Beyond Molasses Creek Read Online Free PDF Page B

you met today. They are looking at you and seeing money in their eyes. You must trust me in this. I have seen what happens to pretty poor girls like you in Nepal.”
    I looked at the card and then back at Mr. Monroe.
    â€œNamaste,” he said to me.
    â€œNamaste,” I replied, which means I honor the light I see within you . Then I walked away, shaking from hunger, shaking from anger. I never saw Mr. Monroe again, though I did have several more offers of work and marriage from men like the one I’d met in the café that day. Surely I would have gone had I not had Mr. Monroe’s warning still in my head. I never knew things could be worse than they are in the stone quarry, where children pound stone for gravel, breathe dust, and get sick, and mothers and fathers must work sixteen hours every day, and no one has the chance to learn to read or write, no chance to get out of debt. Out of the quarry, I always thought things must be better somewhere else, perhaps just beyond the border, over the Himalayas, but Mr. Monroe created in me that day a fear of the lies that men will tell. It has kept me working in this place for more than thirty years. It has held me captive. Or safe. I am not sure which.
    But now, now, I am traveling under cover of rain and umbrella to make my way to the US Embassy. I am going to find that Mr. Monroe. I am going to tell him what I believe I have in my possession. That I have found a book that holds the key to my freedom.
    After all this time I’m not quite sure what this means, freedom.
    I pass the temple but do not dare go in to pray. I am untouchable and therefore unclean. I would be thrown out or worse, even under this new government. Things have not changed for me. For people like me.
    May he still be alive. May Mr. Monroe still work at the US Embassy. May he be able to read the words that I cannot read but that I know hold secrets to my past and to my future . I say my prayers silently as I trudge on by the temple in the river around my ankles that was once a street of Kathmandu.

FIVE
Make Yourself at Home
    Mount Pleasant
Ally
    S OMETHING WONDERFUL FLOWS AROUND ME, A RICH , roasted, savory smell that rouses me from a deep sleep. I wonder if I’m in Africa, or maybe New Orleans again. Smells like spices, tomatoes . . . gumbo? I open my eyes and rub them to be sure I’m really awake and not dreaming. I am still lying in Daddy’s moss-green La-Z-Boy, but the chair seems to have been planted in some other living room, like maybe a tornado plucked my recliner, spun me around, and landed me in Oz. I see Kat, sitting in the windowsill. He looks just as confused as I am.
    Daddy is gone. Every bit of him, the old TV with bunny ears, the bureau beneath the windows with pictures of me when I was a girl, the boxes of books and magazines, the faded rug my mother made with her own two hands. It’s all gone. Instead I see pieces of me, my travels, my world. The television is a flat-screen type, not yet up on the wall, but leaning against it. The coffee table is a round brass one with intricate carvings of Ganesha, the Indian elephant god. A colorful rug I brought back from Guatemala covers the brown carpet and a large Greek lamp shaped like Nike stands beside me, her wings pointed toward the kitchen. I feel as if I stepped into some foreign bazaar. I can almost smell the spices of Kandahar. But no, I really do think it’s gumbo.
    â€œVesey?” I call to him, but only hear the breeze coming in the windows, the far-off call of a crow. I cannot believe that he did all this for me while I slept like an invalid. Vesey did this. How did he pay the men? Where did he send Daddy’s things? Did I tell him I wanted it all sent back to the warehouse in Georgia till I can handle it later? My mind is foggy. My hip still aches, but the pain is a little further away now. Just a few days probably and I’ll be back to new.
    I grab the lever and grit my teeth as the seat