I shifted the coins in my palm. ‘You think I could get away with Sam Cooke today?’ I said.
‘Not a chance. You know him. It’s got to be a girl.’
I scanned down the list, selected Dusty in Memphis. Cora moved aside on her bench and patted the red leatherette next to her. I sat down. The upholstery, already sticky with the heat, was warm and pliant from her body. Ignacio arrived with three Cokes and a plate of cookies. He slid them onto the table, tapped the rim of the cookie plate with his fingernail. ‘That’s for Dusty,’ he said. He returned to the counter and carried on polishing glasses and cutlery, all the time smiling his approval at the neat lines of pastries layered with fruit and cream and curls of chocolate that sat chilling under the glass. Ignacio said little as a rule. Cora, in contrast, seemed to talk at a thousand words a minute. I thought, as I had many times before, how unlike Aunt Mary she was: prettier, livelier, with a deep, grating laugh. It was hard to imagine they were related. I looked down at the sketches. Benny started to slide them back in between the leaves of his book but Cora placed her hand on them.
‘They’re good,’ I said. Benny scowled at me.
‘Revolutionaries!’ Cora said gleefully. She held up a sheet to look closely at it and as she did so, from underneath it, the gloss of a photograph caught my eye. The girl under the yellow bell tree. I was surprised; it wasn’t like America or Aunt Mary to leave anything lying around. Benny reached out to tuck the photograph away again, but Cora had already spotted it. She took it from him, squinted at it; a pretence, her eyesight was sharp enough when a customer glanced at a pastry or edged towards the door without paying. ‘Girlfriend?’ she said.
‘No!’ Benny said.
‘Who then?’
‘She used to work for Mom.’ Benny’s tone was light enough but I looked hard at him then; his voice carried something new. He avoided my eye.
‘Pretty. Bet your father was always sniffing around her,’ Cora said. Then, a second later, ‘Sorry.’
Benny shrugged.
‘You know, I think I remember her. Doring or Dora or Doreen or something. She didn’t last long.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Oh, well, I have no idea. Never really spoke to the girl. Never really spoke to any of them. The pretty ones were always gone in no time.’ Benny stared fixedly at the sketches on the table.
‘Did you know Pop?’
‘Not as well as he’d have liked!’ And then again, ‘Sorry.’ Cora sighed. ‘You know how it is, baby. A snake only knows how to be a snake. In case you’re worried, you’re nothing like him. More like your mom.’
Benny’s eyes jerked up at her and then, unexpectedly, he exclaimed, ‘I wish you’d been my mom.’
Cora gave a high, crisp laugh. She sat back and studied him and after a minute reached out and stroked his cheek with her thumb. ‘Just look at you! She did a great job. Really she did.’
‘I just meant … ’ but he didn’t continue.
‘I hear your Lola’s in town,’ Cora said. From behind the counter, the sound of the grinder stopped.
‘Yeah,’ Benny said reluctantly.
‘Give the old lady my regards.’ The sound of the grinder started up again. Ignacio started humming along to Dusty, his eyebrows arched, a faint smile on his face.
‘She broke her wrist,’ Benny said.
‘Shucks,’ said Cora. Benny’s eyes flashed at her and she added remorsefully, ‘Ok, ok.’ She leaned across the table, planted both palms flat on it as if she were about to push herself up, but she stayed sitting. ‘I know just what’ll cheer you up. You want to help me paint something really big?’
‘Sure, why not,’ Benny said.
‘Come at the weekend. Your mom won’t mind.’
Ignacio brought a bag over to the table. The smell of freshly ground coffee puffed out of it as he set it down. ‘With compliments,’ he said.
I reached out and tugged gently at Benny’s sleeve to uncover his watch. He looked annoyed for an instant but then he held his arm up for me to take a look, tilting it so that the clockface was the right way up. I slid towards the edge of the booth and as I did so Cora started after me, bouncing herself softly along the upholstery. Seeing her move, Benny got slowly to his feet. He looked at me ruefully.
We walked back to the Bougainvillea together. The rhythm of walking seemed to soften his mood and he started to talk about the komik he was working on, The Black Riders. His voice had deepened recently and he’d grown so much taller than me and I noticed now too how, like his brother, he’d started to carry himself differently as his body filled out. I felt a flush of pleasure as he talked; he’d hadn’t discussed his ideas with me for a long time. He talked about the komik all the way home and it was only after he’d gone up to his room and closed the door behind him that it occurred to me that he’d left no openings in which I might have asked about the girl in the photograph.
Barefoot Midwife
Down at the jetty, the House-on-Wheels was preparing to move on but Lorna was nowhere to be found. ‘Hard to misplace someone that big,’ said Lottie irritably. They’d already stayed a couple of days longer than planned because Lorna had complained she was exhausted from moving all the time. ‘Two days,’ Lottie said to Jonah, holding up two fingers, her voice fast, shrill. ‘Two days, getting more conspicuous by the minute, the police sniffing round, helping themselves to cigarettes, letting the kids shine their shoes for free.’
‘Baby hormones,’ said Subong cheerfully and he looked at my father for a response. But my father was barely listening. He stared out at the boats and the boys shifting cargo further down the beach, trying perhaps to imagine how the place would change: the jetty standing empty, the smaller cargo boats and outriggers landing further up the coast near the passenger ferry, being unloaded by a new Jonah, a new Subong, a new Dante Santos.
‘Stupid cow,’ said Lottie. ‘She’ll get us all in trouble. We should just go. Let her walk round the whole country looking for us.’ But she stayed where she was, the sack and the pots and the bedding still unpacked and draped variously over the House-on-Wheels behind her.
Lando put his hand on the warm wood of the House. ‘She’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back.’ He edged his thumbnail slowly along the grain, towards his wife. Lottie watched his hand like she might have eyed a cockroach before swatting it.
‘If she’s not back by the evening we’ll all go looking for her,’ Jonah said. ‘What about you, eh?’ he said to me.
‘Sure,’ I said reluctantly. Even if Aunt Mary didn’t need me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my evening scouring Esperanza for the girl, pregnant or not. ‘I’ve got schoolwork,’ I said, but it wasn’t much of an excuse and I added guiltily, ‘I guess it can wait.’ It could wait, too. I’d lost interest in school lately and my grades were beginning to slide. I couldn’t seem to help it. I found myself daydreaming whatever the subject; nothing held my interest. At school, everything felt dead and flat. Yet, in the evenings when my time was my own, I read everything I could find — Aunt Mary’s art books, books about American or European history, novels by long-dead English authors in which the language curled round itself before blooming out and presenting an idea like a bud. I was consumed for days by unexpected images: an artist walking along a coast in pursuit of the ship that had sailed with his life’s work on board, succumbing to a fever before he made the next port; the architecture of an ancient people of another continent whose blood, brought here by the Spanish, flowed in our veins too. Every day brought a new thing to light and, though I couldn’t have put it into words back then, I think now that I read with the hope something would finally arrive that would illuminate everything, a single piece of knowledge that would show me how my life was meant to unfold. Back then, my life didn’t feel like my own; anyone else — my father, Aunt Mary, God — might have a better plan for how I might live it than I. And so I coasted at school, though I was sure my grades wouldn’t escape Aunt Mary’s attention for long and I’d be reminded soon enough of the importance of accurate punctuation.