeningly loud.
    That lunch at Nemo’s had taken almost three hours—time I knew that Luther, on the clock for billable hours, could scarcely afford to take. I’d even had to come up with a viable explanation for my disappearance, vaguely alluding to a shopping trip with a friend at Sawgrass Mills, a discount mall in Fort Lauderdale that was a notoriously long trek and in a well-known black hole for cell phone reception. Thankfully, Ariel was preoccupied with a case going to trial in a week or so, and we had barely spoken the night before.
    I’d never lied to Ariel before. A half-ass story about Sawgrass Mills was one thing, but not telling him about meeting with Luther made me burn with guilt. Nothing had happened between us, but I knew that on some level I was leaving the door open for the possibility that something might. As long as Ariel knew nothing about Luther’s presence in Miami, then he would have no reason to be suspicious.
    I almost ran a red light when the thought hit me: I was acting just like an adulterer. But I wasn’t getting the great sex.
    I was brought back to reality by the screeching sound of tires; I had hit the brakes at the red light, and a Mercedes, assuming I was going to run it, had to stop fast to keep from rear-ending me. His assumption hadn’t been without basis—red lights in Miami mostly serve as decoration. Only old people, Canadians, and European tourists ever obeyed them.
    With a look in the mirror, I offered a hard-hearted wave of apology to the driver in the Mercedes. He was a Latino guy in his twenties, with slicked-back hair and gold chains around his neck. He just shrugged, looking faintly disgusted, his manner broadcasting his opinion that old women like me had no place on the road. Waiting at a red light was probably an insult to his manhood.
    Then I looked back and saw Marti’s car seat. I had almost just caused an accident because I was thinking about Luther. That was what my life had suddenly become.
    Luther wanted us to meet again. Having dinner with him was out of the question; it wasn’t as though he could walk up to the front door and pick me up for a date. And another three-hour lunch wasn’t likely, either. When I last spoke with Luther, I was sitting at the table with Vivian and Anabel, so the matter of our next meeting was left up in the air.
    I executed the final turn onto North Greenway Drive without causing an accident—it was never a good idea to think about major