A Simple Distance Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t afford to talk with Aunt Lillian, her godmother in England, for hours on end, I’m sure, would not have prevented her from doing so on my dime.
    I’d always thought Aunt Lillian was related to us by blood, but she isn’t. Even though she lives in Europe, she’s one of those people who’s always around. At least in conversation. She trained as a nurse in England during World War II. They say she had a fiancé back then, a Baobiquen pilot in the Royal Air Force. But he didn’t survive the war.
    Baobique’s no place for a young woman disinterested in the rest of its men. I guess she thought she was better off where she was. So she stayed in London, worked in a hospital, bought a flat, earned herself a pension.
    Normally, I would have commented on the cost of the call. Normally, that would have been bothering me most.
    But I was more upset by the substance of the conversation I walked in on than I was its length.
    Were you two talking about me?
    Well, of course. You’re my daughter.
    Something was going on and I wanted, more than anything, not to find out what it was. I did not want to wind up in the middle. But I was angry.
    Mom, what were you saying about me? For Christ’s sake, I just flew you up here. How can you say I don’t care about my own mother? What the hell is going on?
    Jean, there’s no need to get nasty on top of it all.
    Mom, I don’t even know what I’m getting nasty about! Tell me, specifically, what is going on.
    You know exactly what’s going on, Jean. This is all your doing. Mama’s telling Lillian it’s because of that damn goat. What do they think I am, na, a fool? She pressed her tongue to the back of her front teeth, made that sucking noise she only started doing since she returned to Baobique. A noise well below her family’s station on the island, a noise that would have sent my grandmother to an early grave. But right then, that was just what my mother would have liked to do.
    When I was in Baobique visiting my sick uncle, about a year before his death and my mother’s trip to Oakland to recuperate, her dogs killed the goat of a man named Mr. Williams. He worked for her picking seed nuts from the coconut trees at Godwyn to sell in town for three dollars apiece at Saturday market. But when I was there, it was the plums that needed picking.
    Mr. Williams had a bum leg, so he couldn’t pick the plums. He’d hurt it the day before on the estate, twisted it tripping over a root from some tree that couldn’t keep itself entirely underground. My mom and I had to drive him home in her jeep, down the road to Sommerset, where both the ocean and the people are rough but where we managed to accomplish the following things: bought a flat of eggs for bread pudding; gave condolences to a woman whose father had recently died from drinking a jug of lye; said hello to Mr. Issacs, Uncle George’s secretary’s father, and to another older, balding man whose connection to my relatives I’ve forgotten. People gathered in the little intersection as my mom’s car blocked the road and we talked.
    At one point, four young men walked by eyeing me, as most of the men there do to all women under forty. They looked me up and down, hung out in front of our car until my mom honked them to the side. It was obvious they didn’t like us, with our car, our house, our maid, while so many people lived in shacks. There was one man in particular who scared me, his right eyelid sewn shut, who wouldn’t look away even as we rolled by.
    Next morning, bright and early, Rascal and Lucia started barking. Like mad dogs at the bottom of the plum tree. My mom told me to grab her cutlass from the kitchen wall, so I did. And we went to investigate.
    When we got to the dogs, we looked up and saw two sets of brown eyes staring down at us from among the plums. But it wasn’t the men from Sommerset, it was Mr. Williams’s two sons, come to steal what they could off the tree bursting with fruit.
    They told us they were