A Simple Distance by K. E. Silva

there’s a chance you might crash into the rock.
    We didn’t. So everyone on the plane burst out clapping the moment we touched down. Outside the oval windows of our plane, I could see a storm coming, dark and gray. In the foreground, each leaf of the long coconut fronds moving separately in the wind, reflecting leftover light.
    We hadn’t called Granny to tell her we were coming to address her threats about adding my uncles as heirs to Godwyn. No one in the family knew we were there. So no one was waiting to pick us up. I’d booked the tickets the night before, after I’d gotten the call that the judge had granted us the continuance in Cynthia’s case.
    Mr. Petion would not hear of letting us take a taxi.
    His brother, come to pick him up, threw my backpack and all my mom’s bags on the flatbed of his truck, ushered us into his cab, but did not speak. The brother climbed onto the flatbed with the bags. Mr. Petion took the wheel.
    My mother, between us, was utterly useless, moving only when told to, from one seat to the next, saying nothing. I was embarrassed; me, not even Baobiquen, calling on help like that from a stranger.
    Along the way, a tinge of rust on all things metal: red and green tin roofs, cars, street signs, fences, empty aluminum cans strewn by the roadside. Red Stripe. And Fanta.
    We drove mostly in silence, half awkward, half not; pulled up the drive at Godwyn, the crotons and small palms leading us to the car port.
    Outside the truck, Mr. Petion’s brother handed me my backpack. I asked him, Can I help with the gas? Reached for my wallet.
    They laughed at my foolishness . And asked me how long I’d be visiting.
    Until I can talk some sense into my grandmother, I joked.
    Ha ha! Into Granny Pascal? Then you’ll never leave! Mr. Petion joked back.
    He pressed his business card into my palm. An accountant in Bato. Call me if you need anything, young Pascal. I will be back soon.
    They had another hour on the windy road south.

CHAPTER 13
    Almost a year had passed since I’d set foot on Godwyn. It was the last place Susan and I’d made love, before we got caught and Uncle George requested my departure, half-paralyzed, from Granny’s second bedroom. Patriarchs buried in its breast, the house my mother wanted to keep as home. Her crumbling, wooden Godwyn: plastic on rotting cedar planks to keep the outside out; plastic on antique chairs, over the armoire, to keep them dry just one more rainy season; bats in the attic; rats in the crawl space below, where the dogs slept. Yet, all with an elegance calling out from its front porch, its red tin roof and deep purple bougainvillea, all demanding their due respect. It might merely be a matter of time before the next strong winds of the season take down a weight-bearing wall, but there is something more to that house than its structure. Godwyn stands, time itself.
    The wind from the coming storm wrapped me with its long arms; hugged me tight, tight; squeezed the breath from my lungs. Baobique had me once again, and I feared it would never let go.
    But my mom seemed to have lost at least a touch of her inertia. She wandered off, out past the graves, as if ordered by some silent voice that it was time to switch seats.
    I let her go: down the dirt path, reddish-brown between green, stopping only for the sharpest of thorns or sticks beneath her feet, padding her way to the edge of memory; a girl, once again, taking along a dog and a cutlass, even though the path was overused by the squatters in Grampy’s garden; through the small guava trees, bananas, and tall arching coconuts, she’d make her way in the rain-wet bush to where she could see. When she got there, she’d stand silent, holding the dog tight, tight, so he wouldn’t break her peace. And she’d look out over the tall grass and thin trees, across the valley to the next mountain, and the next, and the next. And she’d lean on her Morne Volcan. Rest.
    Behind her, the constant roll of the Atlantic, its