The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies Read Free Book Online Page B

me, strutting around in his clean white shirt, calling me
Madame,
washerwoman, he was one of
them.
You understand?” Ng looked up at last, all three of his eyes narrowing. “I might as well have washed
him,
I made him so white.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo.” Ng unclamped his teeth from his pipe, blew the fine hair from his mole aside. “You’ll be back.”
    Ling had flung out the door. He stood panting in the street for a long moment, then turned on his heel, marched to her lean-to, and knocked heavily.
    â€œCrocker?” she asked when he told her breathlessly about the new job. She stretched her arms wide. He nodded. “Seen your elephant, I reckon.”
    In answer, he put the gold piece Crocker had given him in her hand.
    For a moment they both stared at it on her palm—a woman in profile, as if looking away—and then Little Sister’s hand closed over it like something naked to be covered. With her other, she pulled him into her crib. He heard the shutter snap closed behind him.
    She smelled of lye and lemon, so clean he hesitated to touch her. When he did reach for her, he couldn’t help but examine her for marks, as if he might have smudged her. He started with her blemishes, the puckered spots on her arm where she had burnt herself with the iron. He kissed them. He had those scars; she touched him back. Her hands were soft, except for the pad of her index finger, swollen purple from the pinpricks of mending. She winced slightly when she closed her hand around him.
I’ll buy you a thimble,
he vowed, and she lowered her head, her hair lapping across his thighs.
    Afterward they were silent, lying side by side, staring at the dark ceiling. When he tried to pull her close, she seemed limp and heavy in his arms, as if waterlogged. He thought of his coin again, where it had been—in whose hands, whose pockets and purses, before it came into his, and into whose it would now pass. It made him feel flimsy, insubstantial, this small gold piece. It made him want more, so many that no one coin could ever be so important to him again. And he wondered if he’d spent it wisely (certainly he’d spent it quickly, he reflected with chagrin). He had thought he’d been courting her, but perhaps it was really the coin he’d courted.
    Courted? A nice word for it.
    He pictured the coins of his home, the holes at their center so that they could be threaded on a braid for safekeeping. American coins had no such hole and they seemed always to be slipping away.
    He wished she’d give it back, and when she didn’t, when she rose and rinsed and dressed and still didn’t give it back, he hated her a little. He could ask for it, but he was afraid of being refused.
She wasn’t worth it,
he thought abruptly, though even now he knew he’d give her another coin when he earned one, and another after that, though he’d never save them long enough to buy her outright.
    And she knew it too, he could tell. Suddenly he could feel the anger emanating from her, shimmering like heat from an iron. It was there in the stiffness of her movements as she brushed the tangles from her hair, the determination with which she avoided looking at him or talking to him, except to say, “Time’s up.” She wound her hair into a tight knot, jabbed a chopstick through it. He’d roused himself then, leapt from the bed really, and pulled on his clothes so roughly that he’d torn the stitches under the arm of his shirt. They’d both stopped at that sound of tearing, for just a moment. He might have asked her to mend it, she might have said yes, but then it was too late.
    â€œDon’t look at me like that,” she told him at the door.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œLike I cheat you. Like I got cards up my cunt, a finger on the scale. Can’t I make money too?”
    â€œYou wanted me to go,” he reminded her softly.
    She was shutting the door on