Carolina Garcia Aguilera One Hot Summer (epub)

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.It proved that money was indeed an aphrodisiac, and that large amounts of it were orgasmic.That morning he was dressed in a white shirt and dark suit pants, his jacket and tie draped over a free chair at the table.From this point it would take him only a minute or so to get ready to leave for the office.Several months ago I would have also been wearing a suit, prepared to take on the world.This morning, though, I was still wearing my nightgown and a bathrobe.From where I was sitting on the terrace, I could watch all the recreational and commercial fishing boats setting off to try their luck on the Atlantic.For some reason I felt jealous of them.I picked up the binoculars off the table and focused on a few sailboats anchored in the calm waters of the cove nearest our house.The people who lived out there on the boats seemed to hardly ever come ashore; at times they disappeared for a few days then reappeared one morning as though they had never left.One of the men who lived out there was a Robinson Crusoe look-alike, with wild sun-bleached hair and beard; he usually wore nothing more than a loincloth, and always had a beer in his hand.On another boat lived two stocky butch women with short spiky hair; these lovers demonstrated their ardent lust for each other in private, if the waves that they generated when they went below were any indication.We lived on North Bay Road, a street along Biscayne Bay just north of South Beach.It was a long, winding, tree-lined street favored by the rich and famous; the houses were set back from the road in hopes of affording privacy from prying eyes.We bought our seven-thousand-square-foot home the year we were married.The place used to belong to a salsa singer from Puerto Rico who hadn’t had a hit record in five years.It was built in the old colonial Spanish style, with enormous public rooms—the singer used to give wild, memorable parties there, we learned from our neighbors.The house was too big for us at first—a couple with no children—but the terrace in the back had sold us.Who wouldn’t want to have their morning coffee while taking in a sea breeze and watching the sun-kissed waves of the bay?I had lived in Coral Gables all my life and never really considered living in Miami Beach, but Ariel was determined to make his home there.He specifically wanted one of the houses on North Bay Road.When he was a boy he delivered the Miami Herald, and his route had taken him there every morning at dawn.He used to promise himself that someday he would own one of those houses.I actually cried when he told me about his boyhood dream, and I immediately agreed to live there.Our only regret was that Ariel’s mother hadn’t lived long enough to see her boy make good in such a spectacular fashion.Marti was playing on a little rug next to the table, occasionally sipping juice from his plastic cup, happy and oblivious to the scene around him.He shared his father’s ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else; just then he was concentrating on a wooden puzzle while Jacinta cleared away the morning’s dishes.Ariel wasn’t pressing me to talk, but I could sense him closely watching me as I looked out over the water.He had learned the hard way that there was no use hurrying me to discuss things I didn’t want to talk about.However, I knew him well enough to know that unless I was careful he could maneuver me into where he wanted me to be.He had the ability to manipulate me in such a subtle way that I was unaware he had done it until it was too late.I had to be careful in this instance, as I knew what he wanted.“I know I have to tell them what I’m going to do,” I finally said.“I know.”My firm’s policy was that a leave of absence could last up to a year, but it wasn’t fair for me to keep withholding my plans from them.I was the only lawyer there who specialized in immigration, and I knew that some of my work had been farmed out to other firms.So far my partners had been supportive of me, but I knew it was only a matter of time before their attitude changed.Business was business, and personal goodwill was only going to take me so far.Weber, Miranda, Blanco and Silverman, P.A., was the only place I had ever worked as a lawyer.They had hired me as a summer associate after my first year at Duke, then picked me up for a second summer a year later.After I graduated they offered me a job contingent on my passing the bar.I became their business immigration lawyer by default, really.During my second summer the firm got a commercial litigation case that involved a major immigration factor—not central to the case, but important enough that it needed to be thoroughly researched.The attorney to whom I had been assigned was given that aspect of the case, and I was told to work on it.That had been my first day on the job that summer, and I really wanted to prove my worth.So I threw myself completely into the task.When I was through with my research I gave my boss a report that could have been submitted to the Supreme Court.Immigration law was interesting to me, which was a good thing—once I came on full time, all those kinds of cases were assigned to me.I must have done a good job, because I was made partner five years after graduation, the first woman at my firm to have done so.Most of my Duke classmates had gone on to work for big firms in New York, but I returned to Miami.I had been away for seven years, including my undergrad period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and I felt like I was losing touch with my inner Cuban [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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