“You don’t live in the house too?” Thandi asks.
“Me is a big man. I get my own place,” Charles says defiantly. He opens the door to the small shack. It’s cozy, with a mattress on a spring box made from four planks hammered together. The mattress is covered halfway by a white floral sheet, soiled with that yellowing hue of old sweat. A kerosene lamp rests on a wooden table next to the mattress. Her eyes climb the walls to the window through which a gentle breeze blows the banana leaves. Thandi wonders how he sleeps at night with no curtains. Standing in the shack next to Charles, Thandi feels exposed. She hugs herself and watches Charles put down the two pairs of shoes on the basket-woven welcome mat that’s frayed at the edges. He then searches around the place for something, opening and closing the wooden chest by the bed. When he finds it he lets out a whistle.
“Take this.” Charles hands Thandi a big bath towel. Thandi doesn’t know how long it has been sitting at the bottom of that chest. She dabs her face. It smells like shampoo.
“It used to belong to my father.”
He takes the towel from Thandi and covers her shoulders. Very gently he sits her down on a wooden chair. He sits on the makeshift bed, his long legs jutting up like the legs of a praying mantis. Thandi tucks a lock of her hair behind her ears and looks down at the space between her legs.
“How is Jullette?” she asks, breaking the uncomfortable silence. She sits back against the hardness of the chair.
“Last ah heard, she’s doing fine,” Charles says.
“Where is she now?”
“Still in Mobay. She’s a housekeepah fi one ah di big hotel dem. Half Moon, ah t’ink.”
“She not in school?”
“Nah, sah.” He rubs the back of his head. “Jullette drop outta school longtime.”
“Oh.”
“She doing good fi herself, making har own-ah money. Good money too.”
“As a maid?”
“It gi’ har nuff independence. She ah handle har business.”
“Good for her. Tell her I say hello.”
Charles tilts his head and regards her sideways. “Yuh can tell her that yuhself.”
This is followed by another silence that leaves Thandi empty of words. Perhaps Charles is torturing her. That he knows she hasn’t even spoken to Jullette in, what? Five years? But this is not something Thandi or Jullette would ever acknowledge, for their separation is unspoken. She’s embarrassed about the beating of her heart, which punches with the force of gloved hands inside her rib cage. “I—I have to leave,” she says evenly, using every muscle, every ounce of willpower, to appear collected. “It’s getting late.”
“I can walk yuh back,” Charles says, lowering his knees.
“No. No need.” Thandi springs up from the chair. She can hardly bear to imagine what would happen if word got back to Delores that she was hanging out with Charles this late. Charles leans back on his elbows, watching her through long, thick eyelashes.
“Yuh really did intend fi swim?” he asks.
Thandi shrugs, her shoulders tensing under the weight of his question. “No.” She moves with his towel, not offering to give it back. And he doesn’t ask.
“And before dat, when I saw you?”
“I just wanted to be inspired.”
“You’re pretty good,” he says.
“Who told you could look in my book?”
“You left it. Di breeze blow it open.”
She lowers her eyes, embarrassed by what he probably saw. She touches the nape of her neck, feels her skin dissolve under the warm caress of his gaze. “Thanks,” she says.
She walks out of the shack and all the way home with his towel draped around her shoulders, a smirk hinged on her face; and, under the gossip of watchful women, ignoble.
“Did you go swimming?” Margot is sitting on the sofa, her legs crossed. Thandi takes off Charles’s towel and folds it. Each crease traps bits and pieces of her secret that she will unfold in private. “Yes,” she replies with her back turned to her sister.
“You hate swimming.”
“I was hot.”
“Thandi, look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Margot’s face is illuminated by the light of the kerosene lamp. Thandi never sees her during the day. She forgets what she looks like in daylight. Tonight her eyes and lips are dark, and in this lighting, her glare is ferocious, the charcoal she draws above and under her eyes making her look like a dog with rabies.
“Sit.”
“You okay?” Thandi asks, concerned. Her sister looks as though she has been crying.
“Don’t ask me anything. I said sit.”
Margot gestures to the chair at the table. Thandi hesitates. Her clothes are still wet and she needs to take them off. She sits anyway. Margot’s eyes fall to Thandi’s dark nipples. They stand erect through the thin material of the dress. She covers herself by folding her arms across her chest.
“Who were you with?” Margot asks.
“No one.”
“Thandi, look at me.”
Thandi raises her eyes. Margot appears to swallow something small, the base of her neck pulsing. “What’s going on, Thandi?”