The New Moon's Arms (30 page)

“Now you ready to go.” I took all the breakable dishes out of the sink and lifted him up onto the counter so he could sit with his feet in the sink. “Here.” I gave him the soap and a cloth. With a serious look, he turned on the tap, dabbled his feet in the water, and set about washing the dishes. He loved doing it. He’d make some woman a wonderful husband.

Not like certain men, playing Mr. Sensitive but all the time having it both ways.

I peeled and grated raw Irish potato into a small pot for porridge for Agway’s breakfast. I tossed in a cinnamon stick, filled the pot with water and put it to boil.

Stringing people along until they make fools of themselves.

I put two eggs on to boil for me, and started frying up bacon for me and Agway. It was the one kind of meat he would tolerate cooked.

Getting vexed at people when they go off on you. I turned the bacon over and over in the pan, trying to scrub the image out of my mind of me sweet-talking Hector when all the while…but it kept popping up to shame me.

Foul-smelling smoke was rising from the frying pan. I was turning burnt bacon with my spatula. “Shit!” I twisted the heat dial to off. It came away in my hand. I screamed and threw it out the open window. “He can just go and take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut!” I sobbed.

“Flying fuck,” repeated Agway with perfect diction as he poured water from a bowl over his lower legs. He even got the L right. He’d been having trouble with the letter L.

“Oh, great. Just don’t say that in front of Evelyn tonight, all right?”

Screw the bacon. I boiled another egg. I could persuade Agway to eat an egg if I mashed it and put enough butter in it. I puréed the porridge in the blender, added milk and a dab of butter. Threw my eggs onto a plate with a mound of salt and black pepper beside them, and buttered couple-three slices of harddough bread for the two of us.

I was scraping his mashed egg into his bowl when I heard a rustle behind me. Agway had climbed down off the counter. Even with the cast, the damned boy was agile as a mongoose. He had fished the eggshells out of the garbage and was holding them wadded in his fist, except for the one he was chewing.

“Agway! Bad!” I flicked the broken eggshell out of his mouth. “You mustn’t do that! You understand me? No playing in the garbage!”

He already knew when I was telling him he had done wrong, but I could see that the poor soul couldn’t understand what I was scolding him for. I sighed. “I can’t wait for you to learn more than seven words of English.” I washed his mouth out and found a way to close the garbage can that he couldn’t figure out; not yet, anyway. I sat him at the table and persuaded him to eat his egg, spoonful by spoonful, out of the
spoon
, not with his hands. That battle came to a draw.

What did Hector looked like when he…> I got a mental flash of Hector and another man (who looked a bit like Michael) touching, hugging, their lips meeting. I shut the image down quickly. It mocked me. It looked too much like my secret, voyeur fantasies.

I needed some distraction from this black mood. I took us out into the living room and put on an old DVD:
A Shark’s Tale.
As each movie finished, I fed another one into the player:
Sukey and the Mermaid, Lilo & Stitch VII, In the Time of the Drums.

Eventually I got up and began tucking books away. I cleaned up a bit. Place needed to look good for Evelyn’s visit this evening.

While Agway was preoccupied with a movie and his toys, I set up a card table on the porch with one of the stacks of Dadda’s papers on it. He had more documents stashed everywhere in the house. Sorting his life was going to be a job and a half.

Then I hauled Agway out to the front yard and showed him how to use the tricycle. He got the trick of it, and pretty soon he was zooming around the yard, hunting down the tiny green lizards and yelling as he did. I just prayed he wouldn’t actually catch any of the lizards; with his love of raw food, I didn’t want to see what he would do with it. I flipped through Dadda’s papers. Old water bill receipts: toss. Credit card information: keep, so I could cancel them.

“Child, come away from my tomato plants!” Blasted boy hadn’t learned yet that the green ones gave him a bellyache. His nappy needed changing, too. I plucked him off the tricycle he’d just deliberately crashed into my tomato plants. I took him up onto the porch and stood him on his feet in front of me. He had a saggy diaper, dirt on his hands and knees, more smeared across his face, and little tomato seeds drying around his mouth. “What I going to do with you, enh?”

He tried to go back down the porch stairs. “Wait, hang on!” I grabbed him up by his middle and took him, kicking, into the bathroom.

Using the toilet as a bench, I sat with him in my lap, stripped off his diaper and wiped him clean. He was beginning to get the hang of toilet-training. He didn’t like having a dirty nappy.

I tossed the soiled toilet paper into the bowl. “You want to flush?” I asked him.

He grabbed the handle on the toilet and yanked on it with all his weight. Then he leaned over the bowl to watch the magic. He was fascinated by the toilet, where you could make water run on command. Twice now I’d caught him trying to climb into the bowl. When he wasn’t doing that, he was flushing it, over and over.

Good thing I’d been too lazy to take the cast protector off. One less step to do. I changed into my bath suit, grabbed two towels, and ran after Agway, who had scampered out of the bathroom,
clonk-slap
on his one bare foot and the one with the cast on. I caught up with him in the living room. “Tuck!” he protested as I took him back out to the yard.

“You can play with your truck later. I have something else for you right now.” I set the sprinkler on Dadda’s miserable excuse for a lawn, and made sure I could see it from the porch. I turned it on to “oscillate.” Agway’s eyes got round as the moon when he saw the water come out. Soon he was dashing back and forth through the water, naked as any egg, screeching with glee. He used his all-fours wolf lope. That leg must be healing, if he could do that. I played catch with him in the sprinkler for a while, then I left him sitting under the sprinkler shower, trying to pull up lawn grass by its roots. I was exhausted. Not even lunch time, and a whole day ahead of me of Agway being rambunctious. I returned to the porch, dried off, and kept going through Dadda’s things.

Mortgage papers for the house on Blessée: keep, for nostalgia’s sake; the insurance money done spend long time ago. Card Chastity had given Dadda for his thirtieth birthday: toss; and stop sniffling. Then a legal-size document. The paper had aged to yellow.

I leafed through the dog-eared sheets. There was a section that described a business plan. Apparently, Dadda had wanted to grow cashews and sell and distribute cashew products. Train local workers, expand the production to other islands. Big ideas. Clearly didn’t go nowhere, though.

I turned to the final page. Lender’s line signed on behalf of the FFWD by Messrs. Gray and Gray. The borrowers’ line was signed by Dadda and someone else. I peered at the signature. To rass. Mr. Kite! So they had known each other from before, then. Maybe that’s why he’d been so ready to take Dadda in? Best I call Gene and tell him, nuh true? Could be important.

Chuh. I wasn’t fooling myself. I just wanted an excuse to call him. I reached for my phone and dialled his cell.

He answered the phone with a gruff “Yeah?”

My heart gave a little leap when I heard his voice. “It’s Calamity. I’m not interrupting anything?” I asked, straining to figure out what the noises in the background were.

“Hold on; too much static.” After a few seconds, I heard generic street noises. “Okay,” he said. “I’m outside. Who’s this?”

“Calamity.”

“Wow.
You
calling
me
. Usually I have to do the calling.”

I flushed. “I just found something.”

“What?”

“Dadda and Mr. Kite knew each other from before I was born. I just found papers for a loan they took out to start cashew farming and processing in Cayaba.”

“Awoah.”

“I thought they only met when he rescued Dadda from the docks here right after the hurricane. I wonder what happened to the business?”

“Businesses fail.”

“I’m going through all Dadda’s papers now. Maybe I’ll find something that will tell me.”

“Maybe.” He sounded preoccupied.

“You busy? I can call another time.”

“Nah, man, no need for that! Okay. You have my full attention now.”

But he still didn’t volunteer any information. I recognised what he was doing; had done it myself sometimes. Keep somebody at a distance by telling them as little about yourself as you could get away with. Paper over it by being friendly, but play your cards close to your chest. “Gene, what you and I really doing any at all?”

“How you mean?”

“We seeing each other? We not seeing each other? We friends, we booty-calling, what?”

His laugh was relaxed and open. “That’s all? Well, tell me what you want us to be doing here.”

“And you will go along with whatever I want, is that it?”

“No, you not getting off that easy. Because after you tell me what you want, you have to ask me what I want.”

“You strike a hard bargain, Mr. Meeks.”

“You gotta play to play.”

“Okay,” I replied. I was all nerves. Suppose I was misreading him same way I’d misread Hector? “I not sure what I want,” I told him. “I been thinking maybe I should keep things simple for a while. We were supposed to be doing anonymous funeral sex, remember?”

“That? We did that already. I crossed it off my list long time. You still keeping it on yours?”

I laughed. “Maybe. It had a certain appeal.”

“You can’t be anonymous twice in a row, you know.”

“Not with the same person, anyway.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just like to tease. Truth is, I not sure I have any business dating anybody right now. The heart kind of tender, you know?” I pushed Hector out of my mind.

“Good,” he said, and my spirits sank down even deeper into the crab barrel. “Because I learned long ago not to get involved with anybody who in a big life transition. You have grieving to do, and your life to start over.”

Relief made me giggly. “And a new child to look after. Don’t forget that.”

“You can handle that one,” he said. “I have every confidence.”

“And once I’m done…transitioning, then what?”

“Then we’ll have to see, nuh true? You going to be a whole different person. Maybe you won’t find me interesting any more.”

“And we can still keep company till then?”

“If you want to.”

“I want to.” I was smiling so broadly it was hard to talk.

“Tell me,” he said, “why you call me about Mr. Lambkin and Mr. Kite? I thought you didn’t want any poking around in your parents’ past?”

“It’s your fault, you know. You got me interested, and now it look like I can’t leave it alone.”

“You free Monday night?”

My heart made a little leap. “Pretty sure, yes. Why?”

“Maybe I could come and see you?”

“Yeah, man.” I smiled. The day was looking bright all of a sudden.

Mr. Lessing was coming down my gravel road with a kicking and wailing Agway under one arm, and carrying the tricycle in the other hand. Shit. When the backside the boy had left the yard? “I have to go,” I told Gene. I hung up the phone and went to greet Mr. Lessing. He put Agway and the tricycle down. Agway ran into my arms, complaining. I picked him up. He grabbed my ear.

“I find him down by the Corrolyons’,” said Mr. Lessing, “pedalling that tricycle like jumbie was on his tail.”

“All the way over there?” The Corrolyons lived about half a mile away.

“You going to have to watch him, you know? That’s the sea road he was on.”

“I
was
watching him.”

Mr. Lessing only nodded. I gave him a grudging thank you and took Agway inside. I locked the front door and the back. Suppose a car had hit him? Suppose he’d reached the water? My heart sank as quickly as Agway would if he fell into the sea with a cast dragging him down. “Poor baby,” I said to him. “Your home is here now. And I going to do my best to make it a good place for you to live.”

I would have to put a fence around the yard, with a strong lock on the gate.

E
VELYN SHOWED UP
right on time that evening. She was wearing a cotton skirt in beige, A-line, with a tasteful lace trim at its hem. A matching t-shirt. A crocheted cotton shawl, cream colour, as were the espadrilles on her feet. She’d pulled her greying black hair back into a loose bun, let some tendrils of it escape artfully to frame her face. Damned woman was as bad as Orso; always made me feel like I had yampie in my eye corners and stains on the knees of my jeans. “Come in, nuh?”

She slipped off the espadrilles, left them on the mat outside the door. I showed her into the kitchen. “I running late,” I told her. “Still haven’t shelled the peas.”

“Don’t worry. I not in a hurry.” We were still bashful and awkward with each other. Probably would be for a while.

Then she spied Agway. She tossed her wrap onto a chair and squatted down under the table beside him.

“Hello, precious,” she said. “You remember me?”

Agway handed her one of the plastic mugs he was playing with.

“Thank you, my darling. What you want me to do with this?”

And for the next five minutes, the two of them built towers of plastic mugs, laughing when they collapsed. When she clambered out from under the table, her skirt was wrinkled and most of her hair had come loose from its bun. She was still chuckling. “Well, he looks happy,” she said. She gathered her hair, knotted it, stuck the clip back through it.

“Yeah, man. He’s doing good here.”

“Seem he’s in good hands. You got me convinced, anyway.”

I let out a relieved breath. “Then I rest my case.”

She smiled. “Same thing you used to say back in school.”

“True that.” She had laughter lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. So strange to be seeing Evelyn’s face, but on a middle-aged woman.

“And you were such a tomboy,” she said.