Chapter 5
Cora was in the living room, lying on the sofa in her nightgown.
In the lamplight, she scribbled absentmindedly in her notebook, listening to Kate Bush on her iPhone.
Without saying a word, I got a glass of water from the kitchen and stared at my reflection in the dark screen of my phone.
I didn’t want her to pick up that anything was off.
“Where were you?”
“I had dinner with a friend.”
“Uh-huh, you had dinner with a friend or you had your friend for dinner?”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes, Cora.”
“Geez, guess that one bombed … Do you want to talk?”
I really didn’t. I changed the subject.
“What are you doing?”
I sat down next to her, and she laid her head on my lap—it was becoming a habit.
“Writing poetry,” she replied, handing me her notebook. “This time of night inspires me.”
I skimmed the pages; she had beautiful, neat handwriting, with rounded a’s and o’s. Her rhymes were still corny, leaning heavily on gerunds and vulgar subject matter.
Once, on the wall of a public restroom, I saw a poem:
IN THIS LIFE
THERE ARE FEW TRUTHS
SOMETIMES IT’S BETTER TO FUCK THAN TO GIVE A FUCK
“You don’t like my poems, do you?” she asked.
“Of course I do … Why would you think that?”
“You’ve never said anything nice.”
“Hey, you shouldn’t fish for compliments,” I replied with a wink. “But I hope people take notice of your talent and you get published one day.”
She smiled, hope welling in her eyes, and blew me a kiss.
Watching Cora there in my lap, with her soft hair grazing my thighs to Kate Bush, the idea came to me.
I remembered Umberto, the 500,000 reals he owed us, how we needed to launder the money.
It was perfect! I was so excited that I excused myself and got up from the couch so I could think better.
“We’ll publish you, Cora,” I said.
She got up too and turned off the music.
“What?”
“How many books have you written?”
“Maybe five.”
“Great! We’ll launch an ebook publisher and publish your poems!”
Cora threw her arms around me and gave me a peck on the cheek.
Then she went to wake up the whole house to tell them the news.
She gathered everyone in the living room and asked me to explain my idea.
I’d never seen her so happy, not even at the boat party.
Everybody agreed it was the perfect way to launder the money from the secret dinners.
That same week, I submitted the paperwork to create Seagull Press, a publisher specializing in ebooks.
Aside from some works in the public domain, we would only publish Cora’s poems. The idea wasn’t to actually sell ebooks, just to pretend to sell ebooks.
But Cora didn’t really care. She was so proud of herself that from then on not a single day went by when she didn’t shout from the rooftops that she was finally a published author.