Black Cake: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

quieter, then altogether silent. One day, she simply disappeared, leaving behind a brief note and their twelve-year-old daughter, who kept trailing Lin around the house, gazing up at him with her mother’s round eyes.
    Lin suspected Mathilda had left him under the influence of all that Rasta-black-power-independence business that was going on in the streets, though she used to complain because Lin wouldn’t give her a formal marriage. That, and because he kept going to the cockfights.
    “You don’t like the betting?” Lin asked her one time. “Where do you think I get the money to keep the shops going? Half of our customers are buying on credit, which they will never pay off, by the way. Am I supposed to let them go without? And where do you think this house came from? You tink all dat money fall out a de sky ?” The woman’s face took on that vexed look she used whenever Lin spoke patois around their daughter.
    No, Mathilda had never appreciated her good fortune. Some of the merchants had wives on the far side of the ocean or women on the other side of town, but not Lin. Still, she was the kind of woman a man tried to tolerate. All that skin billowing out of the top of her shirt. The way she would march their daughter straight into the waves without hesitation, aggravating Lin and exciting him at the same time.
    In the tired but hopeful years after the end of World War II, a lot of the fellows who came back to the island after serving in the Royal AirForce and such would talk of nothing but going back to Britain. Some of the Chinese lads from the capital were leaving the island for Florida. But Lin didn’t want to immigrate again, he wanted to improve his lot right where he was. Mathilda, two years younger than Lin, said she liked his attitude. When they were alone, she would run her hand over the top of his head and say that she liked that funny hair of his, black and straight and coarse as a brush.
    Lin could have married someone else. Lin’s mother had been fussing with him to take up with the “right sort” of girl, one of the new ones who had come over from China. Someone who would know the proper way to clean the house for the Chinese New Year. Someone who would know how to prepare the small envelopes of Fung Bow for the children. Someone who knew what to cook for good luck, whose presence would make the family proud when important people came to visit for the holiday feast.
    And he knew that Mathilda would not have sat idling for long. All she had to do to find someone who was better off was to train her eyes on some hotel owner farther up the coast or even one of those movie stars who had managed to get rich despite lounging on the beach half the time. But then Mathilda told him she was pregnant and he understood that this was what he wanted. To live with Mathilda and their child.
    Love was a mystifying thing and the way it could corrode, doubly so. Yes, Lin needed to accept the fact that it was just him and his daughter now. They had been abandoned.
    Within three years, Covey’s shoulders and chest had puffed up and she was taller and swimming faster than any girl and most boys in the parish. Her eyes took on an edge that Lin recognized as his own. This girl was like him. It wasn’t just a matter of talent. She wasn’t just having fun. She was driven to win.
    Covey kept winning, but Lin kept losing. The funny thing was, Lin knew better. He knew better than to gamble without taking a break. He knew better than to spend all that cash on liquor. Lin never forgot a number, had entire armies of them in his head, but he couldn’t for thelife of him remember the date on which he stopped being able to stop himself.
    At some point, Lin began to think, again, about the men who had moved away. He considered selling what was left of his belongings and going back to China.
    “What China?” his one remaining brother said. “ Yu belong to dis island now. What China?”
    Then there was Covey. Lin knew he