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I can’t take care of no children, if that what you thinking. You going to spend almost one hour each way to Port Antonio in the route taxi every day. It don’t make no sense.”
    Beth rolled onto her back. “Joella have to finish high school in Port Antonio, like how she want to start dental assistant school next year, right? She going to take taxi there every day, starting September. Like how she don’t know the place, and I come from Port Antonio and know it good, and we nervous about her traveling with all the boys on the bus, I can travel with her. You know what can happen if we let her go on her own? You said it yourself. Next thing she end up pregnant and the studying gone through the window.”
    Shad rolled his eyes in the dark, hearing what Beth was not saying, that her own downfall had started on a Port Antonio bus when she’d smiled coyly at him, the new bus conductor, and five months later had agreed to go back to his room behind the butcher shop and lie down on his old iron bed.
    â€œWhat about Joshua?” Shad argued, changing direction. “He still breast-feeding—who going to take care of him?”
    â€œHe gone one and a half years now, time to stop the feeding. Miss Livingston say she will look after him in the daytime and I will pick him up when I come home.”
    â€œBut who going to look after Ashanti, like how she so difficult with the autism? Nobody going to want to take care of her.”
    â€œThey have a school in Port Antonio for children like her, and that is another reason I want to work there. I call the number on the pamphlet the doctor gave us, remember the one? They say that they have a day school for children like her, children with disabilities, that’s what they call it. They say that since she going on five, she should start school now, and when Joella start school in September, she can help me with her in the taxi coming and going.”
    â€œAnd Rickia? She can’t stay by herself when she come home from school. And I can’t be here to make sure she do homework and everything.”
    â€œShe going over to Miss Livingston after school and help with the baby. She always good about her homework, anyway, so she can do it there.”
    â€œMiss Livingston agree to this?”
    â€œI tell her I will pay her little money and she say yes. She need the money and she like the company.” A lot of thinking had gone into Beth’s new plan, Shad realized. Without a word to him, she’d done her research and made calls and arrangements with other people, and he, a man who was known as a sniffer and snuffer (according to Miss Mac), a man who knew everything about everybody in Largo, had been clueless about his own woman’s goings-on.
    As hurtful as the news was to Shad, it was even more painful because he hadn’t been consulted. Although he was unable to read and write beyond a fifth-grade level, Shad had established himself as Largo Bay’s problem solver. The role had started from childhood when, as the self-appointed village messenger, he’d earned access to the villagers’ lives. He’d seen who was sitting in the obeah man’s waiting room when he paid a bill for Miss Hilda. He’d known who was coming from England when he delivered invitations to Mas Josiah’s party, and overheard the pastor cursing his wife once when he went to collect his dollar.
    With knowledge of their secrets, the little barefoot boy had morphed into the village’s go-to man as an adult. Yet Shad was keenly aware that he was looked down on by many who were higher up the food chain—even while he was looked up to by his peers. He understood the social context in which he operated, understood the complexities of his people and how they thought. He was a man who observed, who analyzed, who hung back until it was time, and acted when it was. He was a man of street smarts, an Anansi—the African spider of folk tales