Summer Snow by Rebecca Pawel

at him. She did not look angry exactly, only puzzled for a moment and then a little white and sick. “Aleja?” she whispered. “Why . . . yes. Yes, of course I remember you. You . . . you’ve grown.”
    Alejandra looked embarrassed at this supremely inane comment. Toño went over to his mother. “You know Alejandra already?” he said. “How come?”
    Elena knelt to be at eye level with her son. From this position she had to look up at Alejandra. “Aleja was my student,” she said quietly. “In Madrid, before I met Papa.”

Chapter 8
     
    “C arlos!”
    The lieutenant was just addressing his letter when Elena opened the door, calling his name. He dropped the envelope and stood rapidly, alarmed by her tone and expression. “What happened? What’s the matter?”
    “Aleja.” Elena held out her hands to him unconsciously. “Alejandra Palomino. She’s here. She’s in Toño’s room.”
    Tejada closed his eyes briefly and for a moment his clothing sat too lightly on him and he missed the familiar weight of a pistol at his waist. Once, long ago, he had used the pistol too quickly and killed someone who had been merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murder had introduced him to Elena, so he could not thoroughly regret it. But it had also made him responsible for Alejandra, then a child of seven. His conscience had forced him to make sure that Alejandra’s mother was employed and had made him pay for Alejandra’s schooling. But he had been content to provide for the girl at a distance. Seeing her brought back too many uncomfortable memories. Damn , he thought, as he took his wife’s hands between his own and squeezed them. She’s already unhappy here. And now this reminder . “I suppose Alejandra helps her mother after school,” he said aloud, trying to keep his voice steady. “I hope she’s being good to Toño.”
    “Of course she is!” Elena defended her student. “She was reading to him. She—she reads aloud very nicely.”
    “She had a good teacher,” the lieutenant murmured gently, as he embraced his wife. “She must have been glad to see you?”
    “I don’t know. I—oh, God, Carlos, I was so ashamed.”
    “Ashamed? Don’t be silly. Why?”
    “She knew I was Toño’s mother.” The stresses of the day were starting to tell on Elena. There was a catch in her voice. “So she knew that I’m your wife. I felt like such a hypocrite. Everything I taught her when she was little—. She must hate me.”
    “Nonsense.” Tejada stroked his wife’s hair, wondering exactly what she had said about the Guardia to her students during the war. “Fascists” he could accept. It didn’t really insult him, any more than she would have been insulted by being called a Socialist. Rebels, perhaps? He disliked the term because it implied that the Movement that had installed General Franco as dictator and saved Spain from the Republic had been nothing more than a band of disobedient malcontents, but that wouldn’t have been a malicious falsehood, just a half-truth. He gave up trying to imagine how the Reds might have brainwashed their young, and focused on the problem at hand. “Why should she hate someone who’s always been good to her?”
    Elena heaved a long sigh without raising her head from Tejada’s shoulder. Five years of marriage had taught her that trying to explain a classless society—much less its benefits—to her husband was like trying to describe a snowball fight in the tropics: the basic materials were outside both his experience and his imagination. There was no way to explain to him that less than a decade ago she had tried to teach Alejandra that the very wealth he had tried to use for the girl’s benefit was evil when kept in private hands. “It’s not about being good to her or not,” she managed. “It’s that she thought I was on her side then, and now . . . I’m one of the winners.”
    “You have a mania for dividing people into winners and losers.” Tejada