The Rhythm of the August Rain (2 page)

One and a half years after the storm destroyed the hotel, Eric had opened the Largo Bay Restaurant and Bar, a humble shadow of its predecessor. It wasn't a matter of choice. Having no other source of income, his retirement savings sunk into the ruined hotel, and still too young to draw Social Security, he'd finally given in to Shad's suggestion that he use the small insurance check to build a bar on the scrap of land he still owned beside the main road. The money had only been enough to construct the rough walls, concrete floor, and thatch roof that now housed the bar-cum-restaurant, Eric's compact apartment stuck onto one end.

The shabby bar was an embarrassment to the former hotelier from the opening day, leaving him in hapless despair, knowing that he had no other option. On the other hand, to Shad the bar was as sweet as it was to every thirsty tourist. His only alternative to fishing, it was his workplace and savior. In other words, the bar's owner and its bartender had been bonded by the bar and were stuck with each other like a resigned married couple.

A half hour after the call, Eric strolled in from the parking lot wiping his hands on a cloth. A lock of hair blew across his face and he thrust it away with his shoulder.

“Something is up with Shannon, I'm telling you, coming back all of a sudden like this.” He looked at Shad sharply. “Did you tell her about—?”

“I don't tell her nothing, boss. I don't like
cass-cass
and gossip, you know that.”

“It's a crazy coincidence, then.”

“Maybe she just need a rest.”

“She's working, doing an article for a magazine.”

“She can write something about the new hotel we going to build, then.”

Eric took a ginger ale from the fridge. “Nah, it's an article about Rastafarians.”

“Pshaw, man, Rastas is old news. How she can write about Rastas and a nice hotel going up?”

“She doesn't even know about the hotel. It wouldn't matter to her, anyway.”

If Eric thought that Shannon wouldn't care about the New Largo Bay Inn, as the villagers had already christened it, everyone in Largo did. It was the talk of the sixty families living from one night's catch to another. Eric and Shad were to go into the hotel business again, but with a
bigger
hotel this time, they were saying, thanks to a rich businessman named Danny Caines.

The villagers had all seen the investor from New York when he came down earlier that year. A few had even met Caines as he made the rounds in his rented car. The strapping African American had turned out to be in his midforties, younger than everyone had expected. He was a friendly type, although his relationship with a local seamstress had been a little too friendly for some. For a while during his visit, the hotel project had been in danger of dying because of the torrid affair, but in the end, despite his misgivings about cost overruns, despite the dressmaker's wrath when he thwarted her plans to marry him, Caines had decided to build the hotel after all. Even the Mafia didn't stop people from visiting Italy, he'd said with his deep laugh, and one crazy woman wasn't going to stop him.

Shad shook his head, grinning. “Shannon coming back—plenty action in July.”

“That's exactly what we need,” Eric said, taking a sip from the bottle and coughing.

Shad slapped him on the back. “We buying Miss Mac's land next door—”

“You're getting married—”

“—and two of your women coming down at the same time. Action, camera!” Shad couldn't help but clap his hands over his head and send out the high-pitched wail that always signaled his delight as he spun around on one heel.

“At least you don't have another woman waiting in the wings,” Eric commented as he poured the ginger ale into a glass.

“Now
that
is
cass-cass
.” Shad steadied himself against the counter. “They say black man like confusion, but you can match any black man, boss. You make me laugh, no joke. I hope Simone can laugh at it, too.”

Simone was a woman who'd briefly lived in the ruins of the old hotel the year before. An American whose family had migrated from Jamaica when she was a small child, she'd come back seeking a place to heal, had exiled herself from her own life and camped out on the little island for two months. The boss had fallen for the mysterious woman with doelike eyes, and he'd grieved for weeks after she left Largo, but he'd stayed in touch with her and they'd planned for her return in July. And now she'd be met by Shannon, Eric's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his daughter. It sounded like one of the soap operas Shad watched on his day off, and he couldn't wait to tell Beth that
The Young and the Restless
had nothing over Largo.

The little bartender shook his head, tut-tutting. “Boss, you have too much woman in your life. You should settle down like me.”

Eric sat at his do-everything table near the bar where he ate, read, and entertained his guests. “You mean after I've had a flock of children like you? No, thank you.”

“Just one thing I want to ask you,” Shad said, suddenly serious as he scrubbed the dust cloth clean. “With all the excitement coming up, don't get sick or nothing, I begging you. We can't afford for anything to happen to you, like how Danny Caines have no hotel experience and you the only one can manage the hotel.”

Eric threw one leg over a chair. “What d'you mean
the only one
? I wouldn't take on this deal if you weren't going to be a partner, buddy.” Which was the boss's way of saying that he didn't really want to build a hotel again but, indebted as he was, he had to, and Shad was to be his trump card.

In exchange for being the needed local partner, the younger man had agreed to do the real work, from running around during the construction to managing the hotel later. But that's what partners were for, Shad was convinced, especially scrape-bottom men such as him who didn't have any money or land to invest in a deal, who had few legal opportunities to get ahead. And if two American men needed an on-spot Jamaican partner for their hotel, if they wanted a young, hardworking man with a willing heart, he would be more than happy to oblige.

With five mouths to feed, Shad had not only accepted the upcoming challenge of becoming a partner but longed for it. His ambition had been nurtured from childhood when Granny had predicted that, because of his dark-dark complexion and high forehead, he would be a
busha
one day, as big as the white overseers in slavery days. Granny might be dead, but her words continued to ring in her grandson's head, and he carried with him everywhere a small plastic bag with a tablespoon of dirt from the top of her grave, his good-luck charm, to make sure her prediction came true. The new hotel was his one shot, he'd remind himself every night after he'd crept into bed beside Beth, his one chance to be somebody, even if his partners ran him into the ground while he did it.

After hanging the dust cloth over the edge of the sink, Shad looked at Eric. “Boss, where Shannon going to stay in Largo?”

“She asked me to book her into Miss Mac's.”

“You forget Miss Mac not going to have the boardinghouse no more? We buying the land and tearing down the house to build the hotel.”

“Shit, you're right.” Eric hit his forehead, white hair jerking forward. “And the closing is Friday the thirteenth. How could I forget?” He rolled his eyes up to the thatch as he tossed down the last of his drink. “There'll be no boardinghouse after that.”

Shad squeezed his lips together in irritation. Known as Largo's
sniffer and snuffer
(a title bestowed by his former teacher and mentor, the said Miss Mac), the bartender knew that sometimes the boss needed help with his own sniffing and snuffing. His mind went to sleep at least half the day. “And remember, boss, Simone going to be staying in your apartment, so Shannon can't stay with you.”

“I'll call her tomorrow.” Eric stood up. “Maybe she'll have to stay in another town. I have to take the car to Port Maria now before the garage closes. I think it's the carburetor.”

The next evening, after the first of the regulars had settled into their arguments, Shad watched Eric maneuver past him to take the phone into his apartment. When he emerged later, the boss's ruddy face was a shade paler and his eyes even more glazed than the day before.

“You told Shannon about Miss Mac?” Shad asked, opening a soft drink for him. Eric took the bottle and nodded. “What she say?”

“The Delgados—she'll stay with the Delgados.”

“That make sense, like how Shannon and Jennifer used to be good friends before. . . .”

Shad chewed his top lip as he poured ice into a Styrofoam bucket and placed it in the fridge. Eric was staring at, not seeing, the dangling bottle opener.

“Boss, you okay? You look like a
duppy
frighten you,” Shad said, trying a little levity. Eric always laughed at the mention of ghosts.

The bar owner took a gulp of his drink. “She—she's bringing Eve.”

“That good news, man! Like how your son come down last year and see Jamaica, is time for the daughter now. But why she didn't tell you before that she was bringing Eve?”

Eric made his way to a stool, patting the counter like a man who was blind. “She just decided, she said.”

A call from the end of the bar turned Shad's attention to his customers and a fresh bottle of white rum. As he topped them up, Eli, Solomon, and Tri sucked him into a debate about the current prime minister, the first female leader in the island's history.

“Don't tell me,” Tri insisted, thumping the counter, “that a woman can run a country as good as a man, don't tell me that.” Thin and sinewy,
mauger
to the locals, the aging Triumphant Arch never backed down from any political argument, the louder the better. “What you think, Shad?”

“Give the woman a chance,” Eli said in his slow, rambling way. “Is only her first term and—”

“No woman should lead a country,” Solomon put in. The former chef of the hotel, reduced to the bar's part-time cook, wore his usual grumpy face. “The Bible say that woman should walk behind man.”

“You show me,” Eli challenged him, “where in the Bible it say that, and I going to show you a man who write it.”

“All I know,” Shad said, “is that every woman I ever meet can think smarter and faster than a man. You forget I going to get married next month because Beth outthink me?”

When the bartender got back to his stool, Eric had left the counter, his soft drink abandoned. He'd be sitting on his verandah looking across at the island in the pale moonlight, listening to one of the Cuban radio stations as he always did at night. He never liked to sit in the bar unless he had friends over, and tonight wouldn't have been a good night, anyway, not with the way he'd looked after this second phone call.

Throwing the bottle into the garbage can, Shad mulled Eric's reaction to Shannon's news. He could understand the boss being upset yesterday about his ex-girlfriend's coming to Largo—just when Simone was visiting—but tonight he'd acted differently, completely differently, to the news that Eve was arriving, his own child. This time he was holding back, keeping his face blank, no joy, nothing in his eyes.

To Shad, a man for whom family meant everything, there would have been no better news than hearing that one of his children was coming to visit. Not that Eric had been the same kind of parent. Everyone knew he hadn't been much of a father, his two children brought up by two mothers far away in Washington, DC, and Toronto, but he was a good man down deep, and he didn't bear malice toward anybody, least of all his own children. Why then this reaction to the news that his daughter was coming? And what was the real reason Shannon was coming down after all this time?

Shad reached for a rag to wipe down the counter, knowing that the Canadian woman had won the first round. She'd thought faster and smarter than the boss.

J
ennifer Delgado was having a
soiree
, as she liked to call her Friday-afternoon gatherings. The housekeeper, Miss Bertha, would have set out the trays of cocktail patties and miniature hot dogs with olives, Jennifer's husband, Lambert, would have handed around the first glasses of wine and scotch, and the party would be well under way, the buzz of conversation loud enough to be heard by someone—in this case, a slightly out-of-breath Eric—ascending the driveway. A clutch of guests seated on the verandah of the plantation-style home were admiring the twilight colors as he approached.

“I love the view from this porch,” a stylish man in a Panama hat commented. “You can see all the way to Manchioneal Bay, can't you?”

“It looks like an artist's palette,” a woman was saying in a shrill voice.

“And the red flowers of the poinciana tree go with it,” another woman piped up.

After mounting the steps to the verandah, aware that his sweaty armpits were leaving rings on his shirt, Eric nodded to the group and paused to take a few breaths. If Jennifer caught him panting, she'd lecture him again about joining her gym in Port Antonio. But the climb from his bar across the road and up the driveway to the Delgados' house seemed to get longer and steeper every time he undertook it. He was aware that life and age were creeping up on him, that his knees ached when he got up in the morning and the lines on his face increased by the month, but certain markers he didn't need, such as this driveway.

On his way through the double doors into the living room, Eric greeted a couple he recognized from Port Antonio (the Plumbers? he asked himself). Inside, several more people lounged on the cushy sofas and chairs, among them Roper and Sonja, an artist and his writer girlfriend, who lived on the eastern end of the bay.

Eric shook Roper's hand, kissed Sonja's plump cheek, and asked, “Have you seen Lambert?”