Read Online Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) by Audrey Schulman - Free Book Online Page A

with a bad back hunched over.
    While her luggage was packed in, she glanced at Mutara and then away. This was the way she tended to get information about any person who stood close to her, a single fast stroboscopic picture of the person’s expression and gesture. At this speed the person’s face didn’t overwhelm her. On the other hand, she didn’t get all that much detail. He was a thin African wearing a blue shirt. She turned toward his shadow and asked, “The airport is full of people. How’d you know I was the one you were supposed to pick up?”
    There was a pause. His shadow cocked its head. Then its arm gestured toward the airport. “But look. It is clear. You are the only . . . What is the word?”
    She looked back at the crowds. She could do this since their faces were too far away to hurt her eyes. She saw, aside from being darker and half a head shorter than her, the Rwandan women wore designer jeans or ruffled skirts in vivid colors, high heels and large jewelry. A significant number of the men had on suits, some a little threadbare but all perfectly pressed. Most of them dressed as though they were about to interview for a job they really wanted. Max, on the other hand, wore gray stretchy sportswear. Her only jewelry was her dad’s wooden beads strung round her neck on a simple string, her hair shaved as short as a Marine’s. Nothing about her was designed to impress anyone with her social standing or fashion sense.
    â€œAmerican,” she thought. From the distance of a hundred feet, anyone could pick her out as American.
    â€œ
Blanc
,” said Mutara. “You are the only
blanc
.”
    The laugh burst out of her nose, a phlegmy sort of snort.
    Her laughter was rare, but when it came, it geysered out. To fight it, she began to mentally recite the periodic table in alphabetical order, giving herself points for speed. “Aluminum, antimony, arsenic . . . .” Barium next? Her laughter faded as her eyes rolled upward, searching.
    The tropical sky above, for a brief disorienting moment, looked so much like the sky over Maine.
    Â 
    The latch on the van’s passenger-side door was broken and had been replaced by a thick braid of plastic bags that tied the door to the glove-compartment handle. Once Mutara got in, he retied her door shut, then bent briefly under the dashboard to touch two wires together. In the van with him, she could smell his scent of spices, mud, and soap. Coughing, the whole van began to rumble like an outboard motor. She winced and reached into her bag for her noise-canceling earphones.
    â€œMoney,” he shouted over the noise. “Never enough, no? Please not to lean on your door.”
    As they drove away, the officials waved. Yelling good-bye with as much emotion as though she were their beloved.
    She pulled on her earphones. From the edge of her eyes, she saw Mutara shift his torso slightly to watch her do this, then turn away. For the rest of the drive, he didn’t say another word. This was OK, preferable even.
    She stared out the window. Not at all what she’d pictured. Way too many people bustling about, continuous stores and cement high-rises, palm trees and bougainvillea. Gradually the city was replaced by tiny farms, each an acre or less. The soil was the red of laterite, high in iron and aluminum hydroxides, a thin topsoil that washed away easily. It must be poor farming, but every inch of land was cultivated or built on, utilized in some way. Coffee, plantains, sweet potatoes. The entire country was crowded with people, working in the fields or by the houses, churning food in three-foot-tall mortars. Women strode along the roads with babies strapped on their backs. They walked the way she’d always dreamed of walking: perfect posture but not stiff, their hips and backs rolling and alive.
    Although Mutara drove along a two-lane highway, it was nothing like the interstates she was used to. Here, it was