Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

Genres: Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award with In the Time of Butterflies, author Julia Alvarez is a beloved voice in modern fiction and poetry. In Saving the World, she weaves the stories of two courageous women—separated by two centuries—into a breathtaking novel of love and idealism in an increasingly troubled world. A best-selling, Latin-American author living in Vermont, Alma stays behind when her husband travels to the Dominican Republic to help fight AIDS. She needs the time to work on her latest book, but she has terrible writer’s block. Soon, her focus is diverted to an entirely new story, that of the early 19th-century anti-smallpox expedition of Dr. Francisco Balmis. Accompanying Dr. Balmis was DoNa Isabel, who cared for the orphan boys serving as living carriers of the smallpox vaccine. It is the narrative of the courageous DoNa Isabel that provides hope and inspiration when Alma’s husband is taken captive. Mesmerizing and poetic, Saving the World is a visionary tale that raises profound questions about the world we live in—and whether or not it is beyond redemption.

Release date: April 27, 2007

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

In the fall of her fiftieth year, Alma finds herself lost in a dark mood she can’t seem to shake. It’s late September; she has actually not turned fifty yet, but she has already given that out as her age, hoping to get the fanfare and menopause jokes over and done with. It’s not her own mortality that weighs heavily on her. In fact, it makes her sad when she reads that women of her profile (active, slender, vegetarian, married) will probably live—if they take care of themselves—to ninety and beyond.

She should probably feel glad that her glass of time is half full. But instead she wonders who might be alive in her dotage whom she would care to be with? Richard, her husband, overworked and project-driven, will probably not live that long; Tera, her best friend, over-weight and full of political-activist rage, will likely die before Alma does; her saintly neighbor Helen, already in her seventies, fat chance she’ll stick around. Day after day, Alma feels that peppery anxious feeling that she has truly lost her way.

Earlier this year, she went to see the local, small-town psychiatrist, a very short man with an oversized face that reminded her of the post-deaf Beethoven. She explained that she felt as if a whirling darkness were descending on her, like dirty water going down a drain or that flock of birds in the film by Hitchcock.

The doctor, who’d been jotting down her explanation, had looked up. He was so young; he probably hadn’t seen the film. “What kind of birds?” he had asked.

At least he is being thorough, Alma thought.

He asked a lot of questions, referring to what seemed a long list on a clipboard—about whether Alma had fantasies of killing herself, whether she had a gun in the house (Richard did keep an old shotgun down in the basement, which he would occasionally use on the raccoons and groundhogs that invaded his garden), whether there had been any untoward events in their family.

Alma tried to be accurate and provide him with the information requested. She was baffled by this dark mood but still trusting that medical science in the guise of Dr. Payne (incredibly, that was his name) could help her get back to her old self.

Months go by and one after another of the antidepressants Dr. Payne prescribes fail by her lights—she is “better” but numb all the time; she sleeps well but can no longer smell the paperwhites Richard brings her; nothing truly upsets her, even when her agent, Lavinia, sends her an ultimatum letter about Alma’s overdue novel. (She is going on her third year overdue.)

One afternoon when she is trying to rouse herself into some wifely attractiveness before Richard gets home, she goes into their bathroom, opens the cabinet and collects all the prescription bottles she has accumulated over the last months of treatment, and for some reason, rather than flush them down the toilet, she puts on her coat and walks to the back of their property near the tree line. She scoops a small hole in the ground with her boot and pours the contents of these vials inside—no doubt hundreds of dollars worth—then kicks some dirt over it. She is concerned that deer or raccoons or groundhogs will find this trove and drug themselves into a stupor and thus become easy targets for anyone with a shotgun, perhaps Richard himself. In these small ways Alma finds she can still trust herself. She rolls a heavy boulder over the spot, circles it with the upended emptied bottles wedged into the earth (the ground has not yet frozen), and then waits, for it seems some ceremony should close this moment. But she can think of nothing, so she merely stands there for a few more minutes before the dusk and cold draw her back indoors.

She tells no one, not Richard, not Tera, whose impatience with Alma’s persisting sadness Alma can hear in her friend’s voice. As always, Tera is involved in one or another of her causes—antiwar, anti-mines, anti-something—and any confession on Alma’s part will bring on an invitation to join Tera on the front lines. But Alma knows she can’t treat this thing with peace rallies and political work. So, no, she does not tell Tera either. (Another sign that her instincts are still trust-worthy: she knows who to talk to, mostly who not to talk to.) Most definitely, Tera won’t approve. We’re all so goddamn lucky: hers is one of the voices lodged in Alma’s head. Depression is nothing but a first-world disease (she parcels out the word that way). Tera has been Alma’s best friend since Alma ended up in this rural state two decades ago, still young enough to be thought of as a waif, not a lost soul. Now Alma is older, and as her sense of detachment grows, she watches Tera go about her campaigning, her picketing, her trips down to Washington with her live-in companion, Paul, to protest any number of atrocities that Tera somehow always finds out about; e-mail has proliferated her sources of horror. Alma watches Tera the way she would a movie, a good movie, but one she has seen several times already and that, therefore, leaves her slightly bored.

Alma pretends to Richard that she is still taking her antidepressants, but she goes about her own way. She writes Lavinia back and tells her an outright lie, that the novel is done and she is merely going through it one last time. She is still making an effort to maintain her old life, covering for herself, as if she is setting up mock models in one or another room, Alma cooking, Alma going to bed, Alma writing a letter, Alma writing a novel—displays people can look at through a lit up window—but meanwhile she has slipped out the back door with no idea where she is going except somewhere far from this place.

She has every intention of returning—that, in part, is the reason for her secrecy. But she has no story yet to lead her out of her dark mood and restore her to the life that, she has to agree with Tera, she’s damn lucky to be living.

ABOUT TWO WEEKS LATER, Alma is standing by the window on the landing looking out at the place where she buried her pills. She has not revisited the spot since. There have been a couple of what the weatherman calls snow showers, dusting and disguising the ground, so she isn’t even sure that the mound she is looking at is her boulder.

Again, it’s that time of afternoon when even in happy periods of her life, Alma often feels a heaviness of heart. In fact, she once read an article in a woman’s magazine about how this time of day, dusk, was the most often cited as the nadir of mood swings. She is standing at the window, not having had lunch yet or, more accurately, not remembering if she has had lunch yet, when she sees a man coming up out of the woods. Without a coat, that’s what she notices first, wearing only one layer, as people up here like to say. She would be adding what she later learns if she says that this stranger’s hair is longish, that the shirt is a worn plaid, that he is attractive in a mildly disturbing way. The man is walking up from the line of trees that separate their own from Helen’s property. Pin oaks, Richard has told her, the last trees to let go their leaves. In fact, they still have their brown, withered foliage—why Alma might not have seen the man right off.

She thinks of calling Helen but then thinks again about the wisdom of worrying an old, near-blind woman, alone in a run-down farmhouse, relying on a walker to get around. Besides, this man isn’t doing something wrong, he isn’t carrying a gun or a chain saw. But the fact that he isn’t wearing a coat strikes her for some reason as suspicious. He walks with large, easy strides—in good shape, every once in a while stopping, looking around, finally spotting the house. Alma steps back to one side of the window before he can see her and watches as he climbs up the slight rise toward the house. He is still a distance away—they have ten acres, “more or less,” surprisingly a legal phrase in the local registries. It crosses her mind to check that the doors are locked, but the man has stopped—and this is the curious thing—at that mound, though she can’t swear it’s the mound, but she has herself believing it is. He has taken on the pose of discoverers or explorers in statues: one foot on that boulder as he looks around, reviewing the house, the surrounding pasture, Richard’s garden, the pond with the raft already pulled out of the water and resting on four wooden blocks. Then the man turns, facing the woods, assessing, assessing Alma doesn’t know what.

She stands there, waiting, annoyed at the ringing phone. For some reason the answering machine has not kicked in with Richard’s curt welcome and instructions. Finally, when it seems that the ringing won’t ever quit and the man has indeed turned to stone, she races down the rest of the stairs. Her intention is to get the portable and hurry on back to her lookout on the landing.

“IS THIS MRS. HUEBNER?” a woman’s voice asks when Alma picks up.

Alma considers correcting her. But the woman has pronounced Richard’s last name correctly, so Alma assumes the caller is someone he knows, perhaps a childhood friend from Indiana. “This is Richard Huebner’s wife. Can I help you?”

“Okay,” the woman says as if that’s all she called to settle.

“Can I help you?” Alma asks again. Why doesn’t she just hang up? The caller is obviously no one she knows. But she can’t not respond. Years ago, she briefly dated a man who accused her of having a “victim personality.” You make eye contact in subways, he explained. You stop when someone scruffy says, You gotta a minute? Good for me, Alma thought. But the man meant it as a criticism. As a reason for breaking up with her.

“Are you alone?” the woman wants to know.

By this time, Alma has made it back to the landing. The stranger is gone. “Who is this?” she asks. The woman now has Alma’s complete attention. Of course, Alma is alone. Richard is at the office, meeting day today, two hours at least before she’ll hear the garage door coming up under the floor where she has her study. “What is this about?”

“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,” the woman snaps back. “It’s not easy for me either, you know.”

What can it be? Alma’s mind begins racing around, inventing ways her life will soon be destroyed. She supposes that even a determined runaway will turn back if she looks over her shoulder and her house is on fire. Unless she has set that fire herself, of course. Alma feels a pang of guilt, as if she has brought on whatever losses are coming, even though she never intended anything to change. Her present state of mind is baffling and private. She doesn’t want to lose Richard over it.

“I’m an old girlfriend of Dick’s.”

Richard, she almost interrupts the woman. Before Alma came into his life, Richard had been known as Dick among his family and circle of friends. From early on in their romance, Alma hated calling him Dick, a name she associated with the punch lines of stupid party jokes. Richard himself admitted that he disliked the nickname but didn’t want to make an issue of changing it. Alma began referring to him as Richard to their family and friends, and slowly most everyone followed suit. It’s one of the little changes she has brought about in his life that she prides herself on. This woman obviously knew Dick before his life with Alma transformed him into Richard.

“‘Course he’s going to tell you he doesn’t know me.” The woman could be laughing, could be clearing her throat. “They never know you, do they, after they get what they want.”

Alma lets out a sigh of impatience. She wants her guillotine sharp and quick. Actually, Alma is hoping to be spared. In part, she doesn’t want to be distracted from her present state, from the possibility of coming through to the other side of her dark mood. Please, she addresses Richard retrospectively. Don’t have done anything stupid, please. A tryst during the company’s last overnight retreat? A reunion with an old girlfriend when he flew back to Indiana for the funeral of a favorite uncle? Recently, he brought home a cell phone. Richard, who dislikes the whole idea of cell phones (“I don’t want to be reachable every moment of my day”), now has his own private, portable number, courtesy of Help International, in case one of his on-site people needs to get hold of him. But mostly, Richard uses it to call home so Alma can read him the grocery list he has forgotten on the kitchen counter or to tell her he is stuck in traffic on Storrow Drive on his way home from his Boston meeting or to ask her how she is feeling, if she has made any progress in the novel he, too, thinks she is almost done writing.

Maybe Richard is also using this private line to get in touch with other women.

“I have some bad news,” the woman is saying. “I’m calling everybody.”

Alma is sure now. The woman has some communicable disease. But Alma can’t really see how this applies to Richard. Her present mood notwithstanding, they have been basically happily, monogamously married for more than the requisite years you can carry these infections around with you. All those adverbs (basically, happily, monogamously) suddenly sound suspiciously assertive, defending themselves against the onslaught of Are you sure?

“Where are you calling from?” If Alma can place the woman, it might be easier to dismiss her.

“I’ve been so sick.” The woman goes on, ignoring the question, as if she has to get through what she has called to report. “I just found out and so I’m going through my book to warn everyone.” A book to go through? What does the woman run, a service? How many calls has she made already? Is Richard the first?

“What exactly is it you have?” Alma asks the woman, trying to inject concern in her voice. It’s a strategy from her old hitchhiking days when some driver would suddenly turn weird or aggressive. Alma would start gabbing, asking questions, pretending to great interest as if being a nice person might keep her from being raped and murdered.

“I’ve got AIDS,” the woman pronounces the word importantly. Like a trophy.

Of course, Alma is thinking. What other epidemic do people worry about in this part of the world? Elsewhere, along with AIDS, there are other plagues brewing, in terrorist bunkers, in open-door clinics with dirt floors, flies buzzing over wasted faces, diseases long since banished from the richer-world neighborhoods—Tera knows all about them. Alma has been researching the subject, specifically the smallpox epidemic, Balmis and his vaccine expedition around the world with little boys. She doesn’t know why, but in her present mood, it’s the one story that seems to engage her, as if through it she might discover where it is she is going.

“I’m calling all the wives,” the woman is explaining. “I just know how men are. They’re not going to tell you.”

Alma has had enough. “Look here,” she tells the woman. “I don’t know who you are, but I know who my husband is, and he shares everything with me, okay? Everything. And for another thing, his past relationships do not concern me. If you want to talk to him, you have our number, you can call tonight.” She is about to hang up, glad she has conquered her pettiness and mistrust, but the image lurks before her, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, the president having oral sex in the Oval Office while heads of state wait in the anteroom. Then there are Alma’s cousins back in the Dominican Republic, fading beauties having their hair colored and their faces lifted, joining Bible study groups led by young, attractive Jesuit men from Spain, while their cocksure, cologne-scented husbands go off to their mistresses in designer guayaberas. Alma wavers, wanting and not wanting to know more.

“I know what you must think …” The woman’s voice trembles. “But I’m not some whore. I’m just calling everyone to be sure.”

Whore? How old-fashioned the word sounds. There are no whores in the USA anymore, Alma feels like saying. Everyone has a new name now. Flight attendant, waste disposal engineer, sex worker. And what does it mean that the woman is calling everyone to be sure? To be sure of what?

“AIDS is just the last stage,” the woman goes on. She sounds tired, worn out with trying to reconstruct all that some health professional has told her. “I’ve probably been HIV for some time. But I don’t have no health insurance. So I didn’t know myself till I got real sick.”

It’s only now that Alma notices the woman’s bad grammar. Oddly, it makes her feel safer. Richard wouldn’t risk their happiness for someone who can’t talk right, would he? Like a lot of former farm boys, Richard can be a snob about certain things. Then, too, the woman might not be smart enough to have gotten the details right. Maybe she had sex with Richard years ago. HIV doesn’t lie dormant that long. Or does it? Alma knows so little about it—a pamphlet she read while waiting for her flu shot at the hospital. She actually knows more about Balmis and smallpox than about her own millennium’s epidemic.

But this is irrelevant: Richard has told her about everyone he has slept with, and among the modest handful there are no quick affairs, ladies who might later call up with bad news. Alma recalls their first days as lovers (she was thirty-nine; Richard, forty-seven), the thrilling sense that even as middle-agers they could still be the principals in a love story: the long, housebound days on weekends the boys were with their mother, the rumpled sheets, the life stories they shared, the lights of the little town beyond the window, snow beginning to fall. “Okay,” Alma says finally, as if granting the woman some point. “Just tell me, when did you and Richard get together?”

“Please don’t get mad at me, Mrs. Huebner.”

“My name is not Mrs. Huebner,” Alma says, her voice rising again. “I’m Fulana de Tal.” Her professional name, necessary camouflage upon family request. “It sounds too much like a title,” Lavinia had objected, finally relenting when Alma explained that fulana de tal actually meant a nobody, a so-and-so.

“What?”

“Fulana de Tal,” Alma repeats. She doesn’t try to Americanize the pronunciation. This woman will probably assume that Richard found her during one of his third-world consultancy trips and brought her back to be the good wife it is now difficult to find in this country.

“You don’t give a shit, do you? As long as you’re safe.” The woman’s voice has turned nasty. “I hope you get exactly what you deserve! Go to hell!”

“Wait! Please!” Alma is the one pleading now. She wants the woman to take back her curse. But the woman has hung up her end.

Alma is still at her post at the window. She looks out as if she might spot the woman racing across the back pasture toward Helen’s house. She thinks of the stranger she saw earlier. It’s as if in her gloominess she has mistakenly wandered into some twilight zone, among the bruised and broken with no way to defend herself from their intrusion or ill will. This woman’s curse is an infection she won’t be able to shake off.

Only, Richard—loving him, being loved by him, if he hasn’t already betrayed her—might save her.

SHE WANTS TO CALL Richard and hear him deny everything. But it’s Thursday afternoon, when HI holds its weekly company meeting, reports from the different project managers: What’s happening with the water-system project in the West Bank? Is the financing application for the Haitian reforest-a-mountain proposal finished? Did we get back the estimates and feasibility studies from the microloan coffee cooperative in Bolivia?

Whenever Richard talks about these meetings, Alma imagines all the men in the company standing over a large table map, dividing up the world. Always it’s the men she imagines—though a few women do work as coordinators and project managers. And though Alma knows that Help International represents the good guys, many of them former Peace Corps volunteers, corporate Robin Hoods funneling funds from the rich and powerful in the first world to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor, their talk at these gatherings, at least as reported by Richard, sounds to her like four-star generals plotting in the back rooms of the Pentagon. Sometimes Alma wonders how much difference—besides content—there is between these types of men.

“A world of difference,” Tera would say. Bossy and big-hearted, Alma’s best friend is a force of nature. Just who Alma needs to talk to right now. Any number of times in the past, Tera has been the emotional equivalent of God reaching down toward Adam’s lifted fore finger on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Tera has breathed grit into Alma.

The phone rings and rings. Unlike everyone else Alma knows, Tera refuses to get an answering machine and buy into the impersonality of the first world. Dear Tera, everything is a political struggle. But Alma has learned to get beyond this first string of her friend’s defense. She has come to realize that this is Tera’s way of girding her loins, so to speak, making her poverty mean something. Tera actually survives on less than twenty grand a year and no health insurance, teaching as an adjunct at the local state college. She also conducts weekend journalwriting workshops in which a half-dozen or so women participants uncover horrible pasts and buried terrors. One time, as the guest writer, Alma sat through three hours of a sharing session. It was awful.

“Hey!” Tera sounds breathless. She needs to lose some of that extra weight. How to approach the topic again and not have it turn into the evil forces of anorexia attacking the organic, expansive shape of the female body. “I was outside,” she explains. Tera is an incredible gardener—a passion she shares with Richard, although usually it takes the form of competition: who is still harvesting kale in November, who has the first tomatoes. “They’re predicting a big frost tonight. Paul, don’t bring that in here!” Tera’s companion, Paul Vendler, is a tall, docile Quaker, whom Tera has been living with for way longer than anyone they know has been married. Needless to say, Tera does not believe in marriage. “Just set it in the mudroom for now.”

It always annoys Alma: Tera’s stereo conversations with her and Paul. Today especially, Alma wants her friend’s undivided attention. “Tera, I just had this upsetting phone call,” Alma blurts out.

“What happened? Hold on,” she adds before Alma can even begin. “Shut the door, Paul. I can’t hear a damn thing.” It’s Tera’s own fault. She refuses to update the vintage rotary bolted to the wall of the kitchen, the receiver cord so short there is no way to migrate away from noise. Alma once tried to pass on her old portable (marriage with Richard doubled, and in some cases tripled, their cache of certain items: four alarm clocks; five assorted wine bottle openers; six phones, including two portables). But Tera refused the gift. “Ours works fine. But I’ll take it for the battered women’s shelter.” Alma has not told Tera about the cell phone—afraid Richard and she will be consigned to that corrupt circle of consumer hell Tera reserves for people who replace things that aren’t broken.

“Tera? Are you still there?” There is an absent sound on the other end. Tera must have given up on Paul and gone off to shut the door herself.

“Sorry,” Tera says coming back. “Go on.”

Alma has already decided she won’t bring up her dark mood. She doesn’t want a reminder about how lucky they all are. Right now, what Alma wants is Band-Aid reassurance, someone reminding her that her fears and doubts are unfounded.

“Have you talked to Richard?” Tera asks when Alma finishes her account.

“He’s at a meeting. And I just couldn’t concentrate on anything. I had to talk to someone.” Someone doesn’t sound like an adequate category for her best friend. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“I wish you weren’t so far away.” Tera sighs. When they lived in the same town, they met almost every day for a walk and talk. Presence is important to Tera. It’s one of her articles of faith: being there. Maybe that’s why she has let herself get so large. More of her bearing witness, marching on a picket line, being there.

“Here’s what I would do,” Tera says in a voice so strong and sure, Alma feels as if her friend’s capacious arms are pouring out of the receiver and wrapping themselves around her. Although they are the same age, Alma often thinks of Tera as older, wiser. “First, you absolutely need to talk to Richard before you get worked up. It sounds to me like this poor, lonely woman got diagnosed with this horrible disease and got piss-poor medical information and counseling and went home and took out her old address book and started calling everyone she even shook hands with or lusted after in high school. Seriously, the health care in this country is just the pits—”

“Like you say, it’s probably nothing,” Alma puts in, nipping Tera’s rant in the bud. If Tera gets started on the Big Issues of the World, Alma’s petty problems won’t stand a chance. “It’s just, oh, you know how down I’ve been, Tera. And this call just reminds me how everything can come tumbling down.”

“You said it,” Tera agrees. But instead of pursuing any number of corroborating horrors, Tera stays with Alma. Perhaps she senses the des peration in Alma’s voice. “Hang in there. It’ll pass, really. And you got me, babe, like the song says. Are you taking your Saint-John’s-wort?”

Just the name makes Alma cringe. Unlike Tera, Alma doesn’t believe in all those expensive, alternative tins and jars at the co-op. But it’s more than that. She doesn’t want to take Saint-John’s-wort; she doesn’t want to be on antidepressants; she has stopped going to Dr. Payne. There has to be a place left in modern life for a crisis of the soul, a dark night that doesn’t have a chemical solution.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tera offers. “I’m going to drive down and stay with you till Richard comes home. I’ll give you a back rub, make you some lemongrass tea, whatever you want. I just want you to know you’re not alone.”

“Oh, Tera.” Alma feels a surge of guilty love toward her dear, generous friend, whom she so readily lets slip into caricature in her head. “I’m fine. Really.” Richard will be home soon enough. It’s probably best if Tera isn’t here. Richard and Tera, well, they have to work at being friends. Tera’s high-horse antiestablishment takes on everything offends Richard’s bottom-line, heartland faith in the United States of America, the Golden Rule, and not biting the hand that feeds you. But Alma suspects that it has less to do with conflicting ideologies than with the fact that they both want to boss her around, though both are succeeding less and less these days.

“Richard doesn’t have to know. I’ll park on the back road. When we hear his pickup, I’ll go out the back way and hike across the pasture.”

Just the thought of her baggy-panted friend hiking across the back pasture, bumping into her Paul Bunyan peeping Tom, makes Alma laugh. “Ay, Tera, what would I do without you? I’m okay, really. Just promise that if Richard and I break up …” She doesn’t know what to ask Tera to do or be in that eventuality. “You’ll marry me, okay?” They’ve played this way for years. Holding hands walking down streets. Long, passionate hugs when they part or meet. Wannabe lezzes, their gay-couple friends, Marion and Brier, call them. In fact, when Richard and Alma first starting going out and he met Tera, he assumed that at some time in the past they had been lovers.

“I don’t believe in marriage, remember?” Tera reminds her. “And don’t talk horseshit. You and Richard are not going to break up.”

“But if we do—”

“If you do, you move in with us. We fix up the shed as your study. We take turns cooking meals from the garden. We carpool, save on gas. We’ll have a great life all together.”

It’s scary the way it sounds so doable. This isn’t the reassurance she needs. “Well, like you said,” Alma reminds them both, “this woman was probably just calling everyone in the phone book. Oh, Tera. I don’t know why I’ve let this get to me. I mean I know Richard really loves me. We have a good life. I’m a lucky person.”

There’s a worrisome pause. “Of course, Richard loves you,” Tera agrees. “I love you. Lots of people love you.” It sounds like Tera is conjugating a verb that has always given Alma trouble, in English and in Spanish.

AFTER HANGING UP WITH Tera, Alma heads for her study. She’ll try to squeeze a few hours of work out of this wasted day. Will and discipline have gotten her out of old lives and bad habits before; that’s what she’ll try for. Keep at it, and one day she’ll look up and the dark wood will be a flourishing garden, kale in November, tomatoes in mid-January.

All morning, she has taken notes, answered e-mails, called a catalog company, pretending to be her mother. The wrong size cotton briefs have been sent, and her mother has called Alma to correct the mistake. Poor Mamasita is no longer able to negotiate her way through the auto mated mazes of customer service, much less rectify mistakes when an impertinent, young voice finally answers at the other end. There went Alma’s morning. Then the intruder in the back pasture, followed by the woman’s weird phone call have thrown her off completely.

It will make her feel good if she succeeds in g