Read Online The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass - Free Book Online Page B

inside a black, or blackened, coat. Throughout the rooms, a lime-colored dusting of pollen lay across every surface, from books to sofa cushions.
    That part, the dustiness, wasn't like the Lartigues' house. Senora Lartigue kept the rooms as clean as could be. Her conscience, though--could that be clean? Did she think of him, ever? Wonder where he was? Probably not.
    Celestino tried so often to bury the fantasy, stale by now, of returning to that house as a man with his own business--not the archaeologist he'd dreamed of being when he was small, nothing so far-fetched, but a designer of gardens, even parks--and seeking Isabelle. But surely Isabelle was living elsewhere, possibly married. She would be twenty-five.
    Celestino was twenty-six. He had not been back to Guatemala in seven years, not since before Dr. Lartigue had died, not since Senora Lartigue, two months later, had guessed correctly that he and Isabelle were sleeping together under her roof, had coldheartedly ambushed them in bed. How stupid that had been, how reckless. It did not matter that, as Isabelle had shouted to her mother, they were "old enough!"
    In a panic, certain that in her fury Senora Lartigue would have his student visa canceled, make sure that he was sent back to his country, his village, forbidden ever to set foot here again, Celestino had run. He had taken a bus to New York, where an older cousin drove a gypsy cab. For two weeks he had stayed in the cousin's apartment, hardly going outside, as if Senora Lartigue might descend from the open sky, a scornful black eagle, swoop him up and deliver him to his punishment. One day his cousin told him he had to leave or work. So he'd worked, a few months here, a few months there: busboy, night clerk in a bodega, janitor in a dress factory. Finally, he mowed lawns in the Bronx, for Spanish-speaking families who'd made enough money to buy houses. He worked almost mindlessly for two years before he realized that this, too, had been stupid and reckless.
    Some childhood vision of Senora Lartigue as an all-powerful goddess--like the Aztec goddess who ate warriors whole, the one in the stone relief on Dr. Lartigue's desk--had blinded him to reason. She had been free to kick him out of her home, but could she really have taken away his chances at finishing college? Even though Dr. Lartigue was no longer around to help with his tuition, wouldn't the school have taken pity on Celestino, helped him stay, given him work to pay for his classes? All this had not occurred to him until it was too late. And when he thought of Isabelle, how his fear of her mother had outstripped his desire to be with her, he had to wonder whether he'd deserved all his good fortune in the first place. Maybe Dr. Lartigue had been a poor judge to see Celestino as "a boy with potential."
    In the Bronx, there was a fancy estate on the river where people went to admire the flowers and picnic on the lawns. A woman whose grass he mowed had told him they taught classes in gardening there. By that time, his cousin had found a girlfriend and had two babies. Celestino had moved into a place of his own: small, sooty, looking through a fire escape onto the roof of a dry cleaner. The smell from the vent was stifling, the fumes of hell. He could not afford the classes at the estate, but sometimes, on weekends, he went there and walked around, studying the labels beside the plantings, watching the gardeners do their work. A few of them were friendly, so he forced himself to speak up, to ask questions. He learned how to test soil, how to deadhead roses and divide tubers, how to train a fragile vine, how to deepen the roots of saplings so that they would grow tall and hold fast against the wind. He learned about slugs, earthworms, nematodes, aphids, about blights and beetles that threatened the strange northern trees with which he'd become familiar.
    He was twenty-four when he'd found the courage to return to Boston. His cousin knew someone who had a job in a