The Rhythm of the August Rain (11 page)

T
hey were seated like an audience waiting for something to happen, facing the empty lane on a summer afternoon, a dancehall song blasting from a radio. Joella and two teenage boys had the seats of honor on the verandah's three plastic chairs, two-year-old Joshua asleep sprawled across Joella's lap, oblivious of the noise. At their feet, Rickia and a friend sat on the top step, their arms and legs spotted with the sunlight coming through the mango tree and its fruit overhead. Five sets of eyes stared at Shad and Eve as they approached the children and his home.

“Turn down the music,” Shad yelled as he opened the garden gate. “How many times I have to tell you that you making the neighbors deaf.”

“You can't hear the music good if you don't turn it up,” Joella parried as one of the young men bent to turn down the radio.

“I bring a guest today. You children have been saying that you want to meet Mistah Eric's daughter, so I bring her today. Her father say she can come for a little while.”

Eve nodded to the crowd, her hands jammed into her jeans.

Rickia pushed up her smudgy glasses. “Hi, Eve,” said the eleven-year-old, who was always impressed by foreigners, who was going abroad to study, she'd informed her parents.

“What you guys up to?” Shad inquired after the two boys had given up their chairs to him and Eve.

“Shante and I reading, Dadda,” Rickia answered, holding up a book. “Mamma borrow it from the library for me.”

“Jethro, how your mother going?” Shad asked one of the boys, with short, brown dreadlocks. “I hear she not too well.”

“She come out of hospital, suh. My grandmother staying with us now and taking care of her.”

“And you, Winston,” Shad said, gesturing with his chin to the boy holding the radio, the youth he'd found a home for several months back, “you still living with Maisie and Solomon?”

“Yes, suh, and doing a little mechanic work with Zeb.”

“You hear from your father?”

“He write me from Kingston last week. He say he get a job.”

“Good, good.” Shad rubbed his hand over his chin, hoping to find a hair or two he could shave soon.

Joella patted the baby on his rump, observing Eve out of the corner of her eye. “She don't look like Mistah Eric.”

Shad lowered his eyebrows at her. “She have her father's blue eyes, you don't see?”

“But I have my mother's mouth,” Eve said, the crisp Canadian accent slicing through the Largo heat. She looked at Shad when she said it, her mouth firmer and smaller than Shannon's.

“She speak pretty, eh?” Shante commented.

“You been to Largo before?” Winston asked Eve.

She shook her head.

“How long you staying?” Joella inquired.

“I don't know. It depends on when my mother finishes a job she's doing.”

“What she doing?” Rickia asked.

“Writing an article for a magazine.”

“Maybe Eve can come to the wedding, Dadda,” Rickia said.

“If she and her mother still here, of course,” Shad replied.

“Who's getting married?” Eve asked, turning to Joella as if she expected it to be her.

Shad's face got hot and he was glad his skin hid it. “The children's mother and me.”

“A wedding, that's cool,” Eve said. “When is it?”

“July twenty-eighth,” Joella and Rickia replied together.

“I'd like to come,” Eve said to Shad.

It was the warmest she'd been to the bartender thus far, and he felt less conscious of his half-painted house with its scraggly yard. He was glad now that he'd asked Eric if he could bring her to meet his children, something he'd thought of when she'd first arrived but hadn't done, the way she'd pulled her arm away from him. The girl should see how poor Jamaicans lived, he'd decided, and then maybe she'd be grateful for her own life up in Canada and not have such a sour face. He was also glad that, at least for this first meeting, she wouldn't see Ashante, his five-year-old, who was at the school in Port Antonio where Beth took her every day. Strangers didn't understand the child's odd behavior, didn't understand autism.

A gangly, black-and-white cat wandered onto the porch. Rickia laid it belly up in the crook of her arm.

“Can I pat it?” Eve asked. Rickia nodded, and Eve knelt down and stroked the cat. “I like cats.”

“You can have this one!” Joella snickered. “She eat too much.”

A discussion started about what the cat, named Precious, ate and where it slept, while Shad went inside to make himself lunch. When he came back out, Joella announced that they wanted Eve to stay with them for the afternoon. “We going to walk her back to the Delgados' house before it get dark.”

“Is that okay?” Eve actually looked energized, alive for the first time since he'd seen her. “I don't have anything else to do.”

Shad chewed the inside of his cheek. He'd promised her father he'd take her back to the Delgados' when he returned for his evening shift. On the other hand, Joella was a responsible girl, about to start twelfth grade at Titchfield High, off to dental-tech school in Kingston the following year, and she had a reputation for handling her younger siblings with a strong, sometimes too strong, hand. All six young people were looking at him now, eyes expectant, Joella's hand stroking the baby.

“We walk her back along the beach,” Rickia blurted out. “She can see the fishermen going out to fish.”

“Can I please?” Eve asked. “My mother wouldn't have a problem with it.”

That Eve herself wanted to stay, that she had some desire he could finally fulfill, persuaded Shad. “Make sure you have her back at the Delgados' home by six, no later, you hear me?” he told Joella.

“We look after her,” Winston assured him.

Shad took his leave, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure he'd done the right thing, but the children weren't looking at him. They were talking about something—and they'd turned the music up.

When he got back to the bar, Eric was out, and Shad called the Delgados' and told Miss Bertha about Eve's change of plans. “She coming back for dinner?” the housekeeper asked.

“Yes, man. No problem.”

Sunset arrived at the Largo Bay Restaurant and Bar with its usual flair of color, appreciated that evening by a busload of tourists bound for Kingston, who arrived tired and thirsty, taking the bartender away from his reading of
Grossman's Guide
and rushing him off his feet. After a few too many Planter's Punches, the customers turned to singing along with Jimmy Cliff, three of them dancing, delaying their departure until the bus driver said he'd be fired if they didn't leave for the hotel. Shad was happy to see them go despite the hefty tip, and with only the regulars left, the evening suddenly went quiet.

“You're helping Miss Mac move, right?” Eric said after he arrived back at seven o'clock. His habit was to come through every night, say hello to whoever was there, and disappear to sit on his verandah, only to be disturbed in an emergency.

“I have that under control,” Shad mumbled, his finger keeping his place in the book describing
the working arrangement of an efficient bar
. “Remember we going to use the Jeep, though.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot. I was going into Port Morant to pick up a part for the car, but I can do that next week. Zeb said there was no rush.”

“Miss Mac say she want to start moving at seven o'clock on Saturday morning, the day after the closing, so I coming early for the key.”

Eric slid onto the barstool opposite Shad and put both hands flat on the counter. “Pour me a scotch, please, a Johnnie Walker Black.”

“I know you making joke,” Shad said without moving his finger off the page. “You don't drink hard liquor since your birthday party last year.”

“And the next is right now.”

Eric admitted he wouldn't be able to sleep tonight without a shot. “All I can think about is Friday the thirteenth,” he growled, “closing day on Miss Mac's land. I can't even wrap my head around it. It seems so final, sheesh, Miss Mac moving away . . .” The American screwed up his mouth like a purse string, trying not to get emotional, Shad could see. “I'm going to miss the old gal. She's been the best neighbor a man could have. I hate to tear her house down—I have a lot of memories in it. Remember how I stayed with her for the year while we were building the hotel? She'd have a hot meal ready for me every night, whatever I told her that morning I wanted. And she was terrific with Simone when she got off the island, weak from dehydration. It was Miss Mac who brought her back to life before she left. She's a saint, that woman, grumpy sometimes, but a saint.”

Shad served him the scotch and sat down on his stool. “The price of progress, boss, but I going to miss her, too. Me and her go way back to elementary school. She never wanted me to leave school, you know, and she beg Granny to keep me in school because I was bright, but I had to leave because Granny couldn't do the embroidery work anymore, you know. I had to start fishing with Uncle Obediah to earn little something.” Shad put the book away in his library drawer, his chest heavy.

“And even when I came back from the penitentiary, Miss Mac never try to make me feel worthless, you know. She just kept telling me that I must finish up my learning. And when I need to sign all them papers you and Danny gave me to be a partner, it was she who made sure I could read all the hard words, told me how to pronounce them and look them up in the dictionary. You right, we going to miss her bad.”

“I just hope she's happy in Port Antonio with Horace.”

“If anything, boss”—Shad smiled quietly—“she can come back and live with us in the hotel.”

While Eric nursed his scotch, Shad served Tri and Solomon at the other end of the bar, they, too, bemoaning the village's loss of Meredith MacKenzie.

“Now
that
is a woman I always admire,” Tri said while Shad poured white rum into his glass. “She was strict, but she teach plenty children around here, and she manage her life by herself.”

Solomon agreed. “Bring up her son to be a lawyer all by herself.”

“Horace still going to run the campsite on the island?” Tri asked Shad. “Didn't you tell us he was going to put up tents and rent them out?”

“Yes, he and his business partner starting work on it next month. They leasing the island from us.” It was the first time the bartender had used the word
us
in reference to the new hotel, and it sounded so good he was going to use it more often from now on.

While Shad was washing up at the sink and Eric was finishing his scotch, Beth walked, almost ran, into the bar, her face twisted with worry. She never came into the bar at night except for a party, wouldn't come unless something bad had happened, and Shad held on to the edge of the sink, waiting for the news.

“Good night, Mistah Eric,” she said between pants. Her eyes skidded from the boss to her baby father.

“Evening, Beth.” Eric's forehead lowered over his brows, and when she kept panting, he asked what the matter was.

“Is Eve.” She looked at her husband.

Shad's hand went to his scalp. He'd forgotten everything about the child. “Oh, God,” he groaned.

“What about her?” Eric said, glancing at his bartender. “I thought you were going to bring her back after your lunch break. Didn't you take her up—”

“She not at the Delgados'?” Shad asked.

Beth shook her head.

“Where is she?” Eric thundered, standing up.

Beth looked up at him. “We don't exactly know, suh. She was—”

“What you mean?” Shad interrupted her. “Joella and her friends was supposed to walk her home before dark. Joella and Winston
promise
me they would look after her.”

“Where is she?” Eric demanded.

“They don't know where she is.” Beth's eyes implored forgiveness. “She was with them, and then they say she went with Jethro to see something. And when I get home from work, Joella tell me they hadn't come back yet. So we walk up and down looking, but nobody see them.” Beth looked from Shad to Eric and back.

“The Jeep!” Eric called, yanking the keys from their nail on the wall.

“Solomon,” Shad yelled over the partition behind him. “You can manage the bar for me? We gone to look for Eve.”

E
ric pressed the accelerator, then the brakes, careening down Lambert's driveway, hoping Shad and Beth were hanging on in the open back of the Jeep. Beside him, Shannon was ramrod straight in the passenger seat, one hand gripping the door's armrest.

“We'll find her,” she said, her hope making him feel worse. “It's a small village.”

He remembered telling her once that crimes could happen easily in Jamaica—the networks of mountain roads and drug gangs and depraved youngsters could prove unyielding to an outsider. Eric grasped the wheel tighter, knowing he was overreacting, that his fear was making him irrational. By the time he hit the bottom of the driveway, he was almost calm, but then the guilt came back, followed by anger at Shad for letting him down, followed by the knowledge that he was ultimately responsible. “I'm sorry that—”

“There's nothing to worry about, I'm sure,” Shannon said quickly. “She's good at taking care of herself. She's had a lot of practice.” In the light under the dash, he could see Shannon's fingers gripping the tops of her thighs.

“Honestly, I thought she was with you by now. I had to go to get my—”

“And I thought she was still with you—or Shad.” No judgment was in her voice, but he felt it. “Where are we going first?”

“Shad's house—she could be back there already.”

Eric speeded down the empty main road and turned onto a side lane, roaring up to Shad's house, where Joella and Winston were sitting under the verandah's bare bulb. They jumped up when the Jeep stopped.