The Rhythm of the August Rain

by Gillian Royes

  In exchange for being the needed local partner, the younger man had agreed to do the real work, from running around during the construction to managing the hotel later. But that’s what partners were for, Shad was convinced, especially scrape-bottom men such as him who didn’t have any money or land to invest in a deal, who had few legal opportunities to get ahead. And if two American men needed an on-spot Jamaican partner for their hotel, if they wanted a young, hardworking man with a willing heart, he would be more than happy to oblige.

  With five mouths to feed, Shad had not only accepted the upcoming challenge of becoming a partner but longed for it. His ambition had been nurtured from childhood when Granny had predicted that, because of his dark-dark complexion and high forehead, he would be a busha one day, as big as the white overseers in slavery days. Granny might be dead, but her words continued to ring in her grandson’s head, and he carried with him everywhere a small plastic bag with a tablespoon of dirt from the top of her grave, his good-luck charm, to make sure her prediction came true. The new hotel was his one shot, he’d remind himself every night after he’d crept into bed beside Beth, his one chance to be somebody, even if his partners ran him into the ground while he did it.

  After hanging the dust cloth over the edge of the sink, Shad looked at Eric. “Boss, where Shannon going to stay in Largo?”

  “She asked me to book her into Miss Mac’s.”

  “You forget Miss Mac not going to have the boardinghouse no more? We buying the land and tearing down the house to build the hotel.”

  “Shit, you’re right.” Eric hit his forehead, white hair jerking forward. “And the closing is Friday the thirteenth. How could I forget?” He rolled his eyes up to the thatch as he tossed down the last of his drink. “There’ll be no boardinghouse after that.”

  Shad squeezed his lips together in irritation. Known as Largo’s sniffer and snuffer (a title bestowed by his former teacher and mentor, the said Miss Mac), the bartender knew that sometimes the boss needed help with his own sniffing and snuffing. His mind went to sleep at least half the day. “And remember, boss, Simone going to be staying in your apartment, so Shannon can’t stay with you.”

  “I’ll call her tomorrow.” Eric stood up. “Maybe she’ll have to stay in another town. I have to take the car to Port Maria now before the garage closes. I think it’s the carburetor.”

  The next evening, after the first of the regulars had settled into their arguments, Shad watched Eric maneuver past him to take the phone into his apartment. When he emerged later, the boss’s ruddy face was a shade paler and his eyes even more glazed than the day before.

  “You told Shannon about Miss Mac?” Shad asked, opening a soft drink for him. Eric took the bottle and nodded. “What she say?”

  “The Delgados—she’ll stay with the Delgados.”

  “That make sense, like how Shannon and Jennifer used to be good friends before. . . .”

  Shad chewed his top lip as he poured ice into a Styrofoam bucket and placed it in the fridge. Eric was staring at, not seeing, the dangling bottle opener.

  “Boss, you okay? You look like a duppy frighten you,” Shad said, trying a little levity. Eric always laughed at the mention of ghosts.

  The bar owner took a gulp of his drink. “She—she’s bringing Eve.”

  “That good news, man! Like how your son come down last year and see Jamaica, is time for the daughter now. But why she didn’t tell you before that she was bringing Eve?”

  Eric made his way to a stool, patting the counter like a man who was blind. “She just decided, she said.”

  A call from the end of the bar turned Shad’s attention to his customers and a fresh bottle of white rum. As he topped them up, Eli, Solomon, and Tri sucked him into a debate about the current prime minister, the first female leader in the island’s history.

  “Don’t tell me,” Tri insisted, thumping the counter, “that a woman can run a country as good as a man, don’t tell me that.” Thin and sinewy, mauger to the locals, the aging Triumphant Arch never backed down from any political argument, the louder the better. “What you think, Shad?”

  “Give the woman a chance,” Eli said in his slow, rambling way. “Is only her first term and—”

  “No woman should lead a country,” Solomon put in. The former chef of the hotel, reduced to the bar’s part-time cook, wore his usual grumpy face. “The Bible say that woman should walk behind man.”

  “You show me,” Eli challenged him, “where in the Bible it say that, and I going to show you a man who write it.”

  “All I know,” Shad said, “is that every woman I ever meet can think smarter and faster than a man. You forget I going to get married next month because Beth outthink me?”

  When the bartender got back to his stool, Eric had left the counter, his soft drink abandoned. He’d be sitting on his verandah looking across at the island in the pale moonlight, listening to one of the Cuban radio stations as he always did at night. He never liked to sit in the bar unless he had friends over, and tonight wouldn’t have been a good night, anyway, not with the way he’d looked after this second phone call.

  Throwing the bottle into the garbage can, Shad mulled Eric’s reaction to Shannon’s news. He could understand the boss being upset yesterday about his ex-girlfriend’s coming to Largo—just when Simone was visiting—but tonight he’d acted differently, completely differently, to the news that Eve was arriving, his own child. This time he was holding back, keeping his face blank, no joy, nothing in his eyes.

  To Shad, a man for whom family meant everything, there would have been no better news than hearing that one of his children was coming to visit. Not that Eric had been the same kind of parent. Everyone knew he hadn’t been much of a father, his two children brought up by two mothers far away in Washington, DC, and Toronto, but he was a good man down deep, and he didn’t bear malice toward anybody, least of all his own children. Why then this reaction to the news that his daughter was coming? And what was the real reason Shannon was coming down after all this time?

  Shad reached for a rag to wipe down the counter, knowing that the Canadian woman had won the first round. She’d thought faster and smarter than the boss.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  Jennifer Delgado was having a soiree, as she liked to call her Friday-afternoon gatherings. The housekeeper, Miss Bertha, would have set out the trays of cocktail patties and miniature hot dogs with olives, Jennifer’s husband, Lambert, would have handed around the first glasses of wine and scotch, and the party would be well under way, the buzz of conversation loud enough to be heard by someone—in this case, a slightly out-of-breath Eric—ascending the driveway. A clutch of guests seated on the verandah of the plantation-style home were admiring the twilight colors as he approached.

  “I love the view from this porch,” a stylish man in a Panama hat commented. “You can see all the way to Manchioneal Bay, can’t you?”

  “It looks like an artist’s palette,” a woman was saying in a shrill voice.

  “And the red flowers of the poinciana tree go with it,” another woman piped up.

  After mounting the steps to the verandah, aware that his sweaty armpits were leaving rings on his shirt, Eric nodded to the group and paused to take a few breaths. If Jennifer caught him panting, she’d lecture him again about joining her gym in Port Antonio. But the climb from his bar across the road and up the driveway to the Delgados’ house seemed to get longer and steeper every time he undertook it. He was aware that life and age were creeping up on him, that his knees ached when he got up in the morning and the lines on his face increased by the month, but certain markers he didn’t need, such as this driveway.

  On his way through the double doors into the living room, Eric greeted a couple he recognized from Port Antonio (the Plumbers? he asked himself). Inside, several more people lounged on the cushy sofas and chairs, among them Roper and Sonja, an artist and his writer girlfriend, who lived on the eastern end of the bay.
/>   Eric shook Roper’s hand, kissed Sonja’s plump cheek, and asked, “Have you seen Lambert?”

  “I think he’s in his office with somebody,” Sonja answered. Her ear-to-ear smile usually made Eric feel all was right with the world, but not this evening.

  After helping himself to tonic water at the bar, Eric leaned on a column, staying out of the way of small talk. Romantic violins drifted from the speakers above him. He wasn’t in the mood for a party, and he wouldn’t have come if he’d had his druthers, wouldn’t have shaved and pulled his hair back in a ponytail if he hadn’t needed to talk to Lambert.

  “At last—you’re here,” came the hostess’s voice. Wearing a halter dress that showed off her toned arms and flat stomach, despite being a mother of two, Jennifer advanced toward him. Lambert’s second wife (twenty years too young for him, Eric teased him) had always been good at making everyone feel he or she were the one guest she’d been waiting for. A transplanted interior designer from Florida, she’d been even better at enjoying life with her well-to-do Jamaican husband.

  She kissed Eric on both cheeks, a habit she’d adopted after a trip to France a few years before. “You’re late.”

  “Stuff happens.”

  With a bracelet-clanking hand, she pushed her blond hair back. “You’re not allowed to have a long face at my parties. What’s up with that?”

  “Just tired, I guess.” Eric swung his eyes to the corridor leading to Lambert’s office. “I wonder when Lam is going to be free?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Eric crossed the room to the corridor, shaking hands on the way with a man, an accountant, he remembered, whom Lambert had advised Eric to use and whom he’d never called. An outburst of laughter from a group of guests ricocheted off the rafters of the big room, drowning out the music.

  “Hey, man, come on in,” Lambert called when Eric appeared at the office door. “I was showing Doug here the plans for the Andersons’ new house, the solar-powered one in St. Mary I was telling you about.”

  Lambert Delgado was an engineer and a product of Kingston’s professional stock. A decade and a half before and newly remarried, the large mulatto had left the capital and built his home on a hill overlooking Largo. Since Eric’s hotel had been the only place in the area to dine out, the Delgados had befriended the owner and they’d remained close through the years. But while Eric’s fortunes had declined, Lambert’s had risen, and he now handled most of the large construction jobs in eastern Portland, public and private, everyone respecting him as much for his confident authority as for his bushy mustache.

  The contractor had proven to be the one person in the world—other than Shad—whom Eric would have trusted with his life. To his dying day, he’d remember how Lambert had wrapped him in a blanket when he was naked and shivering after escaping his flooded hotel during the hurricane. And he’d forever be indebted to his friend for putting him up in his home, at no cost and without complaint, for the year before the bar had been built. These favors alone made Eric beholden to the big man with the booming voice, but they didn’t end there. Lambert had agreed—suggesting it himself—to build the new hotel at cost. There’d be no charge for his services.

  “Largo needs it and I can afford it,” he’d said, stroking one side of his mustache without blinking.

  Lambert introduced him now to the man beside him, a rotund fellow who thanked the contractor for showing him the plans and departed to rejoin his wife.

  “Have a seat, man,” Lam said, nodding to Eric as he sat down in his desk chair. “Did you get a drink—good. How are things going?”

  The leather creaked under Eric as he lowered to an armchair. “Can’t complain—not too much, anyway.”

  “The construction permits for the hotel are all signed, and Danny sent us the first payment. We’re going to start hiring the skilled laborers right after the groundbreaking. But I told you that already, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you told me, along with a million other things, none of which I can remember, of course. What do I need to do next?”

  “Close on the property and sign your life away,” Lambert said with the guffawing laugh that sounded like a hybrid of a Kipling character and a thumping seal, Eric had always thought. “Is Danny coming out for the closing?”

  “No, Shad and I are going to be there, but they’re going to courier the papers to Danny. He’s coming for the groundbreaking, though. He says it’ll be his first time wearing a hard hat and he’s not going to miss it.”

  “Who’s handling the groundbreaking, by the way? You’ll be needing shovels and—”

  “I hadn’t even thought about it.”

  “Jennifer likes doing stuff like that. I’ll ask her to do it as a gift to you guys.”

  “That would be great.”

  “How many people are you going to invite?”

  Eric shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Never had a groundbreaking for my old place, just started working.”

  “Let’s see.” Lambert looked at the wooden fan spinning overhead. “I’ll make sure that the dozer goes in the day before—the bush will be all gone by that time, but he can make a nice flat spot for the tent. Then on the day, you or Danny can say a few words, and we’ll try to get Donovan Bailey, the local member of Parliament, although it’s hard to get him now that he’s minister of housing. And you should have a pastor bless the project—you know Jamaicans, nothing happens without a prayer. Then after the speeches, we turn the soil: you, me, Shad, Danny, the MP. Get some photographers out there and about twenty to thirty people for refreshments after, I’d guess. Come to think of it, with free food—let’s make that forty people.”

  “Plus two,” Eric said, tightening his buttocks as he shifted in the chair. “Shannon might be here.”

  Lambert leaned over the mahogany desk, bushy brows high. “You’re joking!”

  “She has a job down here, some article to research.”

  “Did you tell Jen?”

  “Not yet. Only one problem, though. She asked me to book her into Miss Mac’s boardinghouse, but, of course, Miss Mac would have sold over to us and be gone by then.”

  The contractor leaned back and grinned. “And she can’t stay with you.”

  “In fact,” Eric said, cracking his neck to one side, “she suggested that she could stay here. She hates the big hotels, and she wants to be based in Largo, she says.”

  “She doesn’t even have to ask. Jennifer would love catching up with her. Remember how they would go off shopping and swimming together? I think she even helped out once or twice in the art gallery Jennifer used to have in Ocho Rios. That was before the babies came, of course, a lot of water under the bridge since then. How long will she be here?”

  “A couple of weeks, I think. She arrives on—what did she tell me?—July sixth, seventh, I think. She has a freelance contract with a magazine.”

  The contractor ran a hand over his wiry, gray hair. “Is she bringing Eve? It would make sense, summer holidays and everything.”

  “Yup.”

  “Splendid, splendid! Casey will be home from boarding school. They can hang out together, do the girlie thing, you know.”

  Eric tried to picture his daughter in Casey’s bedroom with its four-poster twin beds and their pink canopies. “I guess so.”

  Lambert narrowed his eyes. “Why am I getting the impression that there’s something—”

  Eric got up and walked to the window. The sunset had been swallowed by the tropical blackness. “Everything is wrong with this visit, Lam.” Eric turned abruptly. “I almost feel as if Shannon is pulling a fast one on me, the way she did when she got pregnant. Even though she swore it was an accident, I always felt that she planned it. And of course, she never forgave me for not proposing afterward.”

  “That’s all in the past.”

  “Sometimes the past collides with the present, with Simone coming down at the same time. I don’t know what’s going to happen, man. It’s almost as if Shannon knew—”

/>   “She’ll be with us, and Simone will be with you, right? We’ll keep them apart.”

  “This could get really—I mean, I’ve moved on with my life.”

  “I’m sure she’s done the same.”

  “She hated me like pus—”

  “Pus?”

  “My mother’s expression, you know what I mean.” Eric sat down again and let out a hard breath. “Even when I went up to see her after she’d had Eve, it was like she’d put up a wall between us. She was living in this town house in Toronto. It had a blue door, I’ll never forget, and she seemed so distant, so—different. Instead of the pretty, skinny gal dashing around taking pictures, she’d suddenly become this chubby, anxious mother.

  “She was breast-feeding and talking to the baby the whole time. You wouldn’t have thought I was the child’s father, the way she was going on. She didn’t even invite me to stay with her, so I took the bus from Ohio for the day because I couldn’t afford a hotel. I could only stay a couple hours, but, man, were they uncomfortable. She let me hold the baby once, but the second Eve started whimpering, she snatched her out of my arms, like she didn’t trust me. She didn’t even ask me about my trip or anything, and I’d come all the way from Jamaica to see them.”

  “But you went up again, didn’t you?”

  “A couple of times, once a year later. The last time was after my mother’s funeral. Eve was about five at the time. I remember Shannon meeting me at the door and calling Eve to come quickly. No invitation to have a drink, nothing, like I was persona non grata or something. I took Eve to the zoo and dropped her back. Not even a cup of coffee. Why she’s coming back to Largo, I have no idea. I don’t get it.”

  “Maybe she wants you to connect with Eve.”

  Eric straightened his shirtsleeves. “She knows I’m no good with children, I didn’t want another child. I told her plain and straight. I don’t know why women don’t believe you when you tell them something. Claire didn’t believe me either. Even before we got married, I told her and she agreed, but then she, oops, slipped and got pregnant with Joseph. I think when their girlfriends are having babies, it triggers their clocks to start ticking.”