The Dew Breaker

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Book: Read The Dew Breaker for Free Online
Authors: Edwidge Danticat
Tags: Fiction
why he was driving so fast. They dashed through the small talk, the inventory of friends and family members, and the state of their health. She had no detailed anecdotes about anyone in particular. Some had died and some were still living; he couldn’t even remember which. She was bigger than she had been when he left her, what people here might call chubby. It was obvious that she had been to a professional hairdresser, because she was elegantly coifed, with her short hair gelled down to her scalp and a fake bun bulging in the back. She smelled good, a mixture of lavender and lime. He simply wanted to get her home, if home it was, to that room, and to reduce the space between them until there was no air for her to breathe that he was not breathing too.
    The drive reminded him of the one they had taken to their one-night honeymoon at the Ifé Hotel, when he had begged the uncle who was driving them to go faster, because the next morning he would be on a plane for New York. That night, he’d had no idea that it would be seven years before he would see her again. He’d had it all planned. He knew that he couldn’t send for her right away, since he would be overstaying a tourist visa. But he was going to work hard, find a lawyer, get himself a green card, and then send for his wife. The green card had taken six years and eleven months. But now she was here with him, moving her face closer to her own pictures, squinting as her nose nearly touched the frames. It was as though she was looking at someone else.
    “Do you remember that one?” he asked to reassure her. He was pointing at a framed eight-by-twelve of her lying on a red mat by a tiny Christmas tree in a photographer’s studio. “You sent it last Noël?”
    She remembered, she said. It was just that she looked so desperate, as if she were trying to force him to remember her by bombarding him with those photographs.
    “I never forgot you for an instant,” he said.
    She said she was thirsty.
    “What do you want to drink?” He listed the juices he had purchased from the Panamanian grocer down the street, the combinations he was sure she would be craving—papaya and mango, guava and pineapple, cherimoya and passion fruit.
    “Just a little water,” she said. “Cold.”
    He didn’t want to leave her alone while he went to the kitchen. He would have called through the walls for one of the men to get some water, if only they were not doing such a good job of hiding behind the closed doors of their rooms to give him some previously requested privacy.
    When he came back with the glass, she examined it, as if for dirt, and then gulped the water down. It was as though she hadn’t drunk anything since the morning he had gotten on the plane and left her behind.
    “Do you want more?” he asked.
    She shook her head no.
    It’s too bad, he thought, that in Creole the word for love, renmen, is also the word for like, so that as he told her he loved her, he had to embellish it with phrases that illustrated the degree of that love. He loved her more than there were seconds in the seven years that they’d been apart, he babbled. He loved her more than the size of the ocean she’d just crossed. To keep himself from saying more insipid things, he jumped on top of her and pinned her down on the bed. She was not as timid as she had been on their wedding night. She tugged at his black tie so fiercely that he was sure his neck was bruised. He yanked a few buttons off her dress and threw them aside as she unbuttoned his starched and ironed white shirt, and though in the rehearsals in past daydreams he had gently placed a cupped hand over her mouth, he didn’t think to do it now. He didn’t care that the other men could hear them.
    He was exhausted when she grabbed the top sheet from the bed, wrapped it around her, and announced she was going to the bathroom.
    “Let me take you,” he said.
    “Non, non,” she said. “I can find it.”
    He couldn’t stand to watch her turn

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