Beyond Molasses Creek Read Online Free PDF Page A

Vesey. It went out and I haven’t done a thing. Not one thing in here.” I pull the hair on the sides of my head and squeeze.
    â€œNo worries. You go on and unload the truck,” he tells the men with a motion of his hand. “I’ll be ready for you by the time you get it all out.”
    â€œVesey, nobody can do that.”
    â€œJust leave it to me. You wanna lie down?”
    â€œThink you could just help me over to that chair?” Vesey takes my arm and I limp to the living room. He is a gentleman escort and I am a crippled slug, nowhere close to being ready for the ball. He smells of motor oil and fresh-cut grass. He lowers me down slow and steady into the chair, even pulls the reclining lever down so the back flattens out.
    â€œI don’t know how to thank you,” I say. I’m a beached whale, legs straight out, head swimming.
    â€œI had two daughters go off on their own, and a son . . . well, I know moving. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that.”
    â€œYou mean, just another thing you know.” He studies my face to see if I’m upset or freaking out, but I smile at him reassuringly and lay my head back. I’m getting sleepy again. But Vesey’s here. Good ol’ . . . He’ll take care of everything. Everything’s gonna be just . . .

FOUR
Monsoon Season
    Kathmandu, Nepal
Sunila
    I T IS DONE . I CANNOT CHANGE THINGS NOW . I CANNOT go back home. I am so far away from home.
    I have the handle of a rainbow-colored umbrella in my hands, slippery and wet. It is hard to hold on. It is monsoon season in Kathmandu and the umbrella that once covered my head from the sun now shelters me from the rain. It’s been raining for six days and already a river flows around my feet. I step into the road and struggle to keep standing. I slowly make my way across, looking to see an old woman in the window of a crumbling building, a chicken there in her windowsill.
    At the sight of it, my stomach rumbles. I haven’t eaten since yesterday, since I set out on this journey.
    I am thirty-seven or thirty-eight now, I am not sure. Amaa and Buba never talked about my birthday, for they didn’t know when it was. They found me, abandoned near the quarry on a rock before monsoon season. But every year, my father would complain that with me in his presence, disaster had befallen them. In our little one-room hovel, Amaa would tell him that I was the only reason we were not all dead. Yet. She would say it as the tarp on our tent blew in the wind and the white dust of stone covered her dark hands and feet and swirled up into the air like an angry spirit. “We are alive because of her,” she would tell him. Then she’d touch my arm, my untouchable arm, and beg me to get back to work. “The rains will come soon,” she would say, “and then there is no work for any of us.”
    A gust of wind blows the rain under my umbrella and plasters my cholo to my body. I touch beneath my arm and make sure it’s still there, my treasure, my way to a better life. The book is still there, unharmed and dry. I think of the man, the look on his face as he lay there, no longer able to harm me or anyone else. No more threats, no more debts, no more violence.
    I am a Dalit. I am an outcaste in Nepal. Dalit people are discriminated against and often treated badly. A Dalit woman is lower than a Dalit man. Amaa is too shy to look someone in the eye. She is not worthy, she says, so she does not speak up. Yet I am bolder. I learned to beg when I was a child and learned that I would not eat unless I opened my mouth to speak.
    Once, many years ago, when I was begging food from a café, a man sat watching me. He said I would not have to beg if I went with him across the border to India. He told me that he could promise a marriage to a very prominent man and I would never have to work another day of my life.
    I was very close to saying yes, I would go with him. What young