The Weight of Shadows Read Online Free Page A

Chicago. It had to do with why we didn’t answer the phone sometimes and why my dad wouldn’t say anything when they shorted him some hours at work, even though we really needed that money. It had to do with why they worked him thirty days in a row or more, why some people whose names I knew called themselves something different when they went to work, and why my grandparents, like most of my extended family, were complete strangers to me.
    Yoli had been majoring in agronomy, with one semester left, when she found out she was pregnant and had to quit school. Her father kicked her out, and she went to live with Martín’s family. Before this she’d been interested in soil science, in how land can become depleted and lose its ability to produce food. She knew how to graft plants. There was a treenear her home that had been pink, and she added a branch of white blossoms that took. She never told anyone about it so it could be her secret to look at every time she passed. She was also athletic and got along better with her two brothers than with her three sisters. She’d grown to love basketball because her brother loved basketball, and her mother rarely let her out of the house except to play with him and to run errands. She had a broad back and muscular shoulders because in high school she’d been a swimmer, and she could do six wide-grip pull-ups in a row.
    Yolanda’s mother, María, beat Yoli but none of her siblings. I didn’t know about this until well into my teens. María died young, of lung cancer, and Yoli had been the one to empty her bedpan, and she was the one who was there in her mother’s last moments of agony. Somehow I’d always known things had not been good for her. I think it was that we never really talked about my grandparents. When we did it was brief, and we would always reach a point where my mother would become agitated and clam up. We talked about María and my grandfather, Pablo, so infrequently that sometimes, embarrassed, I’d have to be reminded what their names were. There weren’t any pictures of them in our home.
    By all accounts, Martín had a drinking problem. He wasn’t the type of guy who woke up shaking, reaching for a drink, but when he drank it sometimes went on for days. We’re similar in this way, and people say he was similar to his father in the same way. He had been in accounting, but by his own admission he wasn’t any good at school, probably because he liked drinking so much. His father had only been around for a brief period at the beginning of Martín’s life. He only saw him one time after that. His mother was Estela, and he called his uncle Roméo his father. He referred to him most frequently as Pa. Estela owned a restaurant, VicMar, which was a combination of her sons’ names, Victor and Martín. They started working there when they were seven and five, andbefore they moved into their house in Fortín, they lived in a vecindad, a kind of housing arrangement for poor families where private rooms surround a shared courtyard, kitchen, and bath. Martín was friends with Pablo, the brother with whom Yoli played basketball, and that’s how they met. But really they’d always sort of known each other, and then one day things were just different. Neither of them can say what it was really, but they started hanging out alone, without telling anyone. They listened to Silvio Rodriguez on Martín’s record player, and Yoli enjoyed being away from her family.
    Martín was Yoli’s first real boyfriend.
    Her nipples itched. Martín noticed that she’d been scratching them a lot lately. They were on a day trip with Victor and his girlfriend, Marta, on the coast. They all noticed that Yoli was fidgeting with her flannel shirt but thought, at first, that it was the wool. It wasn’t the wool. After she changed into a cotton T-shirt but kept fidgeting, Martín asked Yoli if she