Chapter 19

19

ADA TRIED TO KEEP BUSY. THERE WAS LITTLE TO OCCUPY HER NOW, AND SHE expected that Mr. Oswald would let her go soon. She would have to find work somewhere else, but until that happened, she saw no reason not to make herself useful here. She soaked linens and scrubbed bedpans and put the Bible away. She wet a rag with vinegar and cleaned the looking glasses in the parlor. She wiped the walls, which were papered, even though in many places the paper had peeled and curled at the seams. Worry seeped into her mind at certain moments, remembering what the doctor had said to her in the hall, wondering whether Mr. Oswald had overheard. But if Mr. Oswald asked her about it, she told herself again and again, she would simply explain. She had gone to get fever pills. She had been trying to help. What she did not know is whether that would be reason enough to keep him from being angry with her.

By Saturday, after three days of cleaning, Ada was out of things to do. To escape the feeling of grief that had settled all through the house, she went outside, where the air was fresher and a hot wind tousled the trees. It was just past the noon hour, and in her boots and her patchwork dress, Ada wandered down the hillside, this time in search of flowers that she could take to Mrs. Oswald’s funeral the next day. She found plenty of starlike white ones growing among patches of groundcover, but those were not good for picking, and she passed them by. Small yellow flowers were everywhere, but they were also too tiny for picking, their stems less than one finger tall. Behind an outhouse, Ada spotted a cluster of striking coral-colored blooms, and she uprooted them and held them as she kept on.

She was more than halfway down the hill, her eyes trained on the ground, when out of the clear air she heard someone calling her name. She looked up and saw Omar several feet away.

He walked closer and took off his hat. “I thought that was you,” he said. With his free hand, he pointed. “Now I recognize the dress.”

Ada tugged once on the skirt to make sure it hung full. “My mother made this dress,” she said. “Her specialty is making dresses that stand out. She can’t seem to make them any other way.” She smiled. “What are you doing up here?”

“It is my lunch.”

“Well, aren’t you supposed to be eating it, then?”

“I ate already. But every day after lunch I take a walk.”

“And you walked here?”

He nodded. “You told me where you work. I hoped to see you.”

Before she had ever stepped foot on the isthmus, she had heard that Panamanians were resentful of outsiders like her. But she didn’t get even the faintest hint of a feeling like that from Omar.

“You are busy, though?” Omar asked.

“I was gathering flowers.” Ada held up what she had picked so far.

“Ah, pluma de gallo.”

“What?”

“That is the name of the flower. In English it is ‘the feather of a rooster,’ I think.”

The thought that Mrs. Oswald would have known the name of the flower, or would have liked to have known it, made tears well in Ada’s eyes, and she reached up to wipe them away.

“I upset you?” Omar asked with alarm.

Ada shook her head. “These flowers—they’re for a funeral tomorrow. Mrs. Oswald...” She could not say the rest.

Omar’s face dropped. “I am sorry,” he said. “I did not know.”

Ada nodded, and suddenly she was crying more than she would have liked. Omar pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and gave it to her. She wiped her face with the threadbare square of cotton, and when she passed it back, after gulping a bit of air, said, “My sister is sick, too. And after what happened to Mrs. Oswald, I can’t stop thinking...” She bit her full bottom lip to keep from crying again.

“That is why you came to Panamá?” Omar asked. “For your sister?”

Ada told him about the doctor who had visited the house, about his opinion that Millicent needed surgery, about the ￡15, which was a sum of money that was hard to come by, about leaving without telling anyone, about traveling over on the big ship by herself.

Omar looked at her with a sort of gaping astonishment. “You are brave.”

“Am I? My mother prefers to say I’m impetuous. She’d rather I didn’t do half the things I do.”

Omar nodded, then said, “My father is also that way. He does not understand the things that I do.”

“Like what?”

“He is angry that I work in the canal.”

“Could be he’s just worried about you.”

“I think he does not understand. He is a fisherman, so he is always by himself. But when I come to work, I can see people. The men in my gang say hello to me when I arrive and wish me well when I leave. They let me eat lunch with them, and they talk to me and we laugh. I have never had anything like that before.”

“Well, you tell your father all that?”

“My father does not want to hear anything that I say. We are not speaking to each other now.”

Ada tried to imagine her mother and her not speaking to each other, but it was impossible. Her mother could get angry, of course, usually whenever Ada behaved of her own accord, outside the bounds of good sense, as her mother would say, but even amid the anger, Ada knew—she never doubted—how profoundly her mother loved her. Ada had fallen into a bramble of nicker nuts once and come back to the house dripping with blood, and her mother had frowned and asked what had happened, how could it have happened, Ada was supposed to have been doing her chores, chores that had nothing to do with nicker nuts, of that she was sure, but even as her mother said all of that, she set Ada on the chair—pressing a towel to every perforation until the blood dried to beads and dabbing aloe onto every cut—and when she finished both her ministrations and her lecturing, she cupped a hand round Ada’s head and kissed her at the temple and sighed.

Glumly, as though talk of his father had pained him, Omar put his hat back on and said, “My break is ending. I should go.”

He looked terribly sad, and Ada did not know what to say. “Thank you for telling me the name of the flowers.”

He nodded. “I am sorry to hear about Mrs. Oswald,” he said.

They both had their sadness.

Omar started backing away. Before he was too far, Ada said, “If your father won’t talk to you, you can come talk to me anytime.”

At that, as he walked down the hill, Omar smiled, as Ada was hoping he would.

***

ADA CARRIED THE flowers back to the house. In the kitchen, Antoinette gave her a sidelong look as Ada filled a glass with water and set the stems inside. Antoinette was standing at the worktable, using a dish towel to fan a huge pink ham that, from the look and the smell, had just come out of the oven.

“What are you doing?” Ada said, placing the flowers by the window to save them for the next day.

Antoinette sucked her teeth. “What it look like?”

“Cooling a ham.”

“Well, your eyes no deceive you.”

“But where did it come from?”

Antoinette said, “Ham come from a pig.”

With all the faux innocence she could muster, Ada said, “True? And here I been thinking it comes from a toad.”

Antoinette frowned. “You don’t have something else to do?”

“I picked those flowers for the burying.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“But I can help if you need. I know how to cook some things.”

Antoinette scoffed. “Me don’t need help with the food.”

Ada walked closer to the ham on the counter and leaned down to sniff. It smelled like suckling pig, and her mouth watered at the thought.

With her hip, Antoinette bumped Ada aside. She threw the dish towel over her shoulder, cut two thick slices of the warm ham, and laid them on a plate. “You want to help,” she said, “deliver this to Mister Oswald for me.”

Ada stared at the plate. She had hardly seen Mr. Oswald these past two days. If the newspapermen or the chaplain weren’t at the house, he shut himself up in his study, and that was more than all right with her. Somewhere mixed in with his grief, she did worry he was angry with her, so she would rather keep clear of him if she could.

“Go on,” Antoinette said, thrusting the plate forward.

But Ada shook her head. “I hear you don’t need help with the food,” she said.