Read Online Surviving Santiago by Lyn Miller-Lachmann - Free Book Online

front section has stories on the election campaign, along with car crashes, armed robberies, and a single page of international news.Back home, I won a school essay contest on the protests in Tiananmen Square, but here they don’t even get a mention—as if people have enough of their own problems and can’t worry about the rest of the world.
    I close my eyes and imagine riding on the back of Frankie’s motorcycle, my body pressed against his, taking in the smell of oil and leather and pine-scented aftershave.
    Ernesto arrives half an hour late in a dinged-up little blue Fiat—the car I saw last night, though it was too dark to notice the color, or the dents. Papá opens the passenger door and slides the seat forward for me to climb in the back. He hands me his backpack. Then he drops into the front seat, kicks his bad leg inside, and slams the door. “Where the hell were you? I’ve been up for hours,” he says.
    Ernesto shakes his head. “It’s Sunday morning. Nothing ever happens on Sunday morning, except the Cardinal’s sermon.” He merges onto the wide avenue. I unzip the main pouch of Papá’s pack and search for liquor bottles while Ernesto keeps talking. “Do you know why the Cardinal gives his sermon on Sunday morning, Nino? So we can sleep late.”
    â€œWell, I have things to do.”
    â€œ Oye, huevón , you’re way too intense to be News Director. The minute you take over, there’s going to be an uprising.” Ernesto turns to me at the next light. I hug the pack to my chest. “You should be proud of your papá , Tina. When our News Director retires next year, he’s getting the job.”
    My father interrupts. “And the news department meeting will start at eight sharp.”
    Ernesto winks at me. “That means nine around here.”
    â€œEight.”
    We pull up to the curb in front of a tall Victorian house. It looks more like the house I was supposed to help Evan and Mamá restore than something I’d see in the middle of a Latin American city. They’ve painted the siding dark purple and the gingerbread trim white. I will have to tell Petra in my next letter and suggest the color combo to Evan.
    Papá asks me to bring his backpack inside. It contains no liquor bottles, but an agenda book, five well-stuffed manila folders, and a pad of lined yellow paper with writing. The thermos clipped to the daisy chain is filled with hot water. Unspiked. I tasted it when no one was looking.
    My brother was right last year when he said Papá doesn’t bring alcohol to work—except what may still be in him from the night before.
    Lifting the pack from my hand, Papá turns to Ernesto. “I have a couple of articles to finish for the newspapers. Give her the tour and meet me in the News Director’s office.”
    Ernesto leads me to the basement control room, where a napping engineer babysits the live feed from the Metropolitan Cathedral. Ernesto taps on the window to the adjacent darkened control room for music programming, where he’ll be spinning records after the Mass. OnSaturdays and Sundays, he says, the station mainly plays music, so the weekend News Director’s job consists of editing the UPI newswire to five minutes, giving it to the music programmer to read on the hour, and being available to assemble coverage in case of a big story.
    I am at home in this tall old house. And I’m starting to like Ernesto, the way I’d like a young, cool teacher. While he shows me the meeting rooms and the kitchen, I notice a wedding band.
    â€œSo are you really going on strike when my father becomes News Director?” I ask.
    Ernesto laughs. “Not a chance. We worship him. He taught us everything we know about investigative journalism.” He holds out his hand in front of a framed black-and-white photo on the wall next to the refrigerator. I recognize Papá sitting on a stool behind