“Longer than a moment and I’m letting you fall,” she warned.
He raised a well-polished shoe off the dirt and into her palms. When he lifted himself to the height of the window and transferred his full weight onto her, she was surprised at how light he was. He was the same age and gender as Arthur, but in terms of their individual physicalities, they couldn’t have been more different: one of them sturdy and inert and almost impossible to get rid of, the other quick and insubstantial and seemingly on the perpetual verge of disappearance.
“Done.” He hopped down without a sound.
“Well?”
“They’re both on the sofa, which means no new business is under way. If there were a potential for that, they’d be across a table from each other. And there would be cake.”
Margot nodded. She, too, could have intuited this at a glance, but she wouldn’t have been able to explain it, which was an important difference.
“So,” she said. “You’re apprenticed.”
“Apprenticed?”
“It means to—”
“I know what it means. I just don’t know what you mean by it.”
She gave him a look meant to convey forthrightness, not pride. “My father has been training me to take over someday.”
“Preserving the legacy.” He winced. “A noble path.”
“And you?”
“Unlike my brothers, I’m not the sort of brute who can endure the canneries. So she totes me around with her instead.”
“Then you should make yourself of use.”
He eyed her disapprovingly. She looked at the dirt. The tentacle was just inches away, pill bugs nestled into its suction cups.
“Let’s go back to the porch,” she said.
“No. I prefer it here.”
He perched himself on a branch that didn’t look capable of supporting a sparrow, much less a human boy. She sat on the ground and gave the tentacle a little kick, which caused the pill bugs to wake and scatter. To an onlooker, it would have seemed like a childish thing—hiding in a bush, eavesdropping on the grown-ups—and at first, she felt that way, too. But the longer they sat there, the firmer her contact with the cold, hard earth, the more it appeared that Tino’s preference had been the correct one. Their discussion was about to take a delicate turn, and she was grateful for the darkness and containment the foliage provided.
“So why is she here?” Margot asked. “If there’s nothing new to talk about?”
Tino regarded her mournfully from above. “That’s just the way my people do it, I’m afraid. A signed contract is only the beginning. A true alliance means socializing. Endlessly.”
“Cake must be eaten.” Margot nodded. “Children must meet.”
“Don’t forget all the trips to church.”
He gave a terse, cynical smile. She offered one in return. He thought he wasn’t like her, but he was wrong. They were exactly the same: offspring dragged around by powerful parents and treated as heir or prop depending on the circumstance; captives who, despite their protests, were surprisingly conversant in the language of captivity.
“Tell me about the contract,” she said, rising to a crouch. They were looking directly into each other’s eyes now, the bougainvillea blossoms arranged wreathlike behind Tino’s head, as if by meticulous design. “What are the terms? I heard the cannery went for a very low price.”
“Outrageously low, but only because he agreed to certain conditions.”
“Such as?”
“He can buy sardines from my mother’s fleet, but no one else’s.”
“She owns a fishing fleet, too?”
“The biggest one in town.”
“So by selling the cannery to my father, she now controls both supply and demand.”
“And effectively profits from each step of the production process while simultaneously avoiding the unions’ antimonopoly nonsense.”
“Not bad.”
“I suppose. The only piece I don’t understand is your father. What on earth could be in it for him?”
There was an especially large flower just above Tino’s left ear. She reached up and tore it away, crushing the petals in her fist. Then she lowered herself back onto the ground. Again, Ricketts’s strange words and their sticky echoes. The Methodists, the butterfly trees. Her father as a young man, asleep in a tent.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
Tino cracked his neck once more, the sound like corn popping.
“Well, my advice is to not care too much,” he said. “There was a time when all that mattered to me was what she did and said and where I stood in relation to it. But now I realize it’s a losing game. I’ll succeed only if I escape.”
She wiped her hand on her trousers. “Easier said than done.”
“Is it, though? The way I see it, the only real problem is money. Just because our parents are rich doesn’t mean we are.”
She nodded and looked up. The green leaves looked perfectly black against the white patches of sky; an occasional seagull swooped by to disrupt the pattern. A shrillness from inside the house. Mrs. Agnelli’s laugh.