“G’weh!” Mavis says. “Yuh only picking on me because yuh pickney dem don’t like yuh!” Satisfied after delivering the final blow, Mavis retreats into her stall with a smirk Delores wishes she could slap away. But she can’t move fast enough; John-John is already holding her back. Her hands are frantically moving over John-John’s shoulder, wanting to catch the woman’s face and rip it to shreds. That smirk holds the weight of scorn, of judgment. She should never have told Mavis that morning that her birthday came and went without a card from either Thandi or Margot. Well, she didn’t expect a card from Margot, but Thandi should’ve remembered. Every year Thandi gives her something—last year it was a necklace made of small cowrie shells; the previous year were petals from dried flowers used to decorate the inside of a card; the year before that was a bracelet with coral beads strung by yarn. And this year, nothing. Setting up her items took longer than usual at the beginning of the week. She’s always the first to have everything presented well enough for the tourists to come by, but this week she struggled with the simplest task of covering the wooden table with the green and yellow cloth. One of the figurines had fallen, breaking in half during setup. Delores felt off. The thought of spending the entire day selling made her feel like she was carrying an empty glass and pretending to have liquid in it. She confided this to Mavis, because she wanted someone to talk to at the time. How she has been selling for years and has never felt this way. How Margot, and most recently Thandi, couldn’t care less if she dies in this heat a pauper. And in the heat of this very moment, Mavis has called her out. Mavis—with her crazy, lying, bleaching self—knows that Delores’s children hate her. Mavis—the woman with nothing good to sell and who can never get one customer to give her the time of day—knows Delores’s weakness. That smirk Delores itches to slap off her face says it all; and even if Delores succeeds in slapping the black off the woman (more than the bleach ever could), it won’t erase the fact that Mavis probably has a better relationship with her son than Delores will ever have with her daughters.
John-John releases Delores. “Yuh mek har know who is in charge, Mama Delores! A good fi har,” he says. “Nuh let har get to yuh dat way.” Delores ignores him and plops down hard on her stool. She fans herself with the Jamaica Observer again as John-John surveys her table, checking to see if she sold any of his carved animals since the last time she saw him.
“Notin’ at’all?” he asks when she tells him. He sits down on the old padded stool in Delores’s stall and runs one hand through his dreadlocks, visibly puzzled. Delores is the best haggler out here.
“Yuh see people come in yah from mawnin?” she asks John-John in defense. “Sun too hot.” She doesn’t tell him that she hasn’t been in the mood to do the regular routine—linking hands with tourists, courting them the way men court women, complimenting them, sweet-talking them, showing them all the goods, waiting with bated breath for them to fall in love, hoping they take a leap of faith and fish into their wallets.
John-John shakes his head, his eyes looking straight ahead. “We cyan mek di heat do we like dis, Delores. No customers mean nuh money,” John-John says. His jaundiced eyes swim all over Delores’s face. “Wah we aggo do, Mama Delores?”
“What yuh mean, what we g’wan do? Ah look like ah know?” Delores fans herself harder, almost ripping the newspaper filled with the smiling faces of politicians and well-to-do socialites. She wants John-John to leave her alone to her own thoughts and feelings. But the boy can talk off your ears. He would sit there on the stool and talk all day if she lets him. Sometimes this interrupts Delores’s work, because tourists see him in the stall and politely walk away, thinking they were interrupting something between mother and son. “Well, Jah know weh him ah do. Hopefully him will sen’ rain soon,” John-John says.
“Believe you me,” she says to John-John, who squats to diligently paint one of his wooden birds. “Tomorrow g’wan be a new day. Yuh watch an’ see. Ah g’wan sell every damn t’ing me have.”
“Yes, Mama Delores. Just trus’ an’ Jah will provide fah all ah we,” John-John says. The pink of his tongue shows as he works on perfecting the bird’s feathers. He has been working on that one bird since last week. Usually it takes him only a few hours. When he finishes the bird, he separates it from the rest, which he wraps one by one in old newspaper to place inside the box. Delores picks up the bird he’s just finished. It’s more extravagant than all the others, with blue and green wings skillfully outlined with black paint, a red and yellow underbelly, and a red beak. The eyes are sharp, the whites in them defined with the small black pupils. It looks like it will be a popular item, expensive. Delores already prices it in her head. She guesses fifty U.S. dollars.