She still remembered every detail of that night when she’d been on the hotel’s verandah looking at the stars, when Eric had introduced himself and they’d talked for two hours, the electricity between them making the night air hum around her ears. But, no, Tom she’d trusted and had been willing to build on that. When she sang her song about getting married, it had ended yet again, and for the last year she’d been content being alone.
Earlier that day, Shannon had decided that it was time to speak her mind to Eric. She was older, more mature, and certainly able to tell him, calmly, that she knew his secret, and she would make light of how she and Simone might bump into each other. But the old Jeep wasn’t in the parking lot when she crossed the road, and she let the pasted-on smile relax. When she rounded the hedge, however, there he was, seated behind the bar across from three customers, making her breath catch in her throat.
“Hey,” he sang out when she stepped onto the concrete floor, “long time no see.” She knew it was only a greeting to impress the tourists, who swung their heads around to see whom he was talking to.
Shannon took off her sunglasses. “Hi, is Shad around?”
“No, he’s off to Ocho Rios to buy decorations for his party.”
“I didn’t know he was having a party,” she said, aware that the newcomers were taking note of her clothes, her accent.
“It’s on Saturday night,” Eric said, addressing the young couple and elderly woman across from him. “If you’re still in the area, you should check it out.”
The man fished in his shorts for his wallet. “We’re on our way to Ocho Rios ourselves.” He placed a credit card on the counter. “Y’all have fun, though.”
After they left, Eric offered her a drink and she asked for a Guinness. “That’s right, you always liked it.”
Because it makes me feel bold, she wanted to say.
He placed the dark beer on a coaster in front of her. “Is Eve coming over?”
“She’s gone rafting with Jennifer and the kids.”
“Has she shown you her latest trick?” He sat down on Shad’s stool, smiling broadly as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
“What trick?” She took a sip.
“Sucking her teeth. Shad taught her the last time she was here.” Eric laughed, slapping his thigh. “You should have seen her, trying to pull the air in between her teeth and moving her mouth all over the place.”
“Yes, she came back and showed us.”
“She’s enjoying herself, don’t you think?”
“I hope so. I had to drag her here kicking and screaming.”
“It’s a different story now, though, learning the drums and everything. She’s even been trying to speak patois. You should hear her mimicking Shad and Maisie.” Eric was tickled, she could tell, as if he’d created a new life for Eve.
“Heard the patois, too.”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the—you know—the thing about her taking the cigarettes. I don’t want to say anything to her about it.”
“There’s nothing more to say to her. She was caught by the shop owner. He threatened to call the police, but he called me instead and decided not to report it to the police, thank God. The counselor said we shouldn’t talk about it with her yet.”
“Has she told you why—what made her do it?”
“Nope, tight-lipped girl.” She took another swig of courage. “Like her father.”
Eric pulled his hair back, a pucker between his brows. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t know who you’re calling tight-lipped.” He stood up and straightened his shirt. “It’s not like you’ve come clean about this detective work I’m hearing about.”
Her head jerked back. “What detective work?”
“I hear that you’re not only doing this magazine stuff, but you’ve been looking for some—for some woman who went missing.”
The zing she felt this time made heat pour through her face. “She’s not missing. She’s dead.”
“Dead? That’s even worse. Why don’t they hire a detective?”
“The—it’s not a big deal. She had a relationship with a Rastafarian man and I’m just asking a few questions as I move around for the article.”
“And you’re going to some compound for some ceremony thing, I hear.”
“I’m just going to take a few photographs, ask a few questions.”
“You have any idea how dangerous it is, going to a Rasta compound asking questions?”
“You talk about Rastafarians as if—as if they’re aliens or something.”
“You know exactly what I mean; you said the same thing to Eve yourself. They’re different from you and me, and some of them don’t like white people.”
“I haven’t had any trouble—”
“I’ve lived here a long time and—”
“I can take care of myself, thank you, Eric!” she said, trying and failing to lower her voice. “I’ve been doing very well so far. What do you think I’m doing every day? I’ve been flying all over the world to make a living, so I can raise our daughter.” The words were flying out of her mouth, emboldened by the lonely years.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you.” He looked around the empty bar. “There’ve been incidents where . . . You don’t want to end up like—like the woman you’re looking for.”
“It’s part of my job, Eric. What you want me to do, tell my boss that I won’t take the assignment? How can I do that? I need the money for Eve to go to college—”
“And if you’re going to take care of Eve, you need to keep safe. That’s my point.”
“You don’t trust me, is that your point?”
“Of course I trust you.”
“Thank you very much.” She hoped he read the sarcasm in her eyes.
“You’re trying to make me feel guilty, aren’t you?”
“You should feel frigging guilty.”
“Oh, right.” He slapped the fridge. “Here it comes.”
“It makes sense, don’t you think? All of a sudden, you’re Mr. Concerned, worried about my welfare. Did you worry about me when I was trekking across the outback of Australia or—or in the bazaar in Morocco? Did you even know where I was most of the time? I’ve been managing with no help from you, thank you very much. Not so much as a card on my birthday, not even at Christmas. Two calls a year and you’re worried about me? Give me a break, Eric!”
He opened the fridge door. “I’m thinking about Eve, too, if anything—”
“Eve?” she shrieked at his back. “When have you ever cared what happens to her? Thirteen years and you’ve seen your daughter three times, three fucking times in her entire life!”
“I couldn’t—”
“Did you even remember it’s her birthday next week?”
“Of course I did.” He turned around, his cheeks shiny.
“She’s going to be thirteen, Eric, in case you forgot. Thirteen years and you’ve never even invited her to your home. You’re her father, or did you forget? Don’t you think she’d want to know who you are? I had to bring her down for her to see you!”
He spread his arms. “Don’t you see how I live? I don’t have a hotel anymore.”
“That’s no excuse and you know it.”
“But I send you the money—”
“I give you that, but it’s your presence that’s important, Eric. Joseph said the same thing when he called the first time. Both of your children don’t even know you.”
“Is that what this is all about? You walk in here looking like a dark cloud, and now you’re throwing this at me, just like how Joseph threw all that—that negative stuff at me when he was here.”
“What did you expect? That we’d appear, all sweetness and light, and nothing would come up about—”
“Where was she going to stay? I only have one bedroom, for chrissake!”
“If you’d wanted to see her, you’d have found somewhere, Jennifer’s
or somewhere. But the truth is—”
“The truth is that I didn’t have the money to send for her or come visit—if you even want to know the truth.”
“But you could at least have called—”
The roar of a machine flung itself between them. They looked toward the noise and the sudden peace it brought. “The bulldozer next door,” he shouted, gesturing.
She nodded and yelled back, “We can hear it from the house.” Each word was tight and clear, her heart still racing. She wasn’t done with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
How it look?” Shad said. He stroked the black satin lapels and the salesman winced.
Maisie adjusted the brim of her straw hat for a better view. “You looking sweet, man.”
Snatching up some plastic flowers from a vase, Shad thrust them into the hand of the salesman and pretended to walk him down the aisle, dum-dumming all the way to the store’s front door.
“I hope Beth look happier than him.” Maisie giggled.
“One day,” Shad said, feeling it, knowing it, “I going to own my own tuxedo. I not going to just rent it. I going to wear it to the hotel’s New Year’s Eve parties, the way Mistah Eric used to.”
“You can take it off now,” the salesman snapped.
“How much it cost if I take it for three days?”
“Ninety thousand for the weekend.” The man eased Shad’s arms out of the jacket.
“I don’t want to buy it, you know, star. Is only borrow I going to borrow it.”
“Ninety, and if you dirty it up, is more for cleaning.”
Shad shrugged out of the jacket and paid in cash (insisting on a discount and getting none). He’d pick it up the coming Friday, he told the attendant.
When he and Maisie were in the Jeep again, heading out of the Ocho Rios back street, he sighed deeply. “Miss Maisie, so much good things happening to me that I getting scared.”
“You mean, the wedding?”
“No, man, I talking about the hotel.”
“What you mean? The wedding is a big thing! Everybody in Largo waiting for it.”
“The wedding big, yes, but nothing going to change after that—except that Beth’s money jar going to be empty.” He honked at two taxis stopped in the middle of the road, the drivers chatting. “Is the hotel that keeping me awake at night, man. The more I hear the tractor next door and the more I see the land being cleared, the more I worrying. It make me realize that the new hotel coming for true. All the talk over the last year, and suddenly it happening.”
“You work hard for it, all these years working in the hotel, then in the bar. You deserve it.”
“You know how my life going to change? No more quiet life—pure aggravation after that.”
“But is Mistah Eric going to run it.”
“Mistah Eric!” Shad snorted. “The only running he doing is running out of steam. Is me going to be steam and engine and engineer.”
“You wait. Once it open—”
“You don’t see what I saying? It different now. I is a partner, I responsible this time.”
“But wait.” Maisie pulled her chin back into her neck. “Is not you responsible for seven years now? Is not you who tell Mistah Eric to build the bar when the hotel gone? Is not you stocking inventory and keeping ledger and holding welcome party for the investor man? Is not you organizing party in the bar?”
“Pshaw, man, that easy. Hotel business is different. I going to have to go to conferences at the Tourist Board, and I not no big-shot man with education and passport. You ever hear of a poor man like me becoming a hotel manager?”
The old lady stared at him, her moon face beautiful in its righteousness. “All you have to do is remember what Jesus say: ‘In the world you have tribulation, but take courage.’ You is a good man, Shad, and you like to help people. Everybody going to help you, don’t worry. Why you think Solomon and him friends come leaning up on your counter every night? Why people coming to your parties? Is because they like you, they respect you.”
“They might respect me, but they can’t help me with a big business like that. You talking twenty bedrooms, lobby with receptionists, dining room, swimming pool, beach, two bars—and you have to keep forty, fifty guests happy all the time. When they not sleeping, they want good food and hot sun. Nights, they want entertainment. They want to know Jamaica, the Jamaica they see on them advertisements on TV.”
“You will find things for them to do, man. You always full of ideas.”
Shad drove on, his mind working faster than his foot as he braked around the back streets’ tight corners. “And all the workers them, working in housekeeping and bar and kitchen and garden, how I going to manage them?”
“You don’t manage Solomon and me now?”
“Yes, but is fifty-plus workers we talking about hiring.”
“What you don’t know, you will learn.”
Shad bumped into the parking lot of a strip mall. “Is not that shop we going to? The Party Shoppe, so is called, right?”
Maisie nodded with conviction. “Yes, but I telling you, if Jesus on your side, nothing can go wrong.”
“Suppose He not on my side?” Shad chuckled. “Maybe He don’t like the tourist business, like how Jamaica is a different place from what the TV selling. They telling people abroad how is one love, one heart, and they come and find people harassing them to buy ganja and braid them hair. Jesus don’t like no lying business, and I not the best candidate for Jesus, anyway, like how I was a thief.”
“That was in your youth, man. You done save and baptize now. You go to church every Sunday, even help Pastor fix up the church, give it a fresh coat of paint and everything. Nobody asking you to be perfect, just to do your best.”
Shad thought of the Buffoon flapping his wings. “Maybe you right, even the minister not perfect.”
After they’d finished shopping (she for blue decorations for Beth’s shower, he for silver balloons for his party), Shad headed east back to Largo. A few miles before the turning to Gordon Gap, Maisie put her hand on Shad’s arm.
“You mind if we stop by my cousin’s house just five minutes? She kind of sickly and I don’t see her for a long time.”
“No problem, man. Where she live?”
“Up here so, not far from the main.”
Shad turned the Jeep onto the road Maisie indicated, then turned onto a side road and stopped in front of a small house, its narrow front yard crowded with flowering bushes.
When they walked up the short path to the house, Shad pointed to a bush close to the verandah wall, its furry, red flower looking like a cat’s tail.
“What they call that one again? My grandmother used to grow it in the yard, but it dead now.”
“They call it kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate.”
“That’s right.” Shad whinnied with delight. He loved the old-fashioned sound of it, and he could hear his grandmother roll it around in her mouth when she said it. “You think your cousin will give me a clipping to plant in the yard? I could put it right where the old bush used to be.”
No sound came from the house when they climbed the porch steps. “She must be in her bed.” Maisie called a loud howdy-doo. A weak voice echoed back and she disappeared inside while Shad sat on an aluminum folding chair on the porch.
His eyelids had just started to close when he was roused by a whirring sound. A tiny doctor bird had zoomed up to the passionflower vine shrouding the porch and was sticking its beak into a flower. With its long tail and iridescent, blue-green body, it reminded Shad of why, as a boy, he’d always loved hummingbirds, even if he couldn’t catch one.
“Excuse me, please,” a voice said, and Shad peered between the heart-shaped leaves of the vine. Standing at the bottom of the steps was a young man holding a basket. “Miss Mattie living here?” His short dreadlocks almost covered his eyes; a Rasta novice.
“Miss Mattie is the sick lady?”
“My mother ask me to bring her some soup
.”
“She inside with a friend of mine.” The youth went into the house and returned without the basket.
“Tell me something,” Shad said before the boy could descend the steps. “You know any Rasta camps around here?”
The teenager’s eyes narrowed. “Why you want to know?”
“I inquiring for a friend of mine. My name is Shad, sorry, I should have said.”
The young man’s name was Unity. “They have plenty camps.” He rubbed a pimple on his nose. “The Nyabinghi camp, the place where the wood-carvers live, and then some brethren live just below them. They have a big farm, growing vegetables and thing.”
“They been there a long time?”
“I think so.”
“How you get to that camp?”
“Little before the Nyabinghi camp, you turn right.”
Maisie appeared with a pair of clippers in her hand. “Time to cut bush.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
* * *
In the two weeks since Eve had arrived in Largo, Eric had learned a lot about her. Just playing Scrabble had taught him that his daughter was competitive and funny: when she won, she’d do her rain dance, making everyone around her laugh. Another discovery was that she had a quick retort to every comment, usually delivered in a flat voice. She also reacted as strongly to her environment as her father. If the bulldozer roared close to the bar, they both got distracted and the Scrabble scores were low. She was moody, and on a couple occasions she was almost as morose as when she’d first arrived from Canada.
“What’s the problem?” he asked her on Friday afternoon as he placed the word zealous on the board, a double-word play. He’d been feeling lucky today.
The Rhythm of the August Rain Page 15