Saving the World Read Online Free

it has less to do with conflicting ideologies than with the fact that they both want to boss her around, though both are succeeding less and less these days.
    â€œRichard doesn’t have to know. I’ll park on the back road. When we hear his pickup, I’ll go out the back way and hike across the pasture.”
    Just the thought of her baggy-panted friend hiking across the back pasture, bumping into her Paul Bunyan peeping Tom, makes Alma laugh. “Ay, Tera, what would I do without you? I’m okay, really. Just promise that if Richard and I break up …” She doesn’t know what to ask Tera to do or be in that eventuality. “You’ll marry me, okay?” They’ve played this way for years. Holding hands walking down streets. Long, passionate hugs when they part or meet. Wannabe lezzes, their gay-couple friends, Marion and Brier, call them. In fact, when Richard and Alma first starting going out and he met Tera, he assumed that at some time in the past they had been lovers.
    â€œI don’t believe in marriage, remember?” Tera reminds her. “And don’t talk horseshit. You and Richard are not going to break up.”
    â€œBut if we do—”
    â€œIf you do, you move in with us. We fix up the shed as your study. We take turns cooking meals from the garden. We carpool, save on gas. We’ll have a great life all together.”
    It’s scary the way it sounds so doable. This isn’t the reassurance she needs. “Well, like you said,” Alma reminds them both, “this woman was probably just calling everyone in the phone book. Oh, Tera. I don’t know why I’ve let this get to me. I mean I know Richard really loves me. We have a good life. I’m a lucky person.”
    There’s a worrisome pause. “Of course, Richard loves you,” Tera agrees. “I love you. Lots of people love you.” It sounds like Tera is conjugating a verb that has always given Alma trouble, in English and in Spanish.
    A FTER HANGING UP WITH Tera, Alma heads for her study. She’ll try to squeeze a few hours of work out of this wasted day. Will and discipline have gotten her out of old lives and bad habits before; that’s what she’ll try for. Keep at it, and one day she’ll look up and the dark wood will be a flourishing garden, kale in November, tomatoes in mid-January.
    All morning, she has taken notes, answered e-mails, called a catalog company, pretending to be her mother. The wrong size cotton briefs have been sent, and her mother has called Alma to correct the mistake. Poor Mamasita is no longer able to negotiate her way through the auto mated mazes of customer service, much less rectify mistakes when an impertinent, young voice finally answers at the other end. There went Alma’s morning. Then the intruder in the back pasture, followed by the woman’s weird phone call have thrown her off completely.
    It will make her feel good if she succeeds in getting herself back on track. A sign that at this mature stage of life, Alma can count on inner resources. Shouldn’t she have deep ones by now, on the eve of fifty? Oil fields of inner resources to tap?
    The file marked BALMIS is still on top of her desk, pages and pages of notes from the dull, dusty tome she borrowed from the university library, using Tera’s card. Francisco Xavier Balmis was no spring chicken when he embarked on his smallpox expedition from the Galician port city of La Coruña in 1803, Alma’s age exactly. He had already been to the New World four times, stints at a military hospital in Mexico City as a young man. But this time his plans were to continue around the world, from Mexico to the Philippines and on to China, with his boatload of orphans, and then round Cape of Good Hope to St. Helena and home—a trip that would take almost three years to complete. His poor wife!
Josefa Mataseco, dates unavailable. Marriage, childless.
All of this Alma