Afterlife

by Julia Alvarez

Mona and Tilly gossip on the drive to Happy Valley Road. Tilly has scaled back on her catering. Mona is shifting her therapy practice to just dogs. No, no, no. Not a therapist for dogs, but a therapist using dogs with trauma victims. The kids are fine, Tilly recounts. A big contract. A new house. A hard time juggling motherhood with a full-time job. Promotions, demotions, the stock market of life. The grandkids are incredible, beautiful, bright, destined for glory, as all grandkids are. (Antonia wouldn’t dare say so, but it does seem all her friends who are grandparents and in every other way modest boast unabashedly about their extraordinary grandchildren. Who is having the unremarkable babies anymore? she’d ask Sam after a dinner party in which cell phone videos of little Sophie or Olivia or Timothy made the rounds at the table.) Their only flaw is they do not speak Spanish. What a shame. Or German, Kaspar puts in from the front seat. Monolinguals, he mutters, as if it were a vitamin deficiency that will come back later to haunt them.