The Sea Grape Tree (13 page)

Sarah nodded, hoping someone would knock on the door, anybody.

“You and Danny is friends, right?” Janet finished her business and stood up while Sarah looked away. “I know you spending plenty time painting with him, helping his
soul
to paint, even though his paintings look like baby finger paint them. But he a nice man, you don't think so?”

“Yes, he's—” Sarah said carefully.

“I hear you go somewhere with him last night and spend the night. A little bird tell me. They see you coming back with him this morning.” She nudged Sarah away from the sink and began washing her hands. “Is lie they telling me, or is true?”

The artist's heart started pounding. “We—we went up into the hills—”

“So is true?”

“Yes—but—”

“You don't have no answer for me, right?” Janet wiped her hands on a paper towel. “I going to give you some advice, Miss Englishwoman. If I was you, I wouldn't fuck with other people's man, you hear me?”

“I'm not—I know you and Danny—”

“Let me tell you something.” The woman leered up at her, the gold tooth reflecting the bathroom light. “Danny and me tight. You don't want to make no trouble for us, right? Next thing, people say, because you white, you think you can take a black man away from his woman. You don't want people to say that, right?”

“Of course not.”

“You don't want them to say you have no
respect
for black women, right?” She looked up, smiling suddenly as if they were now friends, fake friends forever. “No, I know you don't want that, you too polite. You look like a nice, well-brought-up woman, the kind of woman who wouldn't want them to say you don't respect people.”

“Of—of course, I respect you.”

Janet's voice slowed and deepened. “So, if you respect me, how come you
fuck
my man last night?”

Sarah backed up to the door. “Nothing happened, I'm telling you.”

“You think I born yesterday? Let me tell you something, Jamaican woman is the
baddest
woman in the world. Somebody should have tell you that before you come down here, because Jamaican woman is pure trouble, you hear me?”

“I can explain—”

“I don't need no
raas claat
explaining.”

Janet opened her purse and pulled out a lipstick in a silver case. “A word to the wise, that what they say on TV.” She pulled off the lipstick cover and turned the tube of lipstick, holding it upright like she was loading a handgun. “Stop fucking Danny Caines and stop fucking with me.” She leaned into the mirror and applied the lipstick with care, back and forth, back and forth. “Danny and I making plans and you not going to interfere with that, you hear me, English?”

Sarah felt behind her for the door latch. “I hear you.”

“One more thing,” Janet said, closing the lipstick and dropping it into her purse. “Don't tell
nobody
that we have a chat, you hear? Largo is a small place and I going to hear about it and next time . . .” She looked Sarah up and down with eyes as hard as boiled eggs, pushed her out of the way, and left.

Sarah latched the door and held on to the sink until she could breathe again. When she emerged, the little bartender was standing near the counter wrapping and unwrapping a dish towel around one fist.

“I saw Janet go in there with you, miss. She trouble you?”

She tried a smile. “She's a strong one, isn't she?”

“You must let me know if she do anything to you, you hear?”

“It's fine, honestly, just a little misunderstanding. Thanks for asking.”

She patted the bartender on the arm—more to steady herself than to reassure him—and started toward her table, the two empty chairs mocking her with every step.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
t was almost dinnertime and a barrage of smells of scallion and thyme and fried fish were pouring into the lane from the wooden houses, making his mouth water. Remembering that his own kitchen was cold, Shad left the verandah to start dinner. He chopped an onion and carrots, browned the onion with the cubes of stew meat Beth had left thawing in the fridge, and threw them into a pot with the carrots.

It was his first day off since Beth had started working, and he'd been alone all day. In his old undershirt and shorts, he'd weeded the vegetable garden, watched a shopping channel on the small television in the living room, and practiced the reading exercise Miss Mac had given him, practiced until his eyes were tired. At half past three, his daughters' noise had filled the house again. He'd picked up Joshua from Miss Livingston at five, as instructed, and turned him over to Joella.

While dinner was cooking, he resumed sitting on the verandah, waiting and checking his watch. It was close to six thirty by the time Beth came down the lane. The new uniform she'd sewn was wrinkled and she looked weary, almost stooped, carrying a heavy bag and Ashanti.

Shad ran down the steps and opened the garden gate. “Let me take her,” he said, reaching for the child.

“Thank you,” she moaned, handing over the girl. “Where the other children?”

“Doing homework, but I don't know how much they doing. They playing in the room with Josh and the kitten.” They went into the house and into their bedroom.

While he was rolling Ashanti onto the yellow bedspread, Beth sat down heavily on the side of the bed with a groan.

“What you cooking?” she asked, pulling off her shoes.

“Stew beef and rice,” Shad replied, leaning on the door frame with his arms crossed, “like you told me.”

“You remember to put in garlic?”

“I put in onion.”

She loosened her belt and her eyes darted up at him. “Your clothes dirty.”

“I was weeding.”

Joella and Rickia came into the room, Joella carrying the baby. Rickia touched her mother's shoulder and smoothed her hair, commenting on how she looked like
a working lady
. After she chased them back to do homework, Beth stretched out on the bed beside Ashanti, who had curled up in the plaid dress her mother had sewn for her.

“How was it?” he asked. “The job, I mean.”

“It kind of boring. The lady who was to show me everything didn't come in until lunchtime. Her son was sick. So I didn't do much at the beginning, I just walk around and introduce myself. The librarian ladies kind of funny, though, don't talk to me at all, like they think they too high to talk to me. Then I had my lunch and the woman come and show me around. I clean the floors like she told me, but they dirty, dirty, and I clean the bathrooms, six toilets, three male and three female, and start to dust the books. Then it was time to go and everybody pick up their bag, so I pick up mine and leave, too.”

“What about the school, the autism school?”

“The head lady talk nice, a white lady from New Jersey, and she have plenty experience with autism.”

“Ashanti give them any trouble, like how she have tantrums and thing?”

“They say she don't pay them no mind. She not
responsive,
the woman said. I tell them that normal, she don't do nothing we tell her to do. But they say she going to be responsive after she get used to them.” He sat at the foot of the bed and put her feet in his lap. While he pulled at her toes, she told him that the teacher at the school said they were going to teach Ashanti how to dress herself and how to go to the bathroom on her own.

“That good,” he declared. “Even if they don't teach her nothing else.”

“Now we need to register Joella at Titchfield High, too, for September.”

Looking at his woman collapsed on the bed from first-day exhaustion, it occurred to Shad that the mother of his children had the same stubborn streak that Granny had, a woman who had taken on raising her baby grandson in her sixties and never complained. Beth would travel twenty miles on bad roads to clean dirty toilets for the sake of the family.

“I know what you doing not easy,” he said, pushing his thumbs into the middle of her soles the way she liked. She closed her eyes, her eyebrows raised, and he continued, finishing the thoughts that had been forming over the course of the afternoon. “And like how you making extra money for us—I was thinking—”

“I listening.”

“I was thinking, since you start making the wedding dress and you set date and everything—we should just go ahead . . .”

She sat up on her elbows. “We talking about the same thing, right?” He nodded and she narrowed her eyes at him. “What change your mind? I know you, and you is not a person to change your mind without a fight. What happen to you now?”

“I see how hard you working for the family, so I know you not leaving me. And I know a wedding will make you feel good, make us official like. You know me, I feel good, anyway, but I know you want a wedding.” Shad looked down at his woman's tired toes. The reason for his change of heart lay unspoken like most truths. That afternoon, Rickia had asked him in the kitchen, asked him so casually that it had stunned him, why he didn't want to marry her mother, and he'd blundered through an answer. Afterward, he'd sat on the verandah thinking of his own distaste for marriage, and about the boss's parents and their unhappiness (still wondering how people living in America could be anything but happy), and it had occurred to Shad—the bolt of recognition making him stand up just thinking about it—that he, like Eric, had come from parents who hadn't had a loving partnership.

Beth, on the other hand, had come from a family with two parents who loved each other, even though her preacher father had ordered Beth out of the house when she got pregnant and she'd had to live with her sister in a rented room. Through everything, her father had loved her mother and she'd loved him back and their children had seen that.

Unlike his partner, Shad knew nothing about the man whose blood he carried in his veins. He didn't know if he was a thief or an idiot or a lady's man or anything else. All Granny had said was that he didn't have a father; she'd never explained. Asking his mother had been out of the question because he barely knew her. When she came from Kingston to visit every few months, always bearing a few sweeties for him and maybe a new shirt, she seemed more interested in gossiping with her mother than paying him attention. Before she left, she'd always plunk money down on the kitchen counter, and by the time he was fourteen he'd concluded that his mother was paying his grandmother to save herself the trouble of raising him.

He'd paced the narrow verandah that afternoon with the new understanding that the bad feeling he'd always had about marriage had come because he'd had no role models to show him anything good about it. He'd been angry with his mother and especially his father, who'd disappeared as if the baby he'd spawned was worthless. And because of that, Shad's highest goals had been to be a good father and to raise his children to be decent people. Being connected to their mother had never been important, and being tied to her in front of witnesses had been out of the question. Now he understood that everything would have to change. Not only was he moving from bartender to businessman, but his family goals would have to change as well.

Beth flopped back on the bed, raising her eyes to heaven. “Married, Jesus be praised! I never think I see the day.”

“One thing though,” her future husband warned. “Is just a small wedding we talking. We can't invite the whole village.”

“Like how much, you mean?”

“Around twenty-five people.”

“Twenty-five?” she said with derision.

“What wrong with that?”

“By the time we invite my sister and her family and your aunts and their children and our four children and Mistah Eric, we done reach twenty-five. We can't even invite Solomon and Maisie, not even Miss Mac.”

“But we can't afford—”

“I tell you what,” she said, covering her eyes with one arm, “let we decide how much money we have to spend, and I will see we don't spend more than that.” Shad stood up to check on the rice, shaking his head, knowing she'd won again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

S
imone was laughing so hard she was almost braying into the phone. “I've never heard that before, Happy
Un-
Valentine's Day! You're one of a kind, Eric Keller.”

“I just thought that since February is Valentine's Month, with all the hoopla around Valentine's Day and everything, then the twenty-ninth—when it comes—should be Un-Valentine's Day. You get to forget the whole nonsense. What do you think? Every four years you buck the trend.”

“Is that the day when you take back your roses or something?”

“They'd be dead by then,” he said, walking with the phone toward the kitchen and away from the ears of the customers. “Just thought I'd make you laugh, and it worked, apparently.”

“Are you feeling guilty for not calling on Valentine's Day?”

“Of course not,” he protested. Ever since Lambert's and Danny's reminders about Valentine's, he'd been thinking about it. Had she expected him to call? Would he now have to remember—in his case, with Post-it notes—upcoming birthdays and rituals? He'd reassured himself that, in this day and age,
she
could have called him or sent him a card, but she hadn't.

“What have you been up to?” he inquired.

“Working on getting the foundation started. It's a long legal and accounting process. I've been filling out forms.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“Either the Celeste Foundation for Young Adults or the Celeste Hall Youth Foundation. What do you think?”

“I like the second one, with her full name. Makes it sound more, I don't know, action oriented, maybe. What's the foundation going to do?”

“We're going to be working with college students who are floundering emotionally, and with parents of those kids—because it's about the parents as much as the young people. That's what I've come to realize with the therapy I've been having. The parents are as damaged as the children. I'm as much to blame as—”

“I didn't know you were going to therapy.” He pictured her lying on a couch talking to a man with a beard, pictured the therapist trying to avoid looking at her perky little nipples, although she was probably wearing bras in Atlanta now.

“It's group therapy where we meditate and then write in a journal and, afterward, we share what we've written. A nun runs it. It's been really helpful. Maybe you should try it sometime.”

“Too late for me, I'm afraid.”

He heard three beeps, perhaps from a microwave, followed by a clunk, before she spoke. “Is the investor still there?”

“Yes, he's still here. He has to be, there are a hundred things to do. We formed a company with Shad, the three of us, and opened a bank account, lots of paperwork. Oh, God, I'm sick of it already. Anyway, next up is to appear before a Parish Council committee, some environmental impact assessment thing.”

“Everything going smoothly, then?” She was stirring a drink, the spoon clinking against the cup. Eric sat down in the kitchen chair, hoping the customers didn't want another drink or would last out until Shad came for his evening shift.

“We went to see the architect a couple days ago.” She was a short, butch woman, he wanted to say, but decided to be politically correct and say nothing. “Danny has these ideas for things he wants to add on, a farm and a gardening warehouse—he calls it a shed, but it's really a warehouse—and five or six other things. I kept trying to tell him it's going to cost more than he wanted to put in, but he said they would pay off in the long run. So now the woman has to go back to the drawing board, and I know the financing is going to be out of whack—what with putting in some infrastructure on the island. I think he's going to be in shock when he sees the sticker price for everything.”

“I guess your son will have to redo the budget.” She took a sip of something close to the phone. “What's his name again? Joseph? Maybe he can come down and—”

“That's not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

The thousand miles between their phones filled with silence, not even a slurp. Struggling with how to tell her, or if he should tell her, Eric walked to the kitchen window and creaked it open. He'd hardly known his own son before he came down to Jamaica to write the business proposal that Caines wanted, and what had happened to Joseph after he arrived he'd never mentioned again. It had been hard enough dealing with it himself.

“You know how Jamaica is,” he said. “Some of the villagers thought he was gay—it was all—just speculation, you know—but one day, something happened—thank God, he escaped . . .” It wasn't true that he'd escaped. Someone had ended the madness, but saying he'd escaped gave Joseph his manhood back.

Her voice slowed. “Oh no. You should have told me about it.”

“There was nothing you could have—”

“I would have listened. That's what friends do. If you want me in your life, Eric, and it seems like you do, then we have to be there for each other. I know you don't want to go there,” she said, undaunted in her Simone way. “I don't know what happened to you in the past with women, and I'm not sure I even want to know, but you're going to have to trust me if I'm going to be your friend. And whether we go forward as nothing more than friends or continue being lovers, we're going to have to keep working at a friendship. It all starts there.”

“Why'd you want a friendship with an old geezer like me, anyway?”

“You're a good lover, what can I say?” He heard a sigh. “You're honest, down-to-earth, kind, and you don't make demands. Plus, you live in a nice place. And while you're thinking about that,” she said without a pause, “The woman is supposed to propose today, by the way, since it's February twenty-ninth. But don't worry, I won't. I couldn't handle it right now.”

“Thank you,” he answered, and they laughed quickly and loudly, pulling back from dangerous ground.