Here Comes the Sun(33)

Delores stops fanning. After a long pause, she braces herself into the chair, which creaks under her weight. “Why are you here?” Delores asks. “To tell me how me is a bad mother?” Delores’s spit flies on Margot’s face. Delores continues. “What should I have done, eh? Tell me!” Her eyes are bulging. “Didn’t it put food on the table? Didn’t it feed yuh? If yuh t’ink yuh bettah than dat—now dat you is Miss High ’an Mighty—then g’weh! G’long!”

Margot doesn’t budge. She can’t. “Ah want to talk to you,” she says. Her voice drops, giving in to a slight tremor.

Delores’s eyes gleam like the edges of swords, her mouth twisted to the right side of her face. “’Bout what?”

“Ah don’t know where to start.”

“Start somweh. Yuh wasting me time.” Delores starts fanning herself again, but before Margot can gather her thoughts, three tourists enter the stall. Delores’s attitude changes. Margot steps aside and waits until her mother is done with them. Suddenly she’s a pleasant woman, the type of woman Margot would’ve liked to get to know, or wanted as a mother—not the mother she grew up with, who was quick to anger and even quicker to trample Margot’s self-esteem. Margot always wondered what it was about her that made her mother so angry. She wished she could make her mother happy the way these tourists do. The way Thandi does. “Yes, sweetie, ah can give yuh dat for a discounted price,” Delores says to the young American teen.

When the tourists leave, Delores goes back to being Delores. “So talk,” she says. “More people soon come an’ me need fi sell.”

Margot treads lightly. “I’m seeing someone.” She clears her throat, feeling an overwhelming need to specify, if not for herself, then for Delores, whose eyes hold in them the question that Margot can never avoid. “A man.” It rolls off her tongue so easily, so naturally, so necessary. A man. Her mother’s facial expression remains neutral, though Margot imagines the smirk behind the dark emotionless face.

“He’s in di hotel business,” Margot continues. “A Wellington.”

“A Wellington?” Delores asks, her eyes wide. “What yuh doing wid ah Wellington?” she asks. “Since when those people commune wid di help? Don’t you work fah dem?”

“He said he loves me,” Margot says, defensive. All she hopes for is Delores’s grudging approval. “He’s willing to leave his wife. And he’s serious about it.”

“Oh?” Delores sits up straight and puts down the rolled-up newspaper she was using to fan with, a gleam finally creeping into her eyes, filling Margot with hope.

“So yuh get yuhself a big man.”

“Yes.”

“How yuh so ch’upid, gyal?”

Delores leans forward, her big arms flopping over her knees. Margot realizes that it wasn’t pride she has seen in her mother’s eyes, it was a sneer. A sneer that reveals the wide gap in her mother’s teeth as she says, “My question to you, Miss High an’ Mighty, is how ah man like dat can leave him pretty wife fi s’maddy like you? Yuh t’ink dem man deh want a black gyal pon dem arm in public? Dey like yuh to f*ck. Not to marry. So know yuh place.”

Margot feels the sting of tears, but she narrows her eyes. She doesn’t even want Alphonso. All Margot wants—now more than ever—is to prove her mother wrong.



Margot bursts through Verdene’s bedroom door and puts her palms against the woman’s cheeks. Her lips trail Verdene’s neck, her breasts. Verdene gasps in surprise, but slows Margot’s fingers.

“Calm down, now. Why don’t you sit down?”

Margot relents, resting her head against Verdene’s before slumping onto the bed. “I wish things were different,” she says. Verdene is watching her, watching the storm of unknown origin rage across her face. “Don’t you just wish things were different?” she asks.

“Many times,” Verdene says.

They peer at each other in the mirror.

“I don’t think I can go on living like this,” Margot says.

“What are you saying?” Verdene sits up against the headboard. Margot studies her face to see if the answer she hopes to find is there. But all she sees is concern and confusion just above Verdene’s eyebrows.

“If you love me, then why haven’t you offered to sell this house so that we can have a fresh start? You know. In an area where we can—”

Verdene cuts her off. “It’s not that simple, Margot.”

“Why not? What do you have to lose by selling this house? It’s not like you have anything left here. We can build something together.”

“It’s all I have left of my mother.” Verdene looks at the picture of her mother that sits on the small table, facing the wall—the only picture she kept out. She reaches over and turns the picture around.

“So I’m best kept as a secret?” Margot asks quietly, turning away from the smiling Miss Ella.

Verdene allows the question to fall between them before she says, “You’re fooling yourself if you think things would be any different in another neighborhood. It’s still Jamaica.”

“Then why don’t you take me with you to London so that we could have a life outside of this?”