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new life.
    You used to say that the young don’t know what they want. I am not so fragile as to believe that anymore. I’m a man, not a boy. The worth of things in life comes with risk. You taught me that. There is no doubt in my mind that my decision was the right one. Please have faith in me; you always have.
    Send something soon,
Mãe
. Let me know if you are all well. My strength is with me, now.
    Your son,
    Manuel
    Manuel has asked Pepsi to mail the letters he’s written, all addressed to São Miguel, Açores. Pepsi asks who Maria Theresa da Conceição Rebelo is. She looks relieved when Manuel tells her. He wonders what his mother must be thinking now—if she even knows. It’s been weeks; has she received word yet that her son has met his father’s same fate—lost at sea? Or, could his letters have reached her first, saving her from this torment. Or after, with news of a resurrection? He is eager for a response.
    “Fishermen need to live by the sea, don’t they, Manuel?”
    “Yes, Andrew,” Manuel nods.
    Andrew begins to dress in layers of coats and then tops off his head with a hat, the fur-lined flaps framing his ruddy face. He is off to check his traps. His padded frame can barely fit through the narrow door. As he hunkers down to go out he turns to look at Manuel, who is writing a letter, and then quickly moves to look at his daughter, who lifts a heavy roasting pan out of the oven in a billow of steam and brushes her wet bangs away from her face with her forearm. He grunts as he moves out the door like a lumbering bear.
    “My father told me we have to keep quiet about this or they’ll send you to some farm in Ontario, Manuel … to work.”
    “Is okay, Pepsi. Shhh. I no say nothing.” Manuel picks at her loose hair and tucks some strands behind her ears.
    “I don’t want anyone to know, Manuel.” They both sit on Manuel’s cot.
    “No one.”
    “I don’t know why she left. I thought it was me, or more her disappointment in giving birth to me? It was all too much for her, I suppose. Growing up I wanted to know—I wanted a reason to blame. Do you understand, my darling?”
    Manuel didn’t ask the question about her mother, although he had often wondered. She had been seven when her mother left her, them. Her father never made much sense when he tried to explain. But in his lame drunken attempts, deep down Pepsi knew
he
was the reason.
    “
This barren heath
—that’s what she called this place; it’stoo far from Brigus to be called anything. But this was the place where she gave birth to me, alone. And as the years passed I began to notice the sadness in her eyes. Maybe she wanted a reason to blame too.”
    Pepsi fixes her eyes on the front doorknob and talks. She looks up at Manuel to see if he is listening.
    “I guess I’ll never know.”
    “You father no say why?”
    “Ah, whatever Father tried to do to reassure my mother was never enough, though. A child can see things, you know, Manuel.”
    “Is hard for lose a mother. But memories you have, no? This make you strong. It make
me
strong.”
    She smiles at Manuel’s much-improved conversation. She is tired and flushed but happy to keep going.
    She tells Manuel of her yearly birthday trip to St. John’s where, if need be, she would get fitted for a new leg and brace. She swings her head from side to side with each memory: the smells of her mother’s cooking, the hours her mother spent teaching her to read, the little dog her mother had left behind who ran after a blowing leaf then disappeared over the cliff. Pepsi rushed to the edge and saw his body smashed and crooked against the shore rocks.
    “All I have left of my mother is this strand of almost-pink pearls she bought for me at a place called Kresge’s, in Toronto—that’s what the box said. She sent them to me on my tenth birthday along with a note:
Dear Pepsi, Please don’t be angry. I just couldn’t any longer. I needed to breathe.
” She rolls her fingertips along the