When Thandi disappears outside into the darkness, she takes all of Delores’s breath with her. The girl must be smelling her ripeness, Delores thinks. Not her Thandi. She’s supposed to be the good one, different from her sister. Had Thandi not been such a good girl all this time, Delores would’ve knocked her in the head with the spoon she uses to stir the soup. Thandi’s eyes held in them the same glint of that thing Delores saw in Margot’s eyes years ago; the same glint that made Delores look away in case it struck her down like lightning.
She cannot get the sketch of the half-naked woman standing in front of a mirror from her mind. The resemblance between Delores and the woman is uncanny, almost like a picture taken of her—same face, same eyes, same mouth, same sagging breasts resting atop the high bulge of her belly. The earnestness in her daughter’s eyes when she looked at her and the hopeful grin that spread across the girl’s face—one Delores hasn’t seen in a long time, Thandi always being so serious. In the sketch Delores saw everything she thought she had hidden so well, tucked away in the folds of years, heaped upon each other like steps that she takes one at a time. In her daughter’s drawing, she saw the lines in her face, her double chin. She saw an ugly woman—an ugly black woman with bulging eyes too wide to be peered into before looking away, and nose too flat on the broad face. In this sketch she was not human, but a creature. This is how her daughter sees her—bull-faced and miserable. All Delores’s secrets and insecurities are exposed in the gaze of this child.
Margot was barely fourteen at the time. In the summers when Margot was out of school she would help Delores carry things to Falmouth and spread them out so that Delores could sell. While Delores sold items to tourists, Margot would help count the change and wrap the fragile items in newspaper. One day a tall, dark-haired man walked into Delores’s stall. He was wearing sunglasses, like most tourists. He had a presence about him, an air Delores associated with important people—white people. Like the ones who just bought out her stall. Except the man wasn’t white. A mixture, maybe. A mulatto kind. He wore a button-down shirt that revealed the dark hairs on his chest. When Delores peered up at him, she saw he was peering down at Margot. He turned to Delores, his eyes hidden behind the shades. “How much?” he asked in a voice that sounded to Delores like thunder.
“Di dolls are twenty, sah. Oh, an’ di figurines guh for fifteen U.S., but ah can give yuh fah ten. An’ di T-shirts! They’re unique, sah. One of ah kind! Only fifteen dollah.”
“No,” the man said, returning his focus to Margot. “I’m talking about her.” He used his pointy chin to gesture to a skinny Margot, who, at the time, had barely started menstruating or growing breasts. Delores looked from her daughter to the tall stranger wearing the sunglasses. “She’s not on sale, sah.”
The man pulled out a wad of cash and began to count it in front of Delores. Delores watched him count six hundred-dollar bills. She had never seen so much money in her life. The crispness of the bills and the scent of newness, which Delores thought was what wealth must smell like—the possibility of moving her family out of River Bank, affording her daughter’s school fee, books, and uniforms, buying a telephone and a landline for her to call people whenever she liked instead of waiting to use the neighbor’s phone—all these possibilities were too much to swallow all at once. “Sah—but she—she’s only fourteen.”