Adventures of a Salsa Goddess Read Online Free Page A

Triangle. All I could see out my new patio doors from my eighteenth-floor vantage point was pelting rain and swirling mists of fog. Just before I left New York, Sally, Elaine Daniels’s executive assistant, had given me a copy of the real estate ad that described my two-bedroom apartment as being “on the. fashionable East side of Milwaukee with expansive views of sunny, scenic Lake Michigan.” The thermometer attached just outside the door read forty-two degrees.
    “Have you met any men yet?” asked my best friend, Elizabeth, who I called the second I’d arrived in my new apartment.
    Elizabeth liked to cut through all the chitchat and get straight to the point, which I suppose she couldn’t help since she lives and breathes the law, working sixty to eighty hours a week for Hobson, Dwight, and McKenzie, the third biggest law firm in New York, since graduating from UCLA law school fourteen years ago.
    “Not since the plane landed forty-five minutes ago,” I said. I was in a city with almost 600,000 people and I only knew one of them. I was already feeling very lonely.
    “I’m disappointed in you,” she said, a smile in her voice.
    Elizabeth and I had been friends since we were both three years old, having met in a preschool ballet class. Although I have no memory of our first acquaintance, a photograph that I’ve carried in my wallet for years, taken at our first recital, shows the two of us in our little pale pink tutus, our arms around each other’s shoulders, with my golden-blond Barbie doll shoulder-length hair leaning against Elizabeth’s dark brunette Audrey Hepburn pixie. I have a vague memory of asking Elizabeth if she wanted to be my best friend and her saying yes, and here we were nearly thirty-eight years later, still best friends.
    While I talked to Elizabeth, I did a tour of my new apartment. The living room had a tacky starving artist’s landscape painting above a plain brown couch. A wood veneer coffee table sat on powder-blue dentist’s office carpeting. Bedroom number one—queen bed, dresser, straight-backed chair, graying walls, gray carpeting, and a gray bedspread. I took two steps across the hallway to bedroom number two—black laminated computer desk, black metal filing cabinet, and a door leading out to the balcony. My apartment had all of the warmth and charm of a mental institution.
    “Just think, your future husband is in the same city as you,” said Elizabeth.
    I had my doubts, but, if he was here, chances were excellent he was intoxicated. According to the guidebook about Milwaukee that I’d read on the flight over:
    Milwaukee is a great city on a great lake with countless ethnic festivals and nonstop flowing taps of beer. With its large German population and a reputation as one of the friendliest cities in the United States, you’ll often hear Milwaukeeans speak of their famous gemutlichkeit . At its zenith, Milwaukee had close to sixty operating breweries. With a tavern on almost every block, it’s no wonder this thriving metropolis has garnered the nickname “Brew City.”
    When my plane had landed, I’d half expected to see throngs of drunken men in lederhosen and serving wenches with heaving bosoms spilling over low-cut tight-fitting dresses, all of them swilling beer and dancing gaily on the tarmac. Instead, I’d landed in the midst of a monsoon with all of my checked luggage having apparently taken a side trip, probably to a warmer destination. The airline assured me my bags would be delivered tomorrow or in three days, after the Memorial Day weekend.
    “You know, your husband might even be living in your building,” Elizabeth said. A split second later, a mighty crack of thunder sounded, the deafening, biblical kind of thunder, loud enough to scare all dogs within a hundred-mile radius under beds and bring sinners to their knees.
    “Did you hear that?” Elizabeth asked. “It’s a sign. I’m sure your husband is there. I can feel it.”
    Once Elizabeth had