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By Root 540 0

and after that she wouldn’t be satisfied with anything but the very worst. I want the hardest place—on any given day that was usually Sierra Leone, “the mountain of the lion,” a small, obscure West African country known mainly for its top-quality kimberlite diamonds and the breathtaking cruelty of its civil war. She’d signed on as country project director for World Aid Ministries, a Protestant umbrella group that specialized in long-term food relief; a religious vocation wasn’t necessary for the job, only a tolerance for what might be charitably called spartan living and a masochistic attitude toward work. So here was the joke: she’d come to Salone determined to lead an authentic life and instead had discovered all the clichés in herself. She wanted to be stupid. She wanted to be rich. She wanted to be lazy, kept, indulged—this was where her fantasies took her lately, mental explorations of the guiltless life. Starkey was rich, and old enough to be her father, a package of clichés that neatly fit her own. She’d tried to pick a fight with him at the Embassy party where they met; anyone in diamonds should have been her natural enemy, but something benign in his eyes, the patient sag of his face, seemed to express a basic decency. She felt calm in his presence, she felt safe; without much fuss she’d gone back to the Royal Sierra with him that night, and it had quickly developed into a standing thing, Jill driving over every evening and staying the night. Her friends in the NGO community thought she’d lost her mind. Maybe I have, she told herself, maybe that’s what crazy is. Despising precisely those things you’re most attracted to.

“So Jill, you really like this guy?”

She was sitting on the cinderblock porch outside her office, skimming the registration binder that Dennis Hatch had brought over from USAID. Sometime in the next few weeks she would be leading a small convoy through the southeast, delivering resettlement packages in advance of the planned repatriation of refugees. That is if the situation held—if the RUF honored the Lomé Accords, if the U.N. peacekeepers could hang onto their weapons, if the rainy season held off and her drivers stayed sober. If a hundred different things she couldn’t control came together at a single moment in time.

“I suppose,” she said absently, flipping pages. Each sheet contained the vital statistics for a single family. Age, height, weight, arm circumference—numerical stick figures.

“He sure must like you.” Dennis was looking through the door to her office, admiring the electrical inverter that Starkey had donated. “Is it possible the word ‘whipped’ could apply here?”

“I’m not clear how much seed rice is going into the package.”

“Well, we’re still elaborating our information on that.” After ten years in the development field, Dennis had mastered a sardonic form of bureaucratese that Jill found alternately funny and maddening.

“Can you even give me a definite date?”

“Negative.”

Dennis folded himself into the straw-bottomed chair beside Jill’s. He had the lean, near-haggard body of a fanatic runner, and was good-looking in a nerdy sort of way, which was more or less Jill’s type. His intelligence and contempt for authority made him her natural ally inside the system, and since he’d arrived in-country a year ago their friendship kept threatening to be something more. But their timing was off, their rhythm, the intangible whatever; all those late nights they’d sat up talking and drinking, and he could never bring himself to make a pass. She knew he wasn’t gay, so what did that make him? Barely relevant, that’s how it struck her lately.

She turned to the budget at the front of the binder. “One-forty per ton for transport.”

“Can you live with that?”

“You offering better?”

“Nah.”

Jill shut the binder. “Then I guess I’ll have to live with it.”

Several women from the sewing co-op passed by with snacks they’d bought from the street vendors outside, the women greeting Jill and Dennis with shy hellos. The co-op was housed in a building at the back of the compound, a sideline to the project