Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around by Pagán, Camille (top novels of all time txt) 📗

of her that my father had sent me right before I decided to flee Chicago, where I’d lived with Tom, for Puerto Rico. They’d been on the beach in Vieques, and she had been pregnant with me and Paul; she had been so luminous and filled with joy that I knew I had to see that place for myself and had ditched my plans to head to Mexico. In spite of my tumultuous emotional state, I, too, looked luminous and joyful in the photo Shiloh had taken. The island was magical that way.

I kept flipping and reminiscing until I reached the last page, which held a picture of me and Milagros standing in front of her pale pink guesthouse. I remembered how scared I was—of officially ending my marriage; of taking a chance on Shiloh, who was practically a stranger to me at the time; and yes, naturally, of dying. But none of that fear was evident on my face. Instead, I was wearing the smile of someone who knows she’s just made a lifelong friend. Beside me, Milagros was grinning like she had it all figured out. Which, of course, she did.

I really missed her. She was already getting up there in years when we’d taken the photo, and now she was . . . eighty-three, I determined after doing the math in my head. The last time Shiloh and I had been to visit her, she’d been bounding around like a woman half her age, but that was five years ago. And if my décolletage was any indication, a lot could change in that amount of time.

Shiloh stuck his head in the door. “Hey, I was going to join you on the patio, but you weren’t there. What are you up to?”

“Just looking through old photos,” I said, hoping I didn’t look like I’d been crying. “I talked to Milagros for a little while.”

“Oh yeah? How is she?”

“Good . . . but old.” I’d already made up my mind but wanted to take the opportunity to gauge his mood before determining how I’d ask him about going. “She asked us to come stay at the guesthouse, so she can meet the girls before she, quote, croaks.”

He laughed lightly from the doorway. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

It always came to that, not that I said this to him. “We are overdue for a trip, though. We’ve been telling Charlotte and Isa that we’d take them back to Vieques for years now.”

“It has been a while for us, too,” he said. When the girls were seven, Shiloh and I left them with Paul and Charlie for a week and flew to Puerto Rico for our first and only solo vacation. That time we’d gone to Vieques for a quick overnight trip. I thought we’d begin to visit more regularly after that, but in the following years, something had always seemed to come up. “What about the week between Christmas and New Year’s? I should be able to take it off if I give Kasey enough notice,” he said, referring to his supervisor.

The holidays were only five months away. It might as well be a decade. “Milagros said the guesthouse is available in August, and it’s ours to use—her treat for my ten-year cancerversary,” I told him.

“Next month?” he said, running his hand through his hair. “As in August, which starts next week?”

“Yes,” I said in a tone that was bordering on defensive. There were a dozen different reasons we couldn’t make it work—last-minute tickets would be a fortune, Shiloh probably couldn’t get the time off, and so forth and so on. Not a single one of them mattered. Visiting Vieques the first time had allowed me to figure out what seemed like an impossible situation. Surely now—when nothing was actually wrong with me—I’d get my head screwed on straight within minutes of setting foot on the island.

But I wasn’t the only one who needed transformation. If the past several weeks were any indication, Shiloh and I needed a serious dose of the island enchantment that brought us together in the first place. And while I wouldn’t describe my family as coming apart at the seams, spending a week away from the stressors of our everyday life might be just the thing to help remind us how lucky we were to have each other.

He was frowning like I’d just told him we’d won a free night at the Bedbug Motel. “You know it’s hot as hades in August, right? And that it’s hurricane season?”

“New York will be just as hot, except without the ocean breeze,” I said, but as soon as I heard myself, I realized I was going to need better ammunition. “Hey—we’re talking about Puerto Rico. As in your homeland. Don’t you want to visit?”

“I do,” he said slowly. “The question is, why do you sound upset?”

“I’m not.” More like desperate. “Anyway, remember when we were supposed to be in San Juan last August? You’d said then that hurricane season is several months long and it didn’t make sense to plan around it.”

“True . . .” I could all but see the wheels turning in his head. I just hoped they were turning in the right direction. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to get off work.”

Now I had to resist the urge to throw up my hands in exasperation. This was a man who said yes first and figured out the details later. What was his hang-up?

But then I looked at him again from across the room, and unlike me, he wasn’t irritated at all. He just looked . . . tired. My annoyance immediately disappeared. “Hey, you need a break as much as I do,” I said softly. “You’ve been working a ton, and we missed two vacations in a row. Add Charlotte’s diabetes to the mix and . . .” I exhaled. “It’s a lot.”

“You’re right, cutie,” he said, his face softening. “I’ve been kind of stressed.”

He had, I realized. And I didn’t need WebMD to tell me the effect stress could have on