Here Comes the Sun(32)

Margot was thinking all this when Alphonso said to her, “Why don’t you come by later, and show me what you’re good at?”

And so, when the sun went down and the staff went home, he led her to the conference room—the only time she had ever seen the inside of it. She opened the folder in which she kept all her ideas for the hotel. Her hands shook a little as she showed him how she had designed the small surveys so that management could know what guests were responding to. But Alphonso wasn’t interested in that. Instead, he watched her. She felt his eyes on her the whole time. When she finally gathered the courage to look at him, he leaned in and whispered, “I didn’t mean for you to show me all that about the hotel. I wanted you to show me what you’re good at.” Her first instinct was to slap him across the face and walk out the office; but Margot thought of Delores. The thought held her in place as Alphonso’s hands traveled the width of her hips, pressing her into him. There, his lust grew forceful. He bent her over and she let him. It’s fah di bettah. As he entered her, Alphonso breathed into the back of her neck. “Now I know why he kept you around.”

Margot responded by moving his hands to her breasts. The folder full of her ideas slipped from the desk and fell, papers sailing every which way. After a few minutes Alphonso came. He stood up and wiped himself clean with the handkerchief he carried in his left breast pocket. He tossed it in the bin with the condom. “Jus’ keep this between me and you,” he said.

But Garfield—the security guard who probably heard movement in the conference room after hours, and who worked for forty years to prove himself in his old age as a noble guardsman who didn’t deserve to be laid off without a pension—busted through the door holding a flashlight and a baton, only to behold the sight of Alphonso zipping up his pants and Margot leaning over the desk, her ass exposed. In exchange for silence, Garfield was given job security. A month later he died of a stroke. The secret didn’t die with him.

In time she has pushed aside the things about Alphonso that make her cautious. His volcanic explosions when people dare question his authenticity as a Wellington, given his tendency to squander money, unlike his scrupulous predecessors. Already he has squandered the revenue from the coffee farms and rum estates, and has had to sell them. And since his family is currently threatening to take the hotels out his hands, he seeks to pull from every vault his father painstakingly hid from him before he died. When Alphonso came up empty-handed after being denied privilege to any more of his father’s estate, he combusted: “The bastard cared for his three w’s. His wealth, his whores, and his whiskey.” He was drunk. He smashed a rum bottle on the wall and splattered the expensive Persian rug in his villa with the brown liquid. He kept on looking at the wall as though he saw his father’s shadow there, though it was his own.

Margot’s distracted memories carry her from under the tree to the crafts market in town. She just needs a scrap of kindess before she can recover, formulate her next move. Though Delores is hardly compassionate, Margot looks for her inside the arcade. The instant reprieve from the heat, though small, is something she’s grateful for. She hasn’t visited the stall in a long time. John-John is sitting there hee-hawing about something, and Margot has a feeling that she’s interrupting. Delores lifts her head and notices Margot, and something comes over her face. When John-John sees Margot, he too stops talking and suddenly becomes shy, lowering his head and regarding her through the lashes of his downcast eyes. “Hello, Margot,” he says boyishly.

“Wha’ppen John-John?”

“Nutten nah g’wan enuh,” John-John says, bringing Margot’s focus back. He seems glad for the opportunity to talk to her. “Same ole, same ole . . . how about you? Yuh looking good.”

“Thanks, John-John,” Margot says in a noncommittal voice. She focuses on Delores and the impenetrable veil over her face.

John-John must sense this, because he picks up his box of crafts and heads to the exit, apologetic when he says to Margot, “I’ll leave you ladies alone.” He bows slightly. “Likkle more, Mama Delores.”

“Likkle more,” Delores replies.

John-John stops at the exit as though he has forgotten something. He digs into his box and hands Margot a sculpted doctor bird. “Me did mek dis special fi you.”

“Thanks, John-John,” Margot says, holding on to the wooden bird as he hurries away.

Delores is chuckling to herself. “Him always did like yuh,” she says. “Only a idiot in love would give up something fah free when him can sell it to mek good money.” She sucks her teeth and fans herself with an old yellowing newspaper. “Lawd Jesas, what ah buffoon, eh?”

“I know.” Margot examines the beautiful bird. She traces the contours with her fingers, every ridge meticulously carved. “Poor t’ing.”

“Poor t’ing is right,” Delores says. “Remember how him used to bring yuh flowers he pick from s’maddy else yard?” Margot chuckles when she remembers this—John-John stealing flowers to give to her. “Both of oonuh was so young,” Delores continues, with the memory glistening in her eyes. “Him used to sit here an’ wait on me, jus’ so he could geet to yuh.” But the humor quickly disappears from Delores’s face, wiped clean by a scowl. “If only he knew.”

“I guess you’d rather put me wid a man who was into fondling and f*cking likkle girls?” Margot says, her voice conversational. She’s been friendly with her mother, but the day’s disappointment has her raw, prodding the wounds of her past. This painful fact has solidified into a rock she throws at her mother when it becomes too big, too heavy to carry alone.