Contents Under Pressure Read Online Free

wardrobe could certainly use it. Call me”), a Hialeah cop griping about politics in his department, a lawyer eager for publicity about a big win in court, and my mother, again. She sounded peevish this time.
    “Where are you, Britt? Why is it that I must always do all the calling?”
    Larry Zink, an insurance salesman I met on a story last month, had left the remaining message on the tape, inviting Lottie and me to meet him and a friend for drinks after work. Too late now to call any of them back.
    I am not like my mother, but I am her only child. My dad was Cuban, though I barely remember him. He died when I was three. He didn’t die, actually; he was killed, stood against a bullet-pocked wall on San Juan Hill and executed by a Castro firing squad. My mother never forgave him. She was the daughter of Miami pioneers and never understood why he let his dream of a free Cuba become a fatal obsession. His face is not precisely clear in my conscious mind, but in many ways his presence is always with me. Estamos Juntos: We are together.
    After his death, my mother was ill and depressed and found caring for me difficult. I was fanned out to various relatives on both sides of the family. Small and bewildered, I felt strange and alone, more an outsider than a part of my father’s outgoing, passionate, and sometimes volatile Cuban family who all talked at once in noisy Spanish or a part of the more reserved Episcopalians on my mother’s side who took turns speaking precise English and never, ever, interrupted one another. My father’s family laughed at my Spanish. My mother’s criticized my English.
    It didn’t help that the families were usually at odds, with me, the only link, straddling two worlds, yet not quite at home in either. My father was considered a hero, a patriot, a martyr by the Cuban community and his relatives. My mother and most of her family thought him reckless, a man who had foolishly gambled his life and lost. I did not permanently rejoin her until I was twelve. By then we didn’t know each other well, and had little to talk about. We still don’t. When I persisted in studying journalism, she encouraged me to attend Northwestern, away from the Miami influences that she considered unfavorable. The school was wonderful, but the Chicago winters were cold and long. I spent the two most miserable years of my life there.
    My clothes were never warm enough, my shoes skidded on the ice, and I hated it I yearned for the musical sound of spoken Spanish, the taste of Little Havana’s food and drink, the warmth of Florida and its vivid colors. Chicago was a gray and lonely place. I escaped and finished my last two years at the University of Miami, home at last.
    From the stories I have heard about him, and what little I remember, I think I am very much like my father. If I was not, I would believe that I am the victim of a maternity ward mix-up. My mother and I are that different.
    I was incredibly lucky to land a job on one of the best newspapers in the nation. My good fortune was more fluke than anything else. Because I was a Miamian with a Hispanic surname, the paper’s minority recruiters assumed I was bilingual and hence fluent enough to report for the paper’s Spanish language section. Not so. They discovered their mistake when, in my first story, I referred to Miami’s vice-mayor as the alcalde de vicio, the mayor of vice.
    By chance, a city desk post for a police reporter, a job no one else wanted, was open. The editors doubted a woman could endure the work. They expected dead bodies and shoot-outs to quickly gross me right out of the job. That only steeled my resolve to master the beat and make it my own. I was determined to be successful at it.
    The job is exciting and enjoyable most of the time. It is almost always a comfort. The newspaper is something I can count on, a constant in a world full of uncertainty. It publishes every day, rain or shine, in peace or war. The newspaper will outlive all of us