Read Online Crossing the River by Amy Ragsdale - Free Book Online

going to be dark.” Peter was worried.
    And the noise! You’d think a small upriver town might be quiet. Buthuge buses, cars, and motorbikes rumbled over cobblestones three feet from the front door. It felt as though the onslaught of sound might raze the house to the ground, sound waves zapping concrete walls into nothingness. It made us wonder about taking the place at all, and, if we did, whether we could ever open the front window or, even more, the front door.
    â€œOhhhh! You guys! Come look out the back.” I’d just unlatched the large square of a back window and swung it open. My eyes were filling with tears.
    The yard sloped steeply away into flouncy mango trees, shaggy as big-hipped English sheep dogs; coconut palms like skinny 1960s rock stars, one-legged in skintight jeans with spiky, long-haired wigs on top; and papayas, leaves like crinolines, spreading in frilly layers, spotted yellow on green. Beyond this, the view dropped away, like a Renaissance painting, to the street below, then dipped into a velvety green field, dotted with humpbacked cows and white egrets. Across the field, Bairro Vermelho, one of the poorer neighborhoods, rose up the next ridge, a wall hanging of box houses in oranges and pinks, pistachio greens and robin’s-egg blues. Horses galloped down its vertical cobbled streets, their riders expertly glued to the saddle. Beyond, palm trees were silhouetted against the molten ribbon of river. Sliding off to the northwest, it split and rejoined around overgrown islands, disappearing into the hazy hills of the interior. Clumps of water hyacinths floated down, along with brightly painted motorized canoes. Most of the canoes carried fisherman standing in pairs, one throwing a net off the bow, the other steering the long-handled motor in the stern. The back-window view was a Leonardo, with its foreground, midground, and background in rich, oiled hues.
    The back was the reason we decided to take the house, despite Peter’s concerns that the four rooms would feel small, despite the fact that we would have to furnish it from scratch—stove, medicine cabinets, closets, and all.
    One week and $3,000 worth of furniture later, we were in. I’d bought an upholstered bench just the right size to fit into the nook by the back window. The view made me gasp, right up until the end.
    The front door opened onto the praça , with some ragtag grass and flame trees, one of many such plazas. Once a month, the glass-and-metal door would rattle open, and we’d hear a whiskey-voiced “ Oi! ” It was Ilda, our landlady, with her small, round face in dark-rimmed glasses and a head of thinning jet-black hair. A retired mathematics professor, she was small but commanding.
    â€œ Tudo bem? ”—All is well? Dark eyes sparkling, she would stride into our house, her jean-clad hips slung forward, her feet sluffing along in low pumps. She always had the air of a lord surveying his estate. Of course, it was hers; but, still, her unannounced entrances were a little disconcerting.
    Out in the square was a central gazebo, which was pretty despite its chipping paint and the balustrades peeling away on one side. Over time, Skyler would discover that he could climb the trees trimmed in geometric cubes and stand—“Look, Ma, no hands!”—with his head poking out the very top. He would persuade his friends Victor and Breno, and eventually feisty Ricardo, to climb into the bigger of the trees to make a fort out of hammocks and a boogie board.
    It turned out that when the hot months came, the straight shot from front door to back window sucked in a welcome breeze, and the small dark bedrooms, especially with our newly installed air conditioning, were ideal retreats. Peter and I nicknamed ours “the cooler.”
    We hesitated to open the windows in our front door, however. The first day we moved in, a crowd of children were looking through and shouting, “ Mohlly!