Chapter Thirteen
Trinidad
1964
Her ship was out of Ponce at four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. Rafaela would arrive in Trinidad Friday morning, and she’d have the weekend to get settled before beginning her new job, her new life. Her letters would be cheerful and light. She’d write them faithfully every week, one each to her parents, her sister, and Candido. She would not write about her awkwardness with the other girls in the secretarial pool, who took orders easily, without prickling, and who demonstrated a bombastic informality with each other that Rafaela found both coarse and alluring. Rafaela appreciated some of these girls, but found herself unable to relax with them, unable to mimic their bonhomie. Neither would Rafaela mention in her weekly letters her homesickness, or how bad the food was in the canteen, or whatever flowered on this island that made her sneeze so loudly she sometimes startled a passing officer, causing him to wonder aloud how such a clamor came out of such a pretty little thing . Her English improved to include all kinds of curiosities. And there was plenty that felt familiar here, in Trinidad, so she focused her attention on those comforting details instead: the whiteness of the clouds across the warm blue sky, the Latin hymns in mass on Sunday mornings, the nighttime lullaby of el coquí outside her bedroom window.
When she received the news from Dolores, rather than from Candido himself, that Candido had booked a one-way ticket to New York, it happened again that Rafaela felt the wobbly blur at the edges of her vision. She wrote to him at once, and when his reply came, it had the feeling of a chronic affliction in that it both distressed her and felt so already-accustomed that the disquiet it provoked in her felt almost indulgent. My dearest friend , he wrote, what is the difference between an absence of a few hundred miles or a couple thousand? You are not here. New York on its worst day can be no drearier than San Juan without Rafaelita.
Candido was right that it made no real difference, she knew. Even if they’d both remained in San Juan, or if he’d come to Trinidad, or she to New York, even that wouldn’t have changed things. Because in that case, she would’ve had to examine the feelings he roused in her. And even if she did that, next she’d have to acknowledge that those feelings meant she was in love. And well, what then? She and Candido could never be together. She’d understood that from childhood, as clearly as she knew that Mamamía should never catch her with the polish and rag. Their incompatibility was as evident as the pink of her ear that day Lola had dragged her out of the pantry and up the stairs, away from him. Rafaela was attracted to Candido because they were young and he was beautiful. That would surely pass. This is what she told herself when she lay tangled up in the hot sheets at night, alone and thinking about him. It will pass , she insisted. Because what choice did she have, now that she was here, earning money for her family? There was no room for childish indulgence among the new responsibilities of her life.
And anyway, even though it was never explicitly spoken aloud, Rafaela had always understood, even before Trinidad, that it was fine for a man (like Papamío) to choose anyone he wanted (like Mamamía) as his spouse, no matter what his beloved looked like or where she came from or who her parents were. Men from certain bloodlines could do as they liked, and any attendant scandal for the man would be swift and light and quickly forgotten. The same was not true for Mamamía, nor would it be true for Rafaela. She knew it was different for women because, although no one ever said so, she had breathed and consumed and absorbed it since infancy: falling in love with a boy like Candido would ruin her. And despite the new circumstances of her life, she was not yet willing to concede that she might, in fact, already be ruined. It had not yet occurred to Rafaela that ruin and liberty were the same word. So the quavering of her heart notwithstanding, the possibility of Candido did not exist, and the ache that remained in the shadow he cast there only served to confound her.
In Trinidad, Rafaela learned how to flirt, and even more important, she learned how not to flirt. She learned how to subdue her smile, turn her face away, cave in her posture ever so slightly from the shoulders, to remove herself out from under the notice of a young man’s undesirable attention. For a girl as beautiful as Rafaela, a US naval base in the deep southern Caribbean was a veritable minefield of young men’s undesirable attentions. Her cousin, who was a lesser beauty, went out on dates three or four nights a week, but Rafaela stayed in and listened to the radio or wrote her letters, which grew more meandering with each passing week. Sometimes she wrote an extra letter, or two or three, to Candido in a given week. These extras she tried to imagine as simple narratives, a dispassionate chronicle of her time here, but that ruse was not sufficiently convincing. She never mailed more than one.
“All I’m saying is there’s much better food on this island than what they’re feeding us in that godforsaken canteen!” Clarisa would joke, wiggling into her stockings. “So, you have to tolerate some goofy fella looking down your top for an hour or two. At least you can get a decent pelau out of the arrangement.”
But Rafaela was only weeks out of saddle shoes and poodle skirts, weeks out of her school pinafore and lace socks. Never mind that some of these enlisted men were only eighteen, only a year older than her. They seemed decades older. Maybe it was the haircuts, the uniforms, the husky deepness of their voices. Maybe it was the way they swaggered when they asked if she had plans on Friday night, their yanqui presumptuousness, their aggressive cologne. Whatever it was, it wasn’t because she was hung up on Candido.
“Well, how about Parcheesi at Pat and Lorraine’s place tomorrow night then?” Clarisa asked, slipping into her heels.
This was tempting only because Rafaela did love games. Pat and Lorraine, like many of her cousin’s girlfriends, Rafa could do without. She appreciated Clarisa trying to include her, but it was clear to Rafaela, during the few evenings she did join in, that her tepid feelings about the girls were reciprocal. Rafaela didn’t know how to talk to them. She didn’t enjoy trying. Whenever she noticed two or more of her cousin’s friends sitting together in the canteen at lunchtime, Rafaela would hold her book an inch higher and pretend not to see them.
“Whattaya say?” Clarisa asked. “We can make sangria.”
Rafaela stood to help her cousin with the zipper on the back of her dress. “We’ll see,” she said.
Rafaela’s daily lunch break was thirty minutes, and that included a three-minute walk each way in the high heels she was still getting used to, then perhaps five minutes waiting in line for her food, which left her twenty minutes to eat. Luckily, the meal was reliably disagreeable enough that she didn’t mind leaving some portion of it behind on the tray. The dining room smelled of antiseptic and boiled tomatoes, but it felt like a glory to sit down for those twenty minutes, to quiet her mind. Sometimes the effort of hearing and speaking English all day left her with a mild headache, which she could often alleviate during these twenty blessed minutes just by briefly closing her eyes while she chewed her unpleasant food, by breathing deeply, and by temporarily evicting the foreign words from her brain. She eased into her Spanish thoughts like a warm bath.
But for the past several days in a row, a very persistent young man with red hair and freckles stood up from his table when he saw her coming, and robbed some number of those precious minutes from her. She felt them slipping past, one, two, while this man smiled in front of her with his yellow teeth and yellow skin and bright orange hair. Rafaela was tired and hungry, and the tray of food was heavy. She didn’t like balancing her milk on the tray, carrying it through the crowded canteen. She worried someone would bump her or the milk would slide off the edge, that she’d spill it all over herself and end up in a sour stink for the rest of the day. The milk trembled in its glass.
“Please,” she said, “I need to sit down.”
The name patch on the young man’s breast said “Busby.” She tried again to walk past him, but he stepped into her path. This was his favorite move. When she tried a different route, he blocked that way too. Rafaela blinked slowly, telling the headache just to be patient, she would be there soon with the remedy. And then, for a moment, she imagined letting herself fly with the tray. She imagined how the hum of conversation in the room would arrest itself at once, the only remaining sound the sizzle of meat on the kitchen grill, followed immediately by the clatter of her flying silverware and falling tray. She imagined Busby’s shocked face, his freckles hidden beneath a dripping white veil, eyelashes sticky with milk. She accidentally smiled.
“See? I knew you had a smile in there for me!” he said. “Rafaela, right? I’d never forget a name like that, and on such a knockout.”
She didn’t even need to answer him anymore; he knew what to expect, and there seemed to have been a shift: he no longer hoped to charm or convince her, but instead to wear her down, to find a way to leave her no choice. She looked at his face again, and lamented that it was clean and dry.
“Foxy girl like you can’t say no forever. Come on, you gotta be lonely, right? Just one date. Come out with me for one date, and I’ll have you begging for a second!”
Rafaela didn’t have it in her to respond, so instead she turned, and was about to collapse into the nearest chair, but even as she made this decision, she was aware of the risk. There was an empty chair directly across the table, and they both knew he would take it as an invitation. He would colonize her blissful, important minutes with his idiotic freckles and wretched voice. Her shoulders drooped, and the milk began to slide, and just as she felt that a scream might make its way out of her throat and into the air without her expressed permission, there was an arm reaching across her, a hand that caught the sliding glass of milk and lifted it up, lightening the weight of the tray. And then a second hand that lifted the tray right out of her arms.
“Bug off, Busby.” The man who belonged to the hands had spoken. “That’s an order, Private.”
Busby’s cheeks reddened beneath all those freckles, and Rafaela could see the struggle that it was for him to close his mouth and obey, but after a moment, he did.
“Aye, sir,” Busby said, saluting before turning on his heel to retreat to his table.
What prevented Rafaela from smiling at the man who was now carrying her tray in one hand and her glass in the other was her worry that a new antagonist had simply replaced the first, that the newcomer might believe his chivalry had earned him the right to sit across from her during her remaining balance of dwindling minutes. Still, she meant it when she said, “Thank you.”
“It’s that clown who should be thanking me,” the man said. “For rescuing him from further disgrace.”
Now she did smile.
“Where would you like to sit?” he asked.
She pointed to her favorite table, by the window. There were crumbs on it, but she would take it anyway, as it was half-hidden by a large pillar and she liked the view beyond, of the sea. Sitting there, Rafaela could almost see Port of Spain across the bay, and she knew if she looked in the other direction, and her eye followed the spits of land that flaunted themselves out into the sea, if she allowed her gaze to travel across those islands and out toward the wider Caribbean beyond, if she could stretch her gaze long enough, magically enough, to six hundred miles, then Rafaela would see Puerto Rico.
The man walked with her toward the table, and then set her tray down with the glass on top. He pulled the chair out for her, just as if he were Papamío and she were Mamamía and they were having dinner on Nochebuena at La Fortaleza.
How odd , she thought to herself, but she sat into the chair and lifted her fork. She tried to steel herself for the moment when he pulled out the opposite chair and sat, to regale her with his clamorous English. But he didn’t pull out the chair, and he didn’t sit. Instead he rested his hands on the back of it and nodded his head at her somewhat formally, so that she was able to admire, for the first time, the unexpected appeal of that head. Tanned skin, an impressive whip of wavy black hair, and thick black eyebrows above the most piercing blue eyes she had ever seen. He clicked his heels together lightly and almost bowed.
“Have a lovely day, Miss,” he said.
And she was so surprised by this that when she opened her mouth to respond, she found nothing inside to say. He was leaving her in peace, this gallant man. He wanted nothing from her, had no plan to plunder her time, to take what was hers and fill it with noise.
“Thank you!” she said again, but he was already on his way. She caught a glimpse of his name patch just as he turned to go.
Brennan .
The chapel on base at Chaguaramas was small and spare, and although Rafaela attended ten o’clock mass there every Sunday, she felt that the damp, soupy aroma of the carpets made it difficult to discern the voice of God. She got nothing out of the service except the wafer, and so finally one weekend she didn’t bother going at all, a decision that felt risqué and thrilling altogether on the morning she made it, but which later resulted in a case of homesickness so acute that she was filled with remorse, and ended up saying nine rosaries in the effort to restore her good humor. The following Sunday morning, Rafaela rose early and full of contrition. She put on a cap-sleeved pink dress, silk stockings, and black pumps. She wore a simple pearl in each ear and a lipstick with a reasonable shimmer. By 7:30 A.M ., she climbed aboard the bus at the gate that would carry her away from base and into town.
Although Rafaela had never been there before, the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Port of Spain was familiar the moment she stood in the plaza and watched the white clouds float behind the imposing twin spires. It was an elaborate wedding cake of a church, but when she stepped inside and breathed the scent of salt and stone and the smoky memory of incense, she was home again, sitting on the edge of her four-poster bed beside Lola, buckling their Sunday shoes.
When they were small, the sisters got themselves dressed for mass, and then they waited for Mamamía to inspect them. She’d straighten an earring here, adjust a hair clip there, and then kiss them each on top of the head. Their mother was always immaculate in a sleeveless shift, pearls at her neck, giant sunglasses, even in the house. Mamamía was prepared for the rigors of the late morning sun, prepared for the envy of every other woman at Parroquia Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. When they walked to mass, Rafaela enjoyed the promenade, the twirling of the parasol handle against her palm. She liked observing what the other girls were wearing, comparing the varying heights of their mothers’ heels (no one’s were ever taller than Mamamía’s). Rafaela and Dolores giggled behind their fans whenever they caught a boy ogling their mother, which was often. In San Juan, mass was a team sport.
The memory made her feel even more alone, even farther away from home, and at the basilica, when she dipped her fingers into the holy water and blessed herself, Rafaela had the sensation that her body itself was a church, that the cavity of her chest was the tabernacle. She could feel her own heart beating inside. But then mass began, and the sounds were a balm, the Latin prayers flying up through the vault, echoing among the arches. There was something curative in the simple acts of sitting, kneeling, standing, kneeling, sitting. Reciting the habitual words. She imagined Dolores and her parents kneeling in their faraway pew, their voices blending with her own earnest prayer. By the time she took communion, Rafaela felt restored to herself. She felt prepared to endure another week in exile.
So it didn’t feel like luck, exactly, when just at that moment, she opened her eyes and her gaze fell upon the back of a head she had seen before. She recognized the precision line just there above the collar where the jet-black hair faded into the strong, tanned neck. She stayed where she was, and that head inclined as Rafaela watched from her kneeler in the ninth pew. When the priest lifted the host, it must’ve been her imagination, because she couldn’t have heard his voice from this far back. She must’ve used her own fancy to project the solidity of the single word there, into the ether. She gave it the hint of a Spanish inflection.
“Amen,” Peter Brennan said, as he took the host.
And when he turned, she was able to study him in profile for the first time, from behind the protective shield of her folded hands. The startling thickness of those black lashes, the expressive eyebrows, the ruddy cheeks. His eyes icy blue, even in profile, even in the dim glow of the stained-glass shadows. He turned the corner to begin his walk back, and at that moment, his eye fell on Rafaela watching him. She squeezed her eyes closed as quickly as she could, but it was too late. He’d already seen her, and she’d seen him, the way his face changed instantly, before he could stop himself. The smile that looked like an escapee, the dimple, the recognition. If someone had asked her, in that moment, to name what it was she was feeling, Rafaela may have paused and given the matter real consideration. With sincere reflection and an honest accounting, she may have diagnosed herself as suffering from loneliness, longing, and an acute case of straightforward, unsophisticated lust. An acknowledgment of that reality likely would have tranquilized some part of the romantic commotion that was happening within her. But no one was there to ask. Rafaela cracked open one eyelid to watch him go and, indeed, it was too late. She felt the tabernacle of her breast fly open. She felt her heart move toward him.
When mass ended, she took her time in the pew, singing until the last verse of the last hymn was complete, and then kneeling once more in an effort to recapture the tranquility she’d experienced briefly before the appearance of the handsome young officer had disquieted her all over again. When she gathered her bag and hand fan from the stone floor, and blessed herself at the door, when she stepped out of the cool, consecrated hush and into the blazing Caribbean midmorning sun, she expected to find him loitering there on the steps, or nearby on a bench. She’d taken her time because she liked the idea of making him wait. She assumed he’d make small talk, remark on the service, the church, the weather, ask for her name, her story, her family background, and because she already knew he was a gentleman, she presumed he’d do all of this while trying not to gaze too long at her mouth, and trying not to glance at all toward the fixed buttons on the front of her dress. But when she shaded her eyes and scanned the plaza, that officer and his glorious head of hair were already gone.
Rafaela began to look for him everywhere. In the canteen during her lunch break, in the laundromat where she washed everything but her unmentionables (which she washed by hand in a basin in her room because she couldn’t bear the idea of a sailor watching her fold her clean underthings in a public place under fluorescent lighting), on the brisk walks she and Clarisa took around base in the evenings to stretch their legs after working all day. Rafaela seldom ran into him, though, and when she did, the officer always acknowledged her with a smile and a friendly nod that was, Rafaela felt, far too courteous.
All of which is to say that, when at last they finally spoke, Rafaela was absolutely swollen with anticipation, straining to hold on for dear life. More than a month had elapsed since she’d seen him at the basilica that Sunday morning, almost three months since the day he’d rescued her in the canteen, and although she returned to the same mass now week after week, and sat in the same pew, and closed only one eye behind the tent of her folded hands when she knelt to say her prayers, she only saw him at the basilica on two other occasions, and both times, although she learned to sing with a little less devotion, and move herself more quickly toward the door after the recessional hymn, still, he was always gone by the time she got to the plaza.
So by that sixth Sunday, she wasn’t surprised to find that he was nowhere to be found when she emerged from the church. She’d become as accustomed to the disappointment as she was to the hope. Still, in the plaza, she felt her shoulders slump within the starched fabric of her blouse. The bus stop was five blocks from the church, but she had almost two hours to kill before the bus would be back, so Rafaela had developed the habit of buying herself a pot bake, and then window shopping while she ate it, as if she were Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The breakfast was the best thing she would eat all week, so she savored every bite, and took her time peering in the windows at the things she’d never buy: jewelry, clothes, hats, shoes. When it began to feel melancholy, when it reminded her too much of what her life had been like before, she allowed her gaze to soften, and she looked at her own reflection instead, and she recognized that she didn’t need anything but this one body, the clothes she had on, the sweet warmth of the coconut bread wrapped in her paper napkin. Her family. She took a bite, sinking her teeth into the crust, and then smiled at her image in the glass.
There, just there, was the illusion of other teeth smiling back, the grin too large for her face. She fixed her gaze, readjusted her focus so she was looking past the glass instead of at its surface. And there he was at a table on the other side, a tiny cup of coffee on a saucer in front of him and a newspaper folded beneath one elbow. And was he… was he laughing at her? He waved then, and she felt her cheeks redden and her mouth go dry, which made it difficult to chew and swallow the rather large mouthful of the pot bake she’d just crammed in there. Rafaela waved back, and then, once she’d managed to swallow the bread, she laughed too. And then he stood from his seat, leaving the cup briefly unattended, and swung the door open onto the sidewalk, alarming the waitress who chased after him, accosting him in the doorway.
“Oh no, I’m not leaving,” he said to the waitress. “I just spotted a friend.” He gestured at Rafaela.
The waitress eyed him suspiciously, but backed away, keeping her eyes on him in case he should try to run. He looked up then, and locked his own eyes with Rafaela’s, by which time she had wrapped the pot bake back into its napkin along with her dignity.
“Come in!” he said.
Rafaela could barely respond. She stood on the sidewalk, momentarily frozen in her heels.
“Let me buy you a coffee?”
She nodded once, and as she approached the doorway, he didn’t move himself out of the way. He stood holding the door open so she could brush past him as she walked through. She passed closer than she needed to, inhaling the scent of his neck along the way.
He bought her coffee, and then another coffee, and then a waffle with maple syrup and a fried egg and some bacon and a stack of toast with extra butter, and he very kindly did not mention her enormous appetite, although he could not entirely hide his admiration at how much she managed to pack into her tiny frame. Rafaela ate enough for a week, hoping he might buy her breakfast again next Sunday, and when she was finally finished eating, he bought her another cup of coffee, and she missed her bus.
“I’d offer you a lift, but I don’t know how you’d manage the motorbike in that skirt,” he said, which was the closest he ever came to remarking on her appearance. Rafaela was surprised to find that, as much as she abhorred those kinds of remarks from the other men on base, she longed to know what this one thought of her. She’d have gladly traded back at least one slice of that toast in exchange for a compliment about her eyes or her smile or her accent. But Peter kept his hands folded on the table between them and set the conversation very carefully in the direction of childhood, family, work, travel. He had an easy warmth, was quick to laugh, and she had the impression that he talked to her the same way he might talk to a friend, another man. It was both stirring and strange, especially when she found she had difficulty concentrating on what he was saying—not because of the swiftness or complexity of his English words, but because those words were coming from such an uncommonly lovely mouth. Rafaela leaned in. She tried to focus on the ideas instead of the lips.
They waited for the late bus together, and when it arrived, instead of seeing her safely aboard and bidding her good afternoon, he got on with her.
“But what about your motorbike?” she asked, as he slid into the seat beside her.
He waved a hand. “My duty hours start late tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll come back and grab it in the morning.”
The next Sunday morning, when Rafaela turned up at the gate for the early bus to Port of Spain, Peter was already waiting, his black hair so thick that even the rigorous grooming of the Navy barber couldn’t fully domesticate it. Rafaela noticed that when he wasn’t in uniform, he wore it parted and swirled to one side like a dollop of whipped cream. He was wearing a lemon-yellow guayabera and khakis, and Rafaela had a hard time keeping her face neutral when she saw him there. She was engaged in that effort when she noticed that there were two other people already waiting at the bus stop as well, and one of them was a woman, and she was standing rather close to Peter actually, and she was leaning toward him, and as Rafaela watched, he said something to her, and she threw her head back in laughter, touching Peter’s arm. She was touching his arm. So now the effort for Rafaela to keep her face neutral took an entirely new direction, and when she came to a stop, she gave him a perfunctory nod and said, “Good morning,” in the same clipped way her math teacher at Las Madres used to say good morning to his students when he was hungover. Peter smiled at her, but Rafaela turned away, pretending to peer down the road in search of the bus, which was not due for another seven minutes. She felt like a fool; for all the times she had triple-checked his left hand for a wedding band, it had never occurred to her that the absence of a ring didn’t mean he was available. No wonder he’d been immune to her presence. Despite the tumult of her feelings, there was a tickle up the back of her neck when he said her name.
“Rafaela, do you know Mindy?”
The girl removed her hand from Peter’s arm and stuck it out toward Rafaela, who shook it reluctantly.
“I don’t believe I do,” Rafaela said.
“I’m Mindy.” The girl pumped Rafaela’s hand in her grip. “Oh, I guess he just said that!”
She laughed uproariously again, although it was not yet 7:30 A.M .
Rafaela found herself unable to muster a polite response, silenced by the scrutiny with which she was now studying her competitor. Mindy’s hair was shiny, but her face was a little horsey, Rafaela decided. She glanced at Peter, whose expression was inscrutable.
“Mindy works in the officers’ mess,” he said.
Mindy dropped her voice behind her hand, and leaned toward Rafaela, “And boy, it really is a mess, wow!”
She laughed even louder this time, and Rafaela noticed that Peter moved his arm before Mindy could place her hand there again, whether for his own comfort or to save Rafaela from the spectacle, she couldn’t say.
Because Mindy’s joke had been overt and not at all funny, withholding a response would’ve been rude, so Rafa tried. She offered a limp little breath and a smile, a lukewarm expression of amusement. She felt it was more than sufficient.
“Rafaela’s in the secretarial pool,” Peter said, and Rafaela nodded.
But before she had to say anything more, the bus appeared mercifully early, and although she’d been the last one to arrive at the bus stop, Rafaela felt no compunction about being the first one to climb aboard. She flashed the base ID that allowed her free transport into town, and made her way to a seat near the back, where she turned her face toward the window and clamped her handbag across her lap. She felt the tingle of pressure behind her eyes and couldn’t tell whether the prospective tears were from heartache or simple humiliation.
She liked him. Rafaela could’ve had a date with any single sailor or officer in all of Trinidad, but he was the only one who’d captured even a slip of her interest. She felt so stupid. Out of her peripheral vision Rafa watched Mindy slide into the second seat, right behind the driver, and scooch her weight quickly to the window, patting the seat beside her. Rafa turned her head farther toward the window, wishing she could shove it open and climb out. She slouched down in her seat. In her mind, she heard Mamamía telling her to sit up straight, but she ignored her faraway mother, who would surely make an exception under these circumstances. Rafaela closed her eyes, hoping her lids could hold back the mortifying tears she was brewing. She wished Lola was here.
And then she smelled him before she saw him, the mild spice of his aftershave. And then she felt him leaning his shoulder against hers, bumping his weight lightly into her frame.
“You okay?” Peter asked. He was sitting beside her.
Rafaela fluttered her eyes open, but looked only at the back of the seat in front of her. She sat up straighter and reached for an excuse for her behavior, her mood.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Bit of a headache, I guess.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb to illustrate her malady.
“Yes, well,” he said softly, “Mindy’s been known to cause headaches.”
Rafaela felt her posture shift, her spine uncurl.
“Chilblains too,” he whispered.
And then he executed an act of outright magic. Like a shaman, and without the slightest acknowledgment of the spell he was casting, he slipped seamlessly into Spanish as he explained that Mindy was not his girlfriend, that from what he could tell, she was good-natured and lonesome and a long way from home, and that it was a balancing act, as he’d gotten to know her a little bit, to conduct himself in a way that provided kindness and comfort without encouraging any false hopes on her part. There was only one girl on base, actually only one girl in all of Trinidad, or perhaps on the planet, with whom Peter felt no desire to keep his balance. For this one girl, he was ready to fall.
Rafaela listened to all of this without breathing, without moving, without lifting her eyes from the seat in front of her. She marveled at his beautiful Spanish, which changed his voice, changed the words he chose to express himself, changed her insides from solid to liquid so that, when she finally looked up, it was first to his mouth, to see the changing shapes of his lips as he formed those beautiful, homecoming words, and only then, only after, to his piercing blue eyes.
“I’m hoping that girl might let me buy her breakfast again, after mass,” he said.
And then he set his hand open, palm up, on his own knee. And waited for her to take it.