The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe by Alexander McCall Smith

his feet and began to leave the room.
    Mma Ramotswe caught her breath. “Charlie!”
    â€œI’m going to die,” repeated Charlie. “Soon soon. You’ll see.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

PILATES WITH CAKE
    M MA POTOKWANE , matron of the Orphan Farm, and substitute mother, over the years, to almost eight hundred children, each of whose young life had had such a bad beginning, took most things in her stride. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had once remarked that she was the only woman in Botswana who could be struck by lightning and make the lightning blow a fuse. “And I wouldn’t want to be the lion who tried to eat her,” he had added. “That lion would learn a lesson, I think.” An exaggeration, of course, but Mma Potokwane had certainly never let the world put obstacles in her path. She had survived the intrusions of bureaucrats, and the indifference and selfishness of those who, having made their money, refused to share it. She had begged and borrowed and scraped in order to provide for the orphans in her care, and prided herself on the fact that none of them, none at all, had gone out into the world without knowing that they were loved and that there was at least one person who wanted them to make something of their lives—one person who believed in them.
    â€œMaybe I can’t give them everything they need,” she once said to Mma Ramotswe, “but at least they know that I have tried.”
    And Mma Ramotswe, who was well aware of the heroic effortsthat Mma Potokwane made, had replied, “They know that, Mma. They definitely know that.”
    As did many others. Everybody now was aware of the scheme that Mma Potokwane had cooked up with Mr. Taylor at Maru-a-Pula School to give orphans what amounted to the best education available in Botswana. The children chosen for that scheme had done every bit as well as the pupils who came from backgrounds of comfort and privilege, and had gone on to train for jobs that would otherwise have been way beyond their wildest dreams. A child who had nothing, who had been passed from pillar to post among struggling relatives, or who had not even had such relatives and had been completely abandoned because there was no grandmother to shoulder the burden—something that went against every fibre of Botswana traditions—such a child might find himself or herself training as a scientist, a doctor, an agronomist. And in the audience at such a graduation would be sitting Mma Potokwane in pride of place, in a sense—even if she were not physically there.
    It was mainly for this determination that Mma Ramotswe admired her friend. But it was also for her wisdom, which had shown itself time and time again. It was this wisdom that had helped her so much during Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s illness or at those times when Mma Makutsi had been unsettled or demanding. It was this wisdom that had helped her in cases where she had found herself pursuing a line of enquiry that seemed to be getting nowhere; a question from Mma Potokwane, perhaps on the surface somewhat opaque, had turned her in a direction that had ultimately proved fruitful.
    THAT AFTERNOON , with the painful memory of Charlie’s outburst still fresh in her mind, she left the office early in order to go out to the Orphan Farm. She liked the drive, which took her along dusty back roads that twisted this way and that around people’s houses and yards, past small islands of scrubland that had survived encroachmentand were now claimed by itinerant herds of cattle. The cattle picked their way through thorn and acacia scrub, making a living somehow, prized by somebody for whom they represented the hard-earned savings of a lifetime. She sometimes slowed down to look at these cattle and judge the state they were in. Her late father had always done this; he could not drive past cattle without stopping and commenting on how well or how badly they were doing. He might say something about the