Verdene wonders if she can risk asking Delores about Margot.
“How are you?” Verdene asks.
“Why is it any of your business?” Delores retorts.
“And how is Margot? I haven’t seen her in years,” Verdene lies. She tries to sound as casual as possible, though her heart is racing. Delores makes two fists and places them on her hips.
“Yuh asking after my daughter?” Delores asks. The weight of her suspicion is heavy, like the basket of fruits and vegetables in Verdene’s hand.
“How dare yuh come here wid my dawta’s name in yuh mouth!” Delores’s eyes are flashing.
She wants to explain, but then thinks against it. “It’s not like you treated her like your daughter. You never cared about her. You never loved her. Not like—”
“You have no business coming in here, telling what kinda mother yuh t’ink I am,” Delores snaps. “She’s not like you. She has a man. A moneyman who own a hotel. So if is come yuh come to see about Margot, then yuh bettah turn back around an’ walk di other way.”
“I didn’t say—”
“I know exactly what yuh didn’t say,” Delores says through clenched teeth.
Verdene opens and closes her mouth. Delores sees through her. She knows. Has always known. It’s obvious in the way she looks at Verdene, her nostrils flared and eyes ablaze. A sneer creeps up Delores’s black ugly face.
“Margot has a moneyman,” Delores says. “A man who can provide for her. So g’weh wid yuh foreign accent an’ yuh inheritance. G’weh wid yuh nastiness! She’s not like you!”
Verdene backs away from Delores’s stall.
“She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you!”
The woman’s screams get louder and louder the farther Verdene runs. The other vendors peer from their stalls to see the commotion. They see Delores screaming, Verdene hurrying away, bumping into things and people. She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you!
She runs into a young Rasta fellow who is holding a box of carved birds. She has seen him selling them on the corner. The box falls, the birds crashing to the ground, breaking. The Rasta man raises his hands to his head, his eyes wild. “Yuh bruk me t’ings dem!” He catches Verdene by the arm, his grasp tight. Her basket falls and the fruits burst open on the pavement. The overripe breadfruit, when it hits the ground, sounds like a fist punching the soft, fleshy part of a body.
“Yuh haffi pay fah di birds!” the Rasta man says, glaring at Verdene.
“Let. Me. Go,” Verdene says through clenched teeth. Her chest heaves painfully as her heart presses against her rib cage. “I said let me go!”
But the Rasta refuses. “Gimme di money fah di birds.”
“Hol’ on pon har, John-John,” says one of the other vendors. “She was messing wid Delores earlier too. Come talk ah ’bout how she love Margot.”
“What yuh do to Mama Delores?” the man asks Verdene. “What yuh do to my Margot?”
His Margot? Verdene looks into his yellow eyes. “Who are you? You let go of me, or else.”
“Or else wah?” The man draws back his fist. Behind him, the vendors chant, “Do it! Do it! Do it! Punch di sodomite in har face!”
“Only a coward hits a woman,” Verdene says in a low voice that only he can hear. “My Margot would never want you.”
The Rasta man pulls Verdene’s face to his fist or his fist to her face. Verdene—who used to block fights between her parents, and who once felt the hard knuckles of her father’s hand in her left jaw to prevent it from fracturing another bone in her mother’s petite body—has perfected a self-defense maneuver that enables her to block the man’s fist and twist his arm behind his back. He grits his teeth as she holds his hand in place.
“When a woman says to let her go, you let her go!”
These words come from someone else. Must be from someone who is standing in the crowd, watching this taking place. For Verdene no longer recognizes her own voice.
“You heard me?” the woman—that other woman—says.
The Rasta man lets Verdene go, his eyes wide with fear. He watches Verdene pick up her basket, which is empty. He says nothing. Neither does the crowd that has gathered. Verdene suppresses the urge to cry. Not in public for all of these people to see how humiliated she really is. One by one she gathers the contents of her basket, knowing she will never return to buy produce from these people again. When she thinks she’s done, someone hands her an apple. Verdene looks up, from the clawlike fingers with blackened nails clutching the apple to the face of the woman.
“I believe this belongs to you,” the woman says; her face is a web of lines as though someone had taken off her skin, crumpled it like paper between fists, then put it back on.