with a knife, sprinkled salt, and dug in with a small spoon. Between bites, she broke off bits of toast and ate them. Alice loved watching her eat; she got such immense pleasure from the simplest food. Her profile was a fallen glory, her breasts sagging. Her face was a ruin, wrinkled to lizard skin by years of African sun. She took a sip of tea and looked at Alice. “So, what will you do?”
“Leave him?” asked Alice in a small voice.
“Is this the first time?”
“Yes.”
“Does he love her?”
“He’s infatuated.”
“People get over it. No one’s perfect,” Lillian said. “He seems decent enough.”
No one’s perfect, Alice said in her head, rolling it around like a marble. She felt as though she were seeing the world through Lillian’s glaze of disappointment and compromise and something harder to define. Not resignation, not joy. If the feeling were a color, it would be gray green, the color of moss on the north side of large trees, the thing that endures, that softens edges.
Next door, the house was dark. She went home to check on Daphne, and shut the door firmly against marauding dogs.
She and Lawrence met a couple of days later over the back fence. The water had drained halfway out of the hole. Five orioles called, weela-weeoo, weela-weeoo, as though they’d flown into paradise. Lawrence was wearing the shorts of his safari suit and a T-shirt with a smear of toothpaste down the front. “I’m finished with her,” he said. “I told her last night it was over. I never loved her. You know that, don’t you, Alice? I was obsessed, I can’t explain it.”
How did she know he wasn’t still obsessed?
“It was like a drug,” he said hanging onto the fence like a criminal. “I didn’t want it, well I did. Yes, I did very much, the way you’d want a cup of coffee after not having one for three days. No, stronger than that, much stronger. Do you hate me?”
She considered his question. His hair was rumpled and needed to be washed. “No. But I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust that it’s over.”
“It’s over. I swear it. I miss you. Will you come home?”
She studied him a moment and smiled at him for the first time in weeks. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Well if you don’t hate me, do you like me?” He touched her finger through the fence.
“That’s not really the question.”
“What is?”
“We didn’t make a nest for ourselves. It’s dry sticks. We couldn’t make a baby.” Her eyes filled.
“Do you want to go home, I mean home home?”
“No.”
Their fingertips touched once more, and she returned to Lillian’s house. It was quiet inside, and the white-walled rooms were cool and peace filled. A faint smell of veldt rose from the grass rugs. Martha, the Gordons’ servant, was in the kitchen humming a song, pulling it from low down. Alice saw the back of her, the motion of her arm whipping something in a bowl. She walked into the guest room and sat on the bed. The orioles still called. They didn’t know that the water was sinking into the earth, more each day. She looked down at her hands resting in her lap, one on top of the other.
Lillian was having a bath. “Well?” she called through the door.
“He wants us to try again. Do you think I should?”
“It has nothing to do with me,” Lillian said. It was quiet behind the door as though she was thinking. “Why don’t you come in?”
“In there?”
“What do I have to hide?”
Lillian was wearing a white bath turban and her face was rosy from the rising heat. Under the water, shimmering just under the surface, were stretch marks crisscrossing her belly. Hope, and hope again. “Sit down,” she said. Her breasts were flattened out, draped softly to each side. Alice perched on the edge of the tub, near her feet.
“What does your heart say?” Lillian asked.
“My heart?” As though she’d never asked it anything.
Lillian slid underwater and sliced up through, her face shining with droplets. “That’s all that matters. Do you want to go back or not?”
She wasn’t sure.
Lillian sat up in the bath and said, “It’s none of my business, but when I was your age, I thought my life was over. I’ll dry off and we’ll have a cup of tea, and then you can sleep on it.”
The water came back on. Isaac had disappeared without a trace. Each afternoon after work, Alice drove to Naledi, parked the truck,