Saving the World Read Free Page A

already betrayed her—might save her.
    S HE 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.
    â€œA 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 Almahas 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.
    â€œHey!” 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.
    â€œWhat 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