Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Elizabeth Acevedo
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Flor
had a tabulated ranking for the seasons, autumn being her least preferred of
the climatic periods in North America. The dying season, for Flor, had
always been worse than the dead.
She should have been taking her daily constitutional through Riverside
Park—despite the rain, she knew the lukewarmth would soon yield to
frostier days—but instead she found herself seated on the pink print couch,
with the documentary.
She told it one way. The truth that was not the truth.
Flor often listened to her daughter speak of her research with one ear
flapped closed. But the other ear, the other ear perked up anytime her
daughter made an utterance in her direction. Flor wasn’t entirely sure when
she’d started looking to her child for approval, but these days she was
forever finding herself trying to demonstrate relevance. Flor was not great
at keeping track of all the rituals, myths, and performances humans had
conducted from Mesopotamia del carajo to now, but Flor was great at
worrying that only through sharing her daughter’s anthropological interests
would they ever become close.
“She teaches Dominican history at City College” was the answer Flor
gave to people in the neighborhood regarding her girl’s career.
(It was always hard for Mami to explain what I, Ona—with my three degrees, mind you—
actually did for work. Mami learned that trying to explain that I studied sugarcane ruins and preColumbian trade routes, and everything having to do with Kiskeya between the early 1500s and
the mid-twentieth century, to a bunch of unlearned imbeciles (her words, not mine) would lead
to neighbors shaking their head: My son has a job in bookkeeping, ja ja, easier than a job in
books.)
But there was a documentary that Ona hadn’t stopped talking about the
entire summer. And so, Flor called her sister Camila to help her set up the
Netflix, and put the captions in Spanish, and with rain insulating Manhattan
in water, she watched the screen.
Un mexicano from Arizona or Colorado, de por allá, sat in a wheelchair
while a long line of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren
lined up to pedirle bendiciones and whisper they loved him. She rolled her
eyes. Just like a man, about to kick the bucket and still making his
descendants kiss his hand. And before he was even in a casket! Her father
would have never. She was considering sneaking a peek at her siblings’
group chat—currently heating up with a discussion about Matilde’s latest
substitute instructor for the salsa class she attended—when the man onscreen began to openly weep. His hands shook on his bastón when one of
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