A LIE YOU’LL NEVER TELL by Mark Jacobs
Meredith was looking for a Chevy. Specifically, a ’56 Bel Air. Red and white, although of course the car could have been repainted. To find it, she had to steal some time away from the tour group. Easier said than done.
At seven, her first morning in Havana – La Habana, people on the tour were already saying, savoring the foreign taste on their tongue – she went through the lobby door of the Meliá Cohiba into hot, wet air that was nothing like the air of Minnesota. She went down the sloping drive just far enough to check out the row of taxis parked on the street. Three of them were big old American barges, bright and cheery as Christmas. Because she did not know cars, she had spent a long time studying pictures, trying to impress the details of that particular Chevrolet on her uncooperative memory.
The Bel Air belonged to a man named Daniel Pacheco, who ran it as a tourist taxi. Supposedly the Cohiba was his preferred spot because so many internationals stayed there. Daniel was married to Yusaima. As hard as Meredith looked at pictures of old Bel Airs, she had looked still harder at the one photograph of Yusaima that existed. The problem was, it was not a recent photo.
“Meredith?”
There stood Priscilla in her cargo pants and emblazoned T‑shirt and stocky Birkenstocks. The wood cross around her neck was just a little too big for her slender body. Off to one side, Graciela waited with a professional smile. Graciela was their Cuban guide. She was attractive and young, someone you’d see on a tourist poster inviting you to fling. She spoke good English and seemed to have thought through every question they had before they ever asked it.
“I wanted to smell the morning,” said Meredith.
Across the street, along the Malecón, the sea had the color of steel and looked sullen, lying calm as a quart of milk in the sunlight. She felt lightheaded. She had never traveled abroad.
“Better hurry,” Priscilla chirped. “We don’t want to miss breakfast.”
Time is my enemy, thought Meredith. She had so little of it to get done what she had come to do. For the first time it occurred to her that she wanted this. She was not just doing a favor for Mrs. Nuñez. She was in Cuba because she wanted to be.
Waiting with a simulacrum of patience, Graciela smiled big.
* * *
Meredith Elder was not courageous, and she was not political. She would never have gone to Cuba if Mrs. Nuñez had been healthy. Mrs. Nuñez was her neighbor at the apartment complex in St. Paul. Meredith marveled at how she managed the Minnesota winters, so far from the Caribbean of warm memory, especially now that she had turned eighty and was suffering from diabetes. The disease was making her blind, and she worsened with every passing month.
“I was hoping my niece would bury me, you see,” she told Meredith.
They were having coffee and cake in Mrs. Nuñez’s apartment. The Cuban woman was fastidious about her appearance. She wore pearls, and a tasteful silver butterfly rested on the breast of her gray silk dress. She worried excessively about her makeup now that she saw so poorly. Enough confidence existed between the two women that she allowed Meredith to touch her up.
“I suppose your niece can’t come visit?” Meredith asked timidly.
“Hah!” Squinting, the old woman stroked her chin. “The bearded one only pretends to be asleep. Not a leaf falls on the island, not a dog scratches its ear, without his permission. And the brother, the brother is more of the same.”
She paused, and the anti-Castro rhetoric leaked out of her like air from a tire. “Well,” she admitted, “lately they are allowing people to leave. The problem is, I have lost touch with my niece.”
She sat without moving, hands folded, for a few moments. Meredith could practically see the memories crowding her, jostling for pride of place in the high vault of memory.
After a few minutes she said softly, “Yusaima.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That is the name of my niece. She is the only daughter of my only sister. Marcelina died in Havana. I never saw her again. We Nuñez, we are disappearing from the face of the earth.”
She wiped tears from her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief and excused herself. Going to her bedroom, she returned with a small black velvet case. She lifted the lid and handed the case to Meredith.
“This is the Nuñez family ring. My dream was to give it to Yusaima. It belongs to her, by right. But I do not delude myself. I will die before Cuba is free.”
The ring was old-fashioned, thick with heavy gold and a sizable emerald, and Meredith impulsively promised her she would take it to her niece. The passion with which Mrs. Nuñez grasped and kissed her hand guaranteed she would not unsay words so hastily spoken.
Getting to Cuba turned out to be harder than Meredith imagined. To get a visa, she had to join a group that qualified with both the American and Cuban governments. That was how she met Priscilla, who was in charge of a Lutheran study group in Minneapolis. Meredith had grown up Lutheran, giving up her church when she married Ralph, who was sort of Presbyterian. Now that she was divorced, and the kids were away at school, she was not so much reclaiming her personal history as experimenting with possibilities. Priscilla welcomed her to the group with a sticky embrace that put Meredith off. What did the Gospel have to say about American policy to Cuba? That was the question they would go to Havana to answer.
They had only four days in Cuba, and Meredith lost the first one to the tour. She felt uneasy at the clinic to which Graciela shepherded them, first thing after breakfast. The eyes of the bedridden children seemed to single her out as a non-believer, someone who didn’t care. How, everyone kept asking, how can the U.S. government deny these sick kids the medicines they need in the name of a fifty-year-old political embargo? Graciela had answers for that and for every other thing that came up in the course of the day, along with a knack for sounding objective.
That evening, Meredith began planning ahead. She did not think of herself as devious, but at dinner she screwed on a face of discomfort and told Priscilla she was not feeling well.
“Oh dear. Nothing serious, I hope.”
Meredith shrugged, disliking about herself the urge to apologize that reared its head in moments of tension. Priscilla was sure she would feel better in the morning.
Meredith lay in bed that night pampering her anxiety. In the morning she skipped breakfast, waiting until Priscilla came by the room.
“I think I had better pass on today’s meetings,” Meredith told her, clutching her stomach in low-key fashion as though underplaying her discomfort.
Priscilla’s concern was genuine, and Meredith felt bad lying to her. But she needed the day, and as soon as the group took off for a round of meetings with university professors she made her way outside.
Her picture study paid off. She recognized the old Chevy the instant she saw it, gleaming in Cuban sunlight. It was still red and white. The slim, handsome man leaning against the side of the car fit, or might fit, Mrs. Nuñez’s second-hand description of Yusaima’s husband. As she approached him he was nonchalant and solicitous. He didn’t care what she might say. He was wearing a tan tie, and his smile was awfully like a smirk.
“I would like to see Old Havana,” she told him.
His English was nowhere near as secure as Mrs. Nuñez had led her to believe, but they made themselves understood and came to terms. She sat in the passenger seat as he drove her slowly around La Habana Vieja. It was a strange sensation, riding in a snapshot car across a city that appeared to be anchored in a harbor out of time. That of course was an illusion. Life moved relentlessly forward. Old Havana spreading back from the waterfront was a crumbling, splendid ruin of archaic streets and formerly fine buildings, but that was only atmosphere. It was the people who transfixed Meredith, everywhere people, people, people, black and white and brown, going about their business, which she could hardly guess at. They looked poor, and put upon, and similarly preoccupied as though by a music whose first note she would never hear, not if she spent her whole life trying.
He took her past the glass-walled enclosure where an old boat was on display. It was the Granma, the cruiser that Fidel and his fighters took from Mexico to Cuba in 1956, launching the revolution that ultimately took the dictator down.
“An amazing boat,” the taxi driver told her. “It has carried millions of people across the water.”
There was that smirk as he looked at her to see whether she got the joke.
She asked him, “What is your name?”
“Daniel. Last name Pacheco.”
“I would love to see your house, Daniel.”
“My house? Why?”
She had thought ahead and had an answer. “I am interested in things the tourists do not see.”
Perhaps that made sense to him. At any rate he shrugged and headed home. He didn’t mind. A fare was a fare. On the way there, Meredith asked him if he was married.
“Yes. My wife. We, together we have one son.”
“Will your wife be at home?”
“She works in a bakery, but just now there is no flour. These things, in Cuba they happen.”
She waited for him to curse the embargo, but he did not. She felt in her purse for the Nuñez ring. She also had five thousand dollars in cash with her, another gift from Mrs. Nuñez to her only niece.
Leaving downtown, the streets deteriorated and the neighborhoods grew more precarious. The house into which Daniel led her, finally, was tiny. A miniature front room with a sofa and a chair, a bedroom still smaller, a utilitarian kitchen. Water stains disfigured the adobe walls with the arbitrary shapes of dream monsters. Meredith felt usefully dislocated, and grateful. She was in a place she had not known how to imagine. But there was no Yusaima.
“Your wife?” she said, uncomfortably insisting.
“She must be visiting Marisol. Her friend. Who has a boy the age of our Sergio.”
“I would like to wait. To meet her, I mean.”
For the first time he looked at her with distrust. His eyebrows wrinkled, and the smile went south. There was no earthly reason why she should care to stay in his house. His skepticism put Meredith on her guard. She had come into the house of a man she did not know carrying cash and valuable jewelry. She felt her face flush.
“I am not feeling well,” she said, and this time it was true.
“Sit down,” he said, guiding her to the little sofa, which had the orange vinyl cushions you saw in a bus station. “You must please rest. I will bring coffee.”
She drank a tiny cup of overly sweet black coffee, and the trembling in her legs subsided. Then here through the front door came Daniel’s wife leading a young boy by the hand. Meredith stood, and Daniel introduced them.
He kissed his wife on the cheek, then stooped to kiss the top of his son’s head. The boy hugged his leg speaking the Spanish of a bright little bird. Daniel gave his wife some sort of explanation for the presence of a fifty-year-old Minnesotan in her house, and the two women shook hands.
“Meredith, this is Yaneth, my wife. And this is our Sergio.”
But Meredith knew before she heard the woman’s name that this was not Yusaima. She was the right age. She had the right hair, dark and luxurious. She was languorously attractive, with sloe eyes and honey skin. Her scoop-neck blouse revealed beautiful small breasts. But she was not Yusaima. Meredith felt trapped, and then a sense of panic. She had screwed up. She had no idea how, but she had gone terribly wrong. Whatever came next would be a disaster, and her fault.
It was tedious, having Daniel translate insipid pleasantries back and forth between his wife and Meredith. She had the sense he was making up her half of the conversation and was relieved when he led her back outside to the Bel Air. They motored in silence back to the Cohiba. She paid him.
“Are you happy?” he wanted to know, taking the folded bills as though he didn’t much care about money, any money.
“Happy?”
“Satisfecha . . . Are you satisfied with your tour?”
“Yes,” she lied, feeling guilty for the relief flooding through her. She still had the ring. She still had the five thousand dollars. There would be no shame in returning it all to Mrs. Nuñez. She had tried. To the best of her sadly limited ability she had tried.
* * *
At dinner that night they sat Meredith between Priscilla and Graciela as though to prevent her from bolting. It was a Cuban meal of rice and beans and roast pork. They drank wine. Afterward, everyone was given a healthy shot of rum. Two factions were congealing from the study group. The bigger one was growing increasingly vocal about the embargo, which outraged them. A smaller faction believed the group was being manipulated by Graciela and her invisible bosses, who were showing them only what they wanted seen, telling them only what they wanted heard.
Meredith took neither side. She was not really a member of the group, not in any meaningful sense. She was a recovering divorcée, learning to make her own financial way thanks to an aptitude for information technology she’d never suspected was in her. She was a person who knew herself imperfectly and mistrusted her own instincts. Her sexuality was on hold. Her imagination was untrained. She was no longer content to see herself as others saw her.
Saying goodnight, Graciela beamed at her. “You are feeling better now, no? You will love tomorrow, Mrs. Elder. I promise.”
Was it a threat, or Meredith’s reflex guilt that heard it as one? She sensed something hard about their Cuban guide. Behind her abiding smile, calculation went on.
In the morning, Meredith did not answer the door when Graciela knocked.
“Mrs. Elder? Meredith? Please come down, everyone is waiting for you. You will love today, I promise. Meredith? You are not allowed to miss the tour, no one is allowed.” A pause. “Anyway you will love it.”
Meredith had never been stubborn. She had always looked at things from her neighbor’s perspective. She had minimized her own druthers and accommodated those of others. So her refusal to come out and get on the bus, her refusal even to open the door, was surprising. She found herself grinning, and nobody to share the moment with.
I wasn’t wrong, she realized. She had no doubt. It’s the right car, the right Daniel. Only the wife is wrong.
She waited twenty minutes. As she stepped out, the corridor was empty. She drank a quick cup of coffee and buttered a piece of toast at a table by herself in the enormous breakfast room on the second floor of the hotel. She went outside. Her group’s tour bus was gone. Seeing the Bel Air she went down and accosted Daniel Pacheco, who was sitting in his front seat, windows down, listening to music on the radio, waiting for custom.
“What did you do to your wife?”
He switched off the radio and looked up at her with a hangdog expression. “I am sorry. I did not understand.”
“You understood all right.”
He shook his head, uncertain how to respond. She had a sense his confusion might turn into anger and wished she wasn’t carrying Mrs. Nuñez’s loot, but she was afraid to leave it in the hotel room. She said what she had to say.
“Your wife is not Yaneth, your wife is Yusaima. I have seen her picture. Her aunt, Mrs. Hilda Nuñez, showed it to me. You divorced her, didn’t you? You left her. Where is she?”
The anger Meredith was expecting did not materialize. All she saw was helplessness. He wished she would go away. After the longest pause he nodded.
“You are a friend of Mrs. Nuñez.”
“I am. She is sick. She is dying. She is going blind. She is worried.”
It was good to speak simple sentences with words Daniel had no choice but to understand. He got out of the taxi. He looked at her. Then he looked down, and for the first time in her life Meredith had a sense what fatalism was, how it could own your bones. Speaking, he made an equal effort to be clear.
“Please tell Mrs. Nuñez that Yusaima died.”
She believed him because it made sense. Mrs. Nuñez had lost touch with her niece, and no one who might have cared to pass on the awful news knew how to reach an elderly aunt living alone in a northern state. Mrs. Nuñez had no use for the Internet.
“Please also tell her that I am sorry. We have lost an important person.”
Meredith did not recall, later, parting from Daniel. Perhaps they shook hands and said goodbye, perhaps not. Back in her room she was devastated. The room was on the ninth floor and had a view of the Malecón, down which the few cars passing looked like models of the sort her sons used to build. Yusaima’s death hung like a pall on the gray Caribbean, and Meredith’s eyes teared for all the things that were wrong and would not be righted. The tears stung. This was a new sensation, a new idea. She had never had reason to give way to something so enormous, because she had never seen it, never known it was there.
She thought of her children. Karl was more naturally sympathetic to people’s tribulations than Ben was. But she would never be able to explain to either of them the sight of the sober sea; all it held, and held down.
It occurred to her that she had not asked Daniel how Yusaima died. Mrs. Nuñez would certainly want to know; she deserved to know. Meredith cursed her own boneheaded incompetence. She could not even carry a message properly.
She had no stomach for the rest of the tour. Mechanically she began packing her clothes. She would not tell Priscilla she was sick. Enough pretending. She would simply inform her she was going home.
When the phone rang she expected Priscilla, calling her to account, but it was Daniel.
“Will you come outside? I will meet you.”
“Why?”
“Please come.”
She went, and found him standing in the shade of the overhang where arriving vehicles deposited hotel guests. Bellhops and people with nothing to do and a security man in a dark suit with sleeves that were too long for his arms were standing around. Meredith understood it was for their benefit that he spoke.
“We will drive to Old Havana. You will enjoy it very much.”
She nodded. She followed him down to the street where they boarded the Bel Air.
“It is not my taxi,” he told her, starting the engine and adjusting his mirror.
“Whose is it?”
“The government owns. Each month I pay them rent. I must buy the gasoline and the tires and all of the parts when they go bad. All of this leaves me little. Yaneth earns fifteen dollars in one month at the bakery.”
He seemed to be apologizing for something. He did not drive toward the old city. Should she be alarmed? She had the emerald ring and Mrs. Nuñez’s money with her.
“Where are you taking me, Daniel?”
He shook his head. “We will drive. I will tell you about Yusaima.”
“Then tell me.”
“She worked in the bakery, the same where works Yaneth. But Yusaima had a very strong personality. She always said the truth, true things only. This is how the trouble began.”
“What trouble?”
He pointed to the window. “This is our Plaza of the Revolution. Where ese señor made his famous long speeches.” He made the same gesture, pulling on his chin, that Mrs. Nuñez had, talking about Fidel.
Meredith saw a row of bright convertibles, Fords and Chevys from the ’50s. Tourists were getting out of the cars to take pictures of the plaza and the government buildings that surrounded it. Meredith recognized the giant image on the face of one of the buildings. It was Che Guevara. The tourists bothered her. You did not have to have political opinions to be dismayed by these people’s digital gawking at the site of a revolution that was no longer there.
“What trouble did Yusaima have?”
“Someone was stealing flour. At work. Many people steal many things here. It is part of our system. But Yusaima made a loud complaint. The person taking the flour had friends in the Party. ¿El Partido Comunista, no cierto?”
Adding the Spanish at the end was aggressive, but Meredith did not hold it against him. She needed to know the truth of Yusaima. If she went back to Mrs. Nuñez with anything, it would be the truth.
“Tell me what happened.”
“They visited us at night. Security people. They said to me you must keep her quiet, she must make no public noise. Me. They did not understand who this person my wife Yusaima was.”
“She continued to speak out.”
“Yusaima did not know how to be a quiet person. One night they came and took her. Six years ago.”
“What did they do to her?”
He would say no more, and she gave him the break he needed to regain his balance. Telling her about his wife, he had been on the point of breaking down. They had reached the edge of the city, and the neighborhoods began to have a rural feel. Runty chickens ran around scraggly yards. Boys and men piloted wheelbarrows, and horses clopped along the broken streets. Meredith no longer wished to ask Daniel where they were going.
He stopped at what looked to Meredith like an impassable crater in a side road onto which he had turned. The hole was waterlogged, and muddy car tracks were visible on both sides. He was making up his mind to chance it when a police car came up behind them.
“Do not speak,” he told her. “Do not look.”
He got out of the Bel Air and stood waiting for the two uniformed policemen to approach him. It was a long conversation. It ended with Daniel’s sticking his head in through the window to tell her, “If we give twenty dollars, they leave us in peace.”
Meredith hated opening her purse, afraid they would see the envelope thick with Mrs. Nuñez’s money. But she drew a twenty from her wallet and gave it to Daniel, who passed it discreetly to one of the policemen.
“If they like,” he told Meredith, back behind the wheel and obviously relieved, “they make everything much too difficult for you, for me. Much worse than twenty dollars. I am sorry you must give them money. They are from the east, you see.”
“The east?”
“Where everyone is poor. No work. The government brings them here because they will not know us, they are happy to make our life miserable because now they have a job.”
“You can’t get across the hole,” she told him.
He shook his head and told her he could. And did. They had something between them now and rode in the old Chevy like people with history. Meredith searched for words to tell Mrs. Nuñez what she thought she knew. Nothing came to her.
On the edge of a village, Daniel finally parked. When he switched off the ignition, the quiet of the country roared at them. On one side of the road, a field of banana trees wrapped around a shack with lath-and-plaster walls and a roof of dun tiles. Children played in the yard, and a brown horse tied to a bush swished its tail cropping grass. On the other side of the road stood a similar shack, but this one had a roof of thatch.
In front of the shack with the thatched roof, a woman stood at an aluminum tub washing clothes. She worked with total absorption, unaware of or indifferent to the Bel Air and the people in the front seat watching her work. A plump small boy sat near her on a three-legged stool, and Meredith wondered why he was not across the way playing with the neighbor kids.
It took her an unconscionably long time to figure it out. When she did, she was ashamed of her denseness.
“That’s Yusaima,” she managed to say. There was not enough breath in her to force out more words.
“They destroyed her in prison.” Daniel tapped the side of his head with a finger. “Her mind is gone. I believe she provoked them because this is what she knows to do, and they lose control.”
“And the boy?”
“Fernandito, she calls him. One of the guards raped her. Something is wrong with the boy, I do not know what. He is sweet but slow. I tried to have her in the house. She would not stay. She always ran away and made more trouble. She cannot tolerate walls. She sleeps under stars. If rain comes, she covers herself with plastic.”
They watched her rinse a pair of men’s pants and hang them on a sagging line. She moved heavily as would a woman shackled. She spoke to the boy, who ran to embrace her. Looking down at him, she laughed. Even at a distance the laugh carried. It was a rich full sound and made Meredith question Daniel’s story.
“I want to talk to her.”
Daniel shrugged but did not try to discourage her. They left the taxi and made their way to the yard where Yusaima was washing another pair of pants. Fernandito saw them coming and ran crying into the house. Meredith caught a glimpse of round softness, and what seemed to be his terror. Perhaps they did not get visitors.
Yusaima did not lift her hands from the wash bucket. She was unkempt. Her hair was wild. She was barefoot, in a shapeless dress, disguising her beauty, Meredith thought, so no one would bother her.
Daniel spoke to her slowly, the way you would speak to an animal trying not to spook it. He must be telling her who Meredith was and why she spoke no Spanish. Yusaima gave no indication she understood, though once she gave Meredith a full-on look, appraising her potential to cause harm. When she spoke, Daniel translated.
“Do you wish to know her real words, what she says?”
“Yes.”
“She says she has no family, so how can you be a family friend?”
“What about Mrs. Nuñez?”
“Her family were all taken away in the back of a truck. A long time ago. They left her to guard the little boy.”
“What about you, Daniel? She must remember you.”
He shook his head. “She believes I work for the guards. I am a good person because I do not hurt her and sometimes I give her money. This is the world she makes. It allows her to survive.”
He spoke matter-of‑factly. He had accepted what he had no choice but to accept.
Fernandito came back outside and tugged at his mother’s dress. He may have Down’s Syndrome, Meredith thought, but she could not be sure. Her purse felt heavy, her purse was a huge problem.
Meredith tried to engage the woman. Daniel did his best to get her across the great chasm to understanding, translating. No luck. No good. Meredith could see she made no impression on Yusaima, and the longer she stayed the more Yusaima fidgeted. The boy whimpered for his mother’s attention.
“Will you say more?” Daniel asked Meredith.
She shook her head. “Hasta luego,” she said to Yusaima. “Muchas gracias.”
“Muchas gracias,” Yusaima repeated as thought it were a clever thing to say.
In the car, Meredith promised herself she would not break down. Hurt though it did, ache though she might, this was not her tragedy. It belonged to Yusaima. It belonged to her boy, and to Daniel, and to Mrs. Nuñez.
Daniel was crying. “Before, Yusaima’s tia, your friend, would send us money.”
“I know.”
“After Yusaima left the prison, I made sure she received the money. One time . . .”
Meredith waited.
“One time, I used some of the money for a birthday party for our Sergio.”
He sobbed.
Nothing Meredith might say would help in the slightest. Somehow, though, the crying made up her mind for her. She opened her purse. She gave him the envelope with Mrs. Nuñez’s five thousand dollars.
“This is for you,” she said. “From Yusaima’s aunt. It is for all of you. You will know how it must be spent.”
He looked at her angrily, and she told him, “We have to go back.”
He nodded and started the engine. She put a hand on his arm.
“I mean back to Yusaima. Come with me, please.”
Yusaima was struggling with a bed sheet as they walked toward her this time. On his stool, Fernandito was eating an orange, entranced by the pattern the pieces of peel made as they fell in the dirt.
Because Meredith knew exactly what she needed to do, it was easy. Recognizing her sense of purpose, Yusaima submitted with good grace. She sat in a chair as Meredith brushed her hair, patiently untangling the thick strands. Yusaima showed Meredith her clothes, which she kept in a pile on a pallet inside the shack. Meredith found a green dress that was fairly attractive. It had a daisy pattern, and Yusaima did not complain, putting it on.
Outside, in the Cuban sunlight, Meredith formed the three of them into a kindred pose. Daniel, who knew now what she was about, put a husbandly arm around Yusaima’s shoulder. Miracle of miracles, she let it stay there, although the crazy lady grin she flashed was unnerving. Fernandito stood in front of his mother, and Meredith thought it must be the first time he was having his picture taken.
She had brought a small point-and-shoot camera, easy to use. When she located them in the viewfinder, they looked like a family. Yusaima looked as well, it seemed to Meredith, as she could be expected to look. Before she snapped, she realized what was missing.
“Wait,” she told Daniel. “I forgot something.”
She took the velvet box from her purse and removed the ring. She went to Yusaima, who let her slip it onto her finger. The emerald was bright and looked innocent, like a thing that only wanted to adorn human beauty. Yusaima liked it.
“Please tell her to hold up the finger with the ring. Mrs. Nuñez will want to see the ring.”
Something – a calmness at her core, or the novelty of the situation – made Yusaima cooperate. When Daniel explained what was wanted, she lifted the ring finger and smiled, and Meredith got a better picture than she had thought possible.
Yusaima said something to Daniel.
“She wants another photograph.”
“Okay, sure.”
But Meredith’s finger on the shutter button had lost its turgor. She felt slap-happy weak, like a clown who couldn’t control his body. It was the weight of all she knew, and all she didn’t. She felt the burden of the truth, and of the necessary lie she was going to tell. She felt grateful and sad.
“¡Que saque otra foto!” said Yusaima.
She was not impatient, she was excited. Her smile was radiant. Meredith breathed in slowly to steady herself. There. Now. She took the picture.
Mark Jacobs is the author of the short story collections Forty Wolves (Talisman House, Publishers, 2010), The Liberation of Little Heaven (Soho Press, 1999), A Cast of Spaniards (Talisman House Publishers, 1994); and the novels A Handful of Kings (Simon & Schuster, 2007) and Stone Cowboy (Soho Press, 2003).