Page 103 - A Little Life: A Novel

else, someone he had known once but had never had to talk to again—she
read it through once, impassive, before nodding at him. “Good,” she said
briskly, and refolded it and placed it back in its envelope. “Good job,” she

added, and then, suddenly, she began to cry, almost ferociously, unable to
stop herself. She was saying something to him, but she was weeping so hard
he couldn’t understand her, and she had finally left, though she had called
him later that night to apologize.
“I’m sorry, Jude,” she said. “That was really unprofessional of me. I just
read what you wrote and I just—” She was silent for a period, and then took
a breath. “It won’t happen again.”

It was also Ana who, after the doctors determined he wouldn’t be strong
enough to go to school, found him a tutor so he could finish high school,
and it was she who made him discuss college. “You’re really smart, did you
know that?” she asked him. “You could go anywhere, really. I talked to
some of your teachers in Montana, and they think so as well. Have you
thought about it? You have? Where would you want to go?” And when he

told her, preparing himself for her to laugh, she instead only nodded: “I
don’t see why not.”
“But,” he began, “do you think they’d take someone like me?”
Once again, she didn’t laugh. “It’s true, you haven’t had the most—
traditional—of educations”—she smiled at him—“but your tests are terrific,
and although you probably don’t think so, I promise you know more than
most, if not all, kids your age.” She sighed. “You may have something to

thank Brother Luke for after all.” She studied his face. “So I don’t see why
not.”
She helped him with everything: she wrote one of his recommendations,
she let him use her computer to type up his essay (he didn’t write about the
past year; he wrote about Montana, and how he’d learned there to forage for
mustard shoots and mushrooms), she even paid for his application fee.

When he was accepted—with a full scholarship, as Ana had predicted—
he told her it was all because of her.
“Bullshit,” she said. She was so sick by that point that she could only
whisper it. “You did it yourself.” Later he would scan through the previous
months and see, as if spotlit, the signs of her illness, and how, in his
stupidity and self-absorption, he had missed one after the next: her weight
loss, her yellowing eyes, her fatigue, all of which he had attributed to—

what? “You shouldn’t smoke,” he’d said to her just two months earlier,