The Aguero Sisters Read Online Free

The Aguero Sisters
Book: The Aguero Sisters Read Online Free
Author: Cristina Garcia
Pages:
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peaches, and a cup of chamomile tea. The meal settles her stomach after the morning tumult. She is careful to eat only soothing foods. Like her sister in Cuba, Constancia has a fragile digestive system. Neither of her children inherited this trait. Her daughter lives on hot-plate-warmed hash poured from cans, and her son, Silvestre, eats nothing but sausage heroes from an Italian take-out place in Morningside Heights.
    Constancia tastes a forkful of her cottage cheese, shudders at the thought of all that indescribable meat. She opens the newspaper to the day’s horoscope. Her birthday,March 21, is on the cusp between Pisces and Aries, a volatile combination, and she often finds it difficult to interpret the dispatches from the stars. “Expect a serious loss. Cling to what you truly want and release all that is ephemeral. A financial coup may be yours if you play the part right.” Constancia is irritated by such equivocal advice. She prefers the more direct approach of the soothsayers back in Cuba.
    At precisely three o’clock
, the Algerian diplomat appears at Constancia’s counter. She declines his dinner invitation, as she has for the past two weeks, but he is not easily dissuaded. Although Constancia is intrigued by his gentility, by the irregular pattern of hair on his brow, she cannot envision herself out with another man. She hasn’t bothered to tell her husband about the diplomat. Heberto is genetically incapable of jealousy. How else could he have married Constancia when she was still sick with love for his brother?
    Constancia continues a brisk pace of sales throughout the afternoon. There is an interlude just before five o’clock when the number of male customers invariably increases. It is their time of day to buy perfume: to beg forgiveness, to surprise a lover, or to sweeten the end of an affair. Constancia can always tell whether hope or guilt is fueling a purchase. For men, it is always hope or guilt, never anything in between.
    On her way home, the sky darkens to a bluish gray. The weatherman predicted snow, but no snow has fallen. Constancia wants the snow to come, to envelop the city in its mending white. Along the southern edge of Central Park, the trees grow heavy with obscurity, with the weight of impending night.
    Heberto is closing shop when Constancia arrives to pick him up. He is flush with satisfaction. The financeminister of Venezuela stopped in to buy ivory pipes for his mistress. Constancia examines the receipt her husband flourishes: $1,940. The minister paid for the pipes with two thousand-dollar bills and told Heberto to keep the change.
    â€œLook how excited you are,
mi cielo
. Are you sure you Ye ready to retire?” Constancia asks, patting her husband’s hand. She wonders what Heberto will do with himself in Florida. He has no hobbies or passions, only this steady mercantile drive.
    Together they walk down Avenue of the Americas, against the tide of the crowds. They pass the skyscraper where Constancia’s son works on the thirty-sixth floor. Silvestre clips newspapers for the library of a prestigious newsmagazine, sorting through sports and celebrity gossip, serial murders and monsoons. He says the fact that he’s deaf makes his job easier, filters out distractions. His father, Gonzalo Cruz, is Heberto’s brother. Constancia was married to him for exactly four months in 1956. Gonzalo lives in Miami now with his sixth wife, a Salvadoran teenager he met at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Coconut Grove. This is another reason Constancia does not want to move to Florida.
    Constancia is supposed to meet Silvestre at the Cloisters the first Sunday of every month, but her son hasn’t shown up since August. Last time she saw him, he complained that she kissed him too hard on the mouth. Then he lifted his hand with a nervous flutter in a gesture that was pure Gonzalo. Silvestre looks so much like his father now that each time Constancia faces him in the
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