Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [99]
“Remember when we would drain the pond and catch fish?” Kelly asked.
“You won’t be doing that in the States,” Jerry said. “There you’ll have your own fish market.”
“You girls had it easy,” Paul Anka said. “Draining the pond, collecting shells to sell to the tourists. You never fished the reefs.”
“Don’t talk about that,” Kelly said. She shivered every time she thought of Paul Anka, Jerry, and Ricky going to fish the reef for tropical fish to sell to pet stores in the States. Five hundred boys—plus livestock, dried corn, and rocks—would squeeze onto a boat and go to sea for two months. They would tie long ropes around heavy rocks. Then two hundred boys at a time would dive into the water, hanging onto ropes that held the rocks, and they would bang the rocks on the coral to scare the fish. When the fish swam out, the captain would drop a huge net over them. The boys would dive down, eighty or a hundred feet, to make sure the net didn’t tear on the reef. Sometimes boys got caught and drowned.
Now Kelly looked at Paul Anka, her eyes filling with tender tears. Too many minutes underwater had left him with a slight palsy. He was her favorite brother. “Let me get you some noodles, Paul,” Kelly said.
He smiled at her. “Shrimp noodles, okay?”
Kelly felt honored that the family would serve shrimp noodles at a party in her honor. She heaped Paul Anka’s plate high with them. Now Marie-Vic was asking him to tell the story of Imelda’s snakeskin wallet. Kelly knew it by heart, how Mrs. Marcos had called the ambassador to tell him she wanted a red and purple snakeskin wallet to match her shoes, how the only one Paul could find was a sea snake wallet—from the Philippines.
“Imagine Imelda with a sea snake wallet!” Jerry said, making everyone laugh.
Kelly had dived for sea snakes as a child; they all had. Then her father would boil the skins off them and sell them to shoemakers. He had warned the children to be careful, saying that the snakes were poisonous, but only recently, in a magazine Patrice had given her, had Kelly learned they were even more poisonous than cobras.
She took a bite of chicken, savored the flavor and the sound of her family’s voices. The voices wrapped her like a cocoon, and she felt warm and loved. She had never lived without her family before, but she was prepared to try. She had a fantasy of standing in a crowd, swearing allegiance to the United States of America. Sending for the rest of her family, Paul Anka first.
Whatever I said I said out of love, out of interest, out of esteem for a name and a house which no one could honor more than I, honoring it perhaps even more than he does.
—TO FRANÇOISE-MARGUERITE, FEBRUARY 1680
LYDIE STUDIED A road map showing the way to the Loire Valley, and realized that she had a new appreciation for the precision of maps. Four-lane highways, dead-end roads, scenic routes, public parks, historical monuments: all were marked. In the past, on trips outside the city with Michael, Lydie had relied on road signs and her sense of direction instead of maps; their rate of success for reaching their destination without major wrong turns was about fifty percent.
Reading the map, Lydie thought of Patrice and Kelly. Patrice, so forthright, with her clear sense of loyalty and betrayal, and Kelly, with her single-minded drive to escape poverty by getting to the United States, had inspired Lydie by their precision. They carved out their places in the world instead of taking what was thrown at them. Lydie thought of how she had come to Paris with