customers just tear the life out of you more and more every day, though nothing was actually said, Petites Cendres just touched his pimply cheek and Yinn’s kiss brushed his cheek, oh this was balm for his night’s wandering, a slave to his needs, Petites Cendres figured he had no choice but to follow his customers from one hotel to the next, still secretly hoping that Yinn’s kiss would stave off his drop over the edge for just a few hours more, maybe loved, even saved by Yinn’s fierce spell just the way Fatalité had been, and as the fog rolled in around them in the remote park, Mai now knew she was under her father’s affectionate dominance and he had the hidden intention of reading her secrets, charmer that he was, he made it difficult for her to articulate what was almost an inner quake for her when he harked back to what he shouldn’t have, the episode with Manuel and the Mercedes when she was eleven, that whole clandestine world she thought he really wasn’t entitled to bring up, and sinking deeper into the morass of words and explanations he suddenly said I really didn’t know a thing about your going to the doctor with your mother and grandmother, if your grandmother can know why not me, I mean I am your father aren’t I, Mai flashed back to the fathers riding shotgun on their daughters’ virtue at banquets in the abstinence and purity clubs, what a laugh — her father was acting just like that, reassuring to the point of suffocating her as though he were there in the hall with them, dancing with their daughters, lulling them into torpor with their sedative presence and suppressing any and all reaching out to freedom from this rigid marriage to Daddy, and was it futureless but for his own egotism, Mai’s dad was benign though, he only wanted to understand her, not counter her, she thought to herself, her grandmother, Mélanie’s mother were women allies and had perhaps never told Daniel about her painful visit to the doctor, a day of arbitration and judgement when Mélanie would be consoled to hear her daughter, herself a child, was not pregnant, what a relief for both of them that neither would receive a guilty verdict, Grandmother Esther would no longer be able to walk in a few months and the trembling in her right hand would spread, sending out danger signals to her heart, the danger of being consigned to approaching nothingness, Mère had told Mélanie dear daughter don’t let that doctor get you down, he’s probably not all that competent anyway, I feel fine, just great, and anyway we’ve all got to live with the thought that anything alive on this earth is condemned to die, haven’t we, Mai nodded her approval though her grandmother now walked with a cane as Jean-Mathieu and Caroline had once done, and Mai, often accompanied by the governess Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint who now had less time for her and was gradually being shunted aside, the Haitian woman didn’t really like her anyway, in fact she couldn’t stand her compared to Vincent, who was her favourite, even if he was off studying medicine and no longer lived at home, Marie-Sylvie could never say his name without love and deference, Vincent her baby, this Mai though was no longer any concern of hers, always running wild and coming home late or not at all, Marie-Sylvie had less demeaning things to do than watch out for this one, what if it’s true thought Mai, her grandmother in faltering health was still so feisty and brave that Mai could never quite make out what the old lady was really feeling, jollier than she’d been for quite some time, and Mai thought I do love her, she’s here by me and she’ll stay that way, nothing’s changed, and I’m not having a baby as Mama was afraid I would, and now here was her father sitting and waiting for some sort of admission when she didn’t want to say a thing, boy this didn’t feel right sitting here with him in the car like this or out walking in the foggy park as the reddish-backed
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