The Prospectors by Ariel Djanikian EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Ariel Djanikian
- Language: English
- Genre: U.S. Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite National Park
2015
My grandfather was a wealthy man. For most of his life, he didn’t feel
guilty about it. Wealth, he believed, was simply something that had
happened to him, as bad luck or hardship could have also happened to him.
From the outside, it was easy to see how money had formed him into a selfaggrandizing, domineering, and charming if recklessly inconsiderate
person. But he wouldn’t have viewed it like that. Instead, he’d drifted
through life accepting good fortune the way a person might step out the
front door, in temperate Southern California, accepting another decade of
spectacular weather.
When he called one afternoon in mid-May to ask if my husband and I
could pay him a visit, there was something tense and halting in his tone that
made me guess there was more he wanted from us, and my first instinct was
to answer evasively, even before hearing the details, already on guard.
“We’d love to, Grandpa,” I said, saving a biochemistry problem set on
my laptop, and speaking over the blare of car music outside. “We’re a little
busy right now with work and school. But first chance we get. Maybe late
June.”
At my dodge, though, he was indignant.
“June?” he cried. “How about Friday?”
He had an urgent matter to discuss, he went on to explain. The
conversation had to be in person and it could not wait. Really, I didn’t want
to go anywhere. I was nearing the crucial end-of-semester exams week and
already feeling behind. But it wasn’t easy to say “no” to my grandfather, not
in the least because he happened to be the person footing the bill for the
very master’s program that was causing my current anxiety. I spun in my
desk chair. I raised my eyebrows, looking across the sun-streaked and
cluttered apartment at Owen, who met my gaze from over the dreary stacks
of high school essays that he was grading.
“Can we do it?” I whispered, holding the phone away.
A hollow sound: Owen’s pen tapping the top of his papers.
“It’s not convenient,” he finally answered, resigning himself. “But for
him, I guess we can manage.”
I swiveled around again. Outside, a light turned green, and the traffic
moved forward.
“All right,” I said into the phone, forcing a cheery tone. “Change of
plans. We’ll drive up this weekend.”
From there, though, only more stipulations. My grandfather didn’t want
to meet us at his ranch near Fresno, where he lived with the irascible
woman I thought of only as “Wife Number Six,” but rather at the
Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite Park, the beloved place of his boyhood
vacations, and where, he told me next without a hint of bashfulness, he’d
already booked a weekend stay for the three of us.
That Friday, on the wings of a prayer that our declining Toyota Corolla
could manage the six-hour drive, Owen and I made our way out of Los
Angeles through bright landscapes host to almond orchards and strawberry
farms, past rows of tall, swinging oil pumps like herds of mythological
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB