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night. Going back to the kitchen, she could hear Mrs. Burrmann moving about upstairs. Once or twice, Bernice stopped her work to ponder how and why this woman could be so offensive.
Satan does always find work for idle hands; and that is what she is: idle hands
. She was finding it difficult to concentrate on her work: her mind was on her sister arriving; and then it settled on the letter she had received from Lonnie back home, the day before.
Pay-day don’t well come before I ain’t getting all kind o’ love-letter from that bastard. He think I up here to support a man? Well, he lie in hell! Man made for supporting woman, and not the other way round, Mister Lonnie. No, darling
. But she took the letter out, and sat in the chair beside the refrigerator to read. Part of her mind was on the high-heeled movements upstairs. She did not want Mrs. Burrmann to catch her sitting down in the middle of the afternoon. Lonnie’s letter was written on crisp, expensive onionskin paper; and she wondered where he had stolen it, since he never had money.
Darling, sweetheart Bernice
(this salutation, which she had read four times, put a sharp pang of desire in her body. She had read it, last night, just before going to bed — just the salutation; but she didn’t read more, because she knew the rest of the letter would be asking for money, andtelling her how he missed her “in that certain way.” Bernice was not strong enough to read this kind of letter, while she was alone, and uncomfortable in bed, thirsty for the warmth of a man’s body next to her skin. “Lonnie, when are you going to learn how to write me a love-letter like any other man would, without asking for money in the same sentence? Heh-heh, Lonnie, you is a real case, in truth,” she said, as if she was talking to him, across all those hundreds of miles) … 
this is Lonnie. I writing you because Christmas soon here, and things down here in Barbados still rough as hell with me. The sugar cane crop-season was a real bitch this year, Bernice. And the estates start the season laying off mens, right and left, like flies. I only had a five weeks job this crop-season. Furthermore, a piece of sickness had me flat flat on my back the whole of last month, and I had was to give up a little picking a fellow by the name of Boulee, who uses to be a garbage collector in a donkey cart in Christ Church parish, told me about. You remember Boulee? The job he told me about was a night watchman job at a new club open by a Canadian fellow whose name I can’t call to mind right this minute, because only heavy things like money resting on my mind these days …
The letter made her think of her son, Terence. Terence was left with Mammy, with strict instructions not to let Terence see his father, Lonnie. The moment the plane took off from Seawell Airport, Bernice put Barbados and Lonnie out of her future plans. But she was going to send for Terence, when he was big enough, and put him through university, if she had to beat the brains into his head. That was her plan for her son. “Hope it won’t be too long, Lord, I hope it won’t be too long before Terence grow up.” She looked at Lonnie’s letter, put it down because she had to wipe the recollections of tears out of her eyes with the tail of her apron; and just as she was about to read itagain, Mrs. Burrmann crept into the kitchen (she had already seen Bernice sitting down, in the middle of the afternoon!) as silent as Putzi, her cat, who followed her now, and who followed her everywhere she went. Bernice jumped up, and in her haste forgot the letter lying open on the kitchen counter.
    “I just this minute sit down here, ma’am, to rest my poor foots,” she said.
    Mrs. Burrmann ignored her. “I was dreaming,” she said. She seemed as if she was still in the dream. Bernice saw the lines from the pillow case, and from her fingers, etched into her face. These marks looked like wounds that did not cut deeply enough into the flesh to