Someday my son will come back and when he does we'll fix the roof and cook a fresh goat. Perhaps, we'll roast it and rub it with spices like his mother use to do. It does not seem so long ago that he played with sticks in the yard, making them baa like farm animals.

It seemed a silly waste of time to be playing when one could be working, earning money for the family. Now, oh now, I would love to see him in the doorway, grimy from his play, smiling at me with that crooked tooth . How he'd touch it with the tip of his tongue and look away when I scolded him.

But that was long ago, now the morning sun finds me through the holes in the roof and I miss him so. In the mornings, selling the bruised fruit in market, I search for his face among the crowds of sweating locals. Instead of him, Natol comes. Her body broad and squat, her face like a camel's ass, round and pinched. My widowed neighbor who thinks to make me her next old husband. Ah, the idea. I have no time for her.

Natol started pawing through my fruit, grunting and sweating like some rooting animal, casting up a dark, murky eye in what I hoped were not flirtatious glances. She was a bold one, that one. Had she been a year younger than a thousand, I would have warned her that she would get herself beaten for her loose behavior.

She brushed my hand, seemingly by accident. Ah, I jerked my hand away. I lifted my eyes away from her to search the teeming people, searching the faces. And there he was. My heart pounded. My son was coming toward me, a well-dressed man.

Jebee's coffee colored eyes looked into mine and saw me. For a moment, we stood there in some isolated bubble where only we existed. I raised my hand to call him forward, smiling. But Jebee's eyes did not smile. The moment lost, he started to walk past my stand, his lips pulled back in a grimace, his crooked tooth winking at me.

Perhaps, I was wrong.

I was an old man, my eyes were not so good anymore. No, no that was not my Jebee. Soon, my Jebee would come home and we would cook a fresh goat and fix the holes in the roof. Unsettled, I shoved a handful of damaged melon into Natol's hands, ignoring her pleased bleat and went back to work, my eyes still searching the crowd. My son would be coming soon and we would go home and cook a fresh goat together.

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