The Sum of Our Days Read Free Page A

gone one night to look for Jennifer and to spread the gentle message of Jesus among sailors and stevedores who were not in the humor to be led to Christ. We were never again awakened at midnight to listen to his messianic sermons.
    Jennifer had spent her childhood hiding in corners, invisible, while her brother Lindsay, two years older than she, monopolized the attention of his parents, who could not control him. She was a mysterious and well-behaved little girl with a sense of humor too sophisticated for her years. She laughed at herself with clear, contagious giggles. No one suspected that she was climbing out a window at night until she was arrested in one of the most sordid neighborhoods in San Francisco many miles from her house, an area where the police are afraid to venture at night. She was fifteen. Her parents had been divorced for several years; both were occupied in their own affairs and perhaps had not gauged the gravity of Jennifer’s problem. Willie was hard-pressed to recognize the heavily made-up girl shivering in a cell in the police station, unable to stand up or speak a word. Hours later, safe in her bed and with her mind a little clearer, Jennifer promised her father that she was going to do better and would never do anything that foolish again. He believed her. All kids stumble and fall; he too had had problems with the law when he was a boy. That had been in Los Angeles, when he was thirteen, and his offenses were stealing ice cream and smoking marijuana with the Mexican kids in the barrio. At fourteen he had realized that if he didn’t straighten up right away he would be in trouble all his life, because he had no one who could help him, so he kept his distance from gangs and made up his mind to finish school, work his way through the university, and become a lawyer.
    After Jennifer fled the hospital and the efforts of the Filipino doctor, she survived because she was very strong, despite her seeming fragility, and we heard nothing of her for a while. Then one winter day we heard a vague rumor that she was pregnant, but we rejected it as being impossible. She herself had told us she couldn’t have children, her body had suffered too much abuse. Three months later she came to Willie’s office to ask for money, something she rarely did since she preferred to make her own way—in that case she didn’t have to offer explanations. Her eyes darted around desperately, looking for something she couldn’t find; her hands were trembling but her voice was strong.
    â€œI’m pregnant,” she announced.
    â€œThat can’t be!” Willie exclaimed.
    â€œThat’s what I thought, but look . . .” She unbuttoned the man’s shirt that covered her to the knees and showed him a protuberance the size of a grapefruit.
    â€œIt will be a girl and she will be born this summer. I will call her Sabrina. I’ve always liked that name.”

Every Life a Melodrama
    I SPENT NEARLY ALL OF 1993 off to myself writing to you, Paula, crying and remembering, but I wasn’t able to avoid a long book tour through several American cities promoting The Infinite Plan , a novel inspired by Willie’s life. It had just been published in English though it had been written two years before and had already appeared in several European languages. I stole the title from Willie’s father, whose wandering religion was called the Infinite Plan. Willie had ordered the book as a gift for all his friends—by my calculations he had bought out the complete first printing. He was so proud that I had to remind him that it wasn’t his biography, it was fiction. “My life is a novel,” was his answer. Every life can be told as a novel; each of us is the protagonist of his own legend. At this moment, writing these pages, I have doubts. Did things really happen as I remember them and as I am telling them? Even with my mother’s invaluable correspondence, which preserves