The curtain flicked once, then stilled. Bien-Aimé leaned out the guardhouse door to see if it would happen again. He counted up, then counted down, but the curtains hung like poured cement. Probably no one was awake at this hour. Probably it was a draft. Everyone knew the mzungus couldn’t get up on their own; they needed Maman Dudu to extract them from their bed like a plump pair of teeth.
He tipped his chair back in the shade. A gecko zipped down the balustrade. He had cleaned out his right nostril and was cleaning out his left when someone pounded on the gate. Bang-bang-bang.
“Aimé! Hurry up, man!”
Bien-Aimé hustled across the courtyard and pulled the heavy gate open. Maman Dudu rolled her eyes at him and ran to the servants’ entrance, her key straight out in front of her like a crucifix hurtling the demons away. Her back was wet from the pre-dawn rain. She kicked her cracked sandals aside and chopped the onions with her jacket still on.
Bien-Aimé smelled eggs frying. His stomach twisted with hunger. He popped a pebble in his mouth to give his saliva something to play with.
Maman Dudu opened a tap and the mzungus’ new water pump clattered on, thudding and shrieking like a power drill through wet gravel. Then, abruptly, it cut off. The power was out again. Maman Dudu cursed in Swahili and stomped outside. She dropped a lit match into a bucket of charcoal and arranged her frying pan over it.
Often, when this happened, the Monsieur unlocked the front door and stalked across the courtyard with soap in his eyes to curse at the pump in a language Bien-Aimé didn’t understand, but this morning the big white ice cube house remained still. Maman Dudu dumped hot charcoal into a second bucket and put a kettle to boil.
Bien-Aimé tossed another pebble into his mouth. He had it all planned out. When the mzungus had eaten they would, as always, unlock and re-lock the front door, then climb the six steps to the courtyard. From there it was either three steps to the passenger side of the truck or seven steps to the driver side. Sometimes he smelled them before he saw them. The Monsieur smelled of coffee and the Madame smelled of chemicals. On hot days they both smelled of old cheese and wet dogs, neither of which was a human smell.
Bien-Aimé tried not to think about this. It was bad enough they had no color. You could see the blood running under their skin and the cells shifting inside their eyeballs. Smells like a dog but looks like a fish, he thought, but never said, because he worried his mzungus—and white people in general—might be wizards. How else could they breathe through a nose without holes? And what kind of a person never entered a church, and slept late on Sunday mornings at a time when everyone else was pledging allegiance to Jesus and proving to their neighbors that they weren’t witches? Mzungus, he was learning, had their own peculiar understanding of social responsibility.
Bang-bang-bang went the gate a second time.
“Got sweet bread.”
Bien-Aimé peeped through the security hole. “Don’t want it.”
“Even one?”
“Move on with you.”
“You not eating today?”
“No.” Bien-Aimé scowled. “Money problem.”
The boy yanked the bucket of sweet breads off his head and plunked it on the dirt road. His old green t-shirt sagged on his chest like goat udders.
“So, what, you’re making your money problem my money problem? Every day you buy from me. I count on you.” The boy stuck his finger through the security hole. “Don’t give me problems, brother. My uncle’s the most powerful wizard in three provinces.”
Bien-Aimé spat out his pebbles. “Hah! Go tell him someone else is doing his work for him.”
The curtains burst apart and the mzungu door opened. Bien-Aimé hurried to the top of the stairs. The Monsieur was on the portico staring into his phone. His backpack hung from one shoulder. He dipped sideways under the weight of it. Man as parallelogram.
The Madame was chattering and hopping on one foot as she fastened her sandal. It was a furry pink sandal with tiny silver snaps, like feet-sized plush toys. Bien-Aimé wondered if she was a child bride. Mzungu age was so indeterminate; no matter how young they were, their hair was white, and no matter how old they were, they gorged on mangos. Bien-Aimé would have believed his mzungus to be anywhere between fifteen and fifty. The Madame’s long hair fell into her eyes and she laughed. It was strange hair. Wispy and always moving, as if geckos nested inside it. He hoped she would tire of it and leave it behind her when she went; he could sell it for an excellent price.
“Papa!” he called out as they mounted the steps. “Good morning. How are you?”
“Fine, fine, Aimé. You?”
The Monsieur continued thumbing his phone. He didn’t look at Bien-Aimé. The Madame was rooting in his backpack for the car key.
“I am not fine!”
The Monsieur looked up, his eyes wary. He retracted his thumb and slid the phone into his pocket. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh!” Bien-Aimé slapped his head. Tears shivered on his eyelids. He held them there, like beads of sap on a branch, the better through which to peer pitifully at the Monsieur. “I am an unlucky man! Very poor and very unlucky.”
“Was your house struck by lightning again?”
“Papa is very kind, he remembers about the lightening. That was terrible, awful, very bad.” Bien-Aimé swung his knobby arms, imagining himself at a pulpit. “Curses on whoever sent that lightning. It burned up my floorboards, and new floorboards cost forty dollars. Where would a poor unlucky man like me, your humble security guard, find such a sum? Even until now we are stepping over holes and sleeping on cardboard I stole from a building site. Last week one of the babies fell under the house and we couldn’t find her for almost the entire day. I was so scared she’d been eaten by a pig.”
The Monsieur rattled his keys and made a move towards the truck. The Madame was already inside with her seatbelt fastened.
“But, oh, papa!” Bien-Aimé stepped between the Monsieur and the truck. “The curse remains. Whoever sent the lightning, they are not satisfied! Two days ago when I left your house it was morning and I was tired and I was carrying a small backpack and inside the backpack I had my little worthless phone and also fifty dollars—fifty dollars!—that my brother had given me to pay my children’s school fees which by the way are due tomorrow. I have eight children, did you know? Eight! These African women, they insist. You can’t imagine how they insist. Insatiable, all of them. So there I was with so much money and of all days, can you believe it, when I ran to catch the bus, someone went behind me with a razor and cut my bag open and everything fell out. Wah!”
“Gee, that’s terrible.”
“Oh, papa! By the time I realized the disaster I was already on the bus and it was too late and I didn’t know who did it but I lost everything and what will I do now? How will my children study?”
“Um.” The Monsieur slid by Bien-Aimé and threw his backpack into the truck. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
He unlocked the driver side door. The Madame was combing her long hair with her fingers. She gestured to her watch. The Monsieur put a foot on the running board.
“Please, papa, you are like a father to us, your poor employees. I am like your child. Don’t leave me desperate like this. Don’t make a grown man beg. Just fifty dollars, that is all. So much for me, so little for you. I won’t even ask you to replace my wretched phone, no, I will not ask that. Let me go through life without a phone, like a goat herder or a monkey-eater or a eunuch who has arisen from the dead. What do I care for my pride? Let me suffer humiliation so that my children may study and have a life that is better than mine.”
The Monsieur climbed into the truck and put the key in the ignition.
“Tell you what. You bring me that bag that’s been cut, show me your story’s for real, and we’ll talk about what I can do for you.”
“The bag?”
“The bag.”
“Which bag?”
“The bag the thief cut.”
“Oh. That bag. That bag is not available just now.”
The Monsieur raised an eyebrow and shut the truck door, then locked it. He rolled the window down three fingers and said, “I’ll wait.”
Bien-Aimé slapped his head again and squeezed between the bushes and the truck door so he could press his forehead against the Monsieur’s window.
“Look, papa, my brother has the bag. I lent it to him and he took it to Goma. I don’t know when he’ll be back, maybe it will be a long time, but I need to pay the school fees now, not in a long time, do you understand?”
“Why would your brother borrow a torn bag?”
“There is a very good but also very complicated reason for this.”
“Right.”
“If you haven’t got fifty, then how about you make it twenty? With twenty I can hire a witch doctor to strike the thief with lightning.”
The Madame sighed loudly. The Monsieur started the truck and inched forward.
“How will that get you your stuff back?”
“It will not, of course, but it is important to punish the wicked.”
Bien-Aimé was amazed that this needed explaining. You would think that when the mzungus had brought Jesus to the Africans they would have kept a part of Him for themselves. But, no. Jesus was only the boss of the poor.
“Like I said: bring me the bag and we’ll talk.”
He rolled up the window and pointed to the gate. Bien-Aimé hurried to open it. They pulled away, their truck lurching violently over the deep rainy season ruts. The Madame held onto the dashboard with one hand and waved goodbye with the other.
Bien-Aimé latched the gate and returned to his chair, and to his job, which was to wait for someone to attack the ice cube house. He waited. Time passed. No one attacked. He watched the clouds.
It was a silly job. Hardly anyone ever attacked a mzungu house. How could they? They would have to scale a high brick wall, squirm over a double row of broken bottles, then thread themselves through a vicious coil of barbed wire. A human spaghetti experiment is what it would be.
He gave up on guarding and returned to his book. It was a miner’s treatise on soil types. A Belgian had left it behind when fleeing the war. The diagrams were more interesting than the text but they were very, very tiny diagrams so to see them it was necessary to squint. Bien-Aimé was grateful to the unknown Belgian for the book, but all the same he prayed that one day his mzungus would leave behind books with better pictures.
When the sun was high, Bien-Aimé siphoned water from the water tank and sold it to a woman who was too lazy to slide down the bank to the lake. Then he watered the beans and sweet potatoes he was surreptitiously growing in black plastic bags behind the latrine.
The latrine was the most secure place on the property. The mzungus never went anywhere near it.
More time passed. Still no one attacked. The curtains hung like a crumpled shroud. It was very boring to guard something that didn’t need guarding.
In the evening the mzungus returned and Bien-Aimé tried again, this time clamping onto the Madame.
“Bonsoir maman, have you heard about my problem? I am cursed. Do you know it? Please, from your kind heart–”
But she went right by him, not even reciprocating his good evening. The Monsieur followed her into the house and Bien-Aimé heard the door lock. They straightened the long, silly curtains, and all signs of life ceased for the day.
When Bien-Aimé was sure they had gone to bed, he hopped the railing to the lower balcony, wrapped a blanket around his legs, and stretched out on a plastic chair. It was cold. The lake was dark. He switched on Ferdy’s little radio and went to sleep.
At seven a.m. Ferdy reported for work and Bien-Aimé caught the bus home.
Bien-Aimé lived with his family on a hill a long way away from the mzungu house, in a neighborhood where every place was either up or down. To get the bus you went up. To get water you went down. When it rained, mud and water sluiced along the narrow trenches between the houses and you hoped your house wouldn’t dissolve all the way down the slope and either end up in the lake or under a thousand kilos of mud.
“Did you get the money?” Shilla demanded as soon as she saw him sliding down the slope, his work uniform folded under one arm.
She was straddling a basin of laundry. Three children played in the dirt at her feet. One caught a beetle as big as his fist and gave it an experimental lick.
“Not yet. What’s to eat?”
He poked his head in the house. At this time of day it was empty—and necessarily so; it was one small mud room and the only way to fit the whole family inside it was for everyone to do as they did at night, lie side by side like sausages. The newest baby was asleep on a pile of sweaters, his breath rattling in his narrow chest. He smelled of pee. The room, Bien-Aimé noted with satisfaction, was brighter since the lightening had hit it. The bolt had jabbed new holes in the zinc sheeting. It was a pity that now, instead of the problem of the dark, there was the problem of the rain.
“There’s nothing to eat,” Shilla said. “Why would there be anything to eat? You don’t make any money. All we chew in this place is sweat and tears.”
She swatted the beetle out of the boy’s hand and he started up a wail that got bigger and bigger, like a cyclone full of broken dishes. Bien-Aimé nudged the boy aside with his foot and collapsed onto a pink plastic stool in the doorway.
“Gimme that basin so I can bathe.”
Shilla grunted. She was bent over at the waist, suds up to her elbows.
“You’ll bathe when I’ve finished the laundry. Maybe if you made some money we could buy a second basin, ever think of that? Huh?” She wrung out her pagne and hung it over a dead electrical line.
“I want that basin.”
“And I want avocados. Aren’t you always bragging about how those mzungus have a garden full of avocado and mango trees?”
Bien-Aimé looked away from her. He didn’t like the way she was so loud. And that child of hers wouldn’t stop wailing. The women next door were laughing at him; the old man up the slope, the muzey, was frowning behind his cataracts.
As if Bien-Aimé didn’t pay nine dollars a week for this house. As if he hadn’t the right to be there and have a wash and eat a plate of fried fish and sweet peppers after a long twenty-four-hour shift.
“So where’s all that fruit?” Shilla continued, wet hands on hips. The little boy patted helplessly at her feet for his lost beetle. “How come we’ve never tasted it?”
“Not in season.”
“You think I’m stupid? I know you eat it all the time you’re there.”
“So what if I do?”
He stood up quickly and flung his uniform into her laundry basin. Let her wash his clothes on time for once, the lazy cow.
“Should I starve?” he demanded. “I don’t see you making me anything to bring to work with me. I’m a man. I can’t go twenty-four hours without what’s proper to put in my belly. And avocados aren’t proper, by the way.”
“Well they’re better than the nothing your eight children eat all day long while you sit outside some fancy house picking your nose.”
Bien-Aimé pushed by her and slid down the slope to Ghislain’s. She didn’t try to stop him; he had nothing to add to her life.
Ghislain lived alone in a brick dormitory that cost him a much more affordable eight dollars a week. His room was the third from one end, and the second from the other. He was a businessman, which in Bukavu could mean a lot, or it could mean very little. The men who harvested coltan and diamonds were businessmen; the old women who sold fried sambussas in La Place de l’Independence were businessmen too. Ghislain’s business was to carry maize flour and cassava flour down to Uvira on the Burundian border and sell it there for a few cents more per kilo than what he had bought it for in Goma. As the profit wasn’t much, he couldn’t be bothered to take the trip more than a few times a year. The rest of the time he made banana liquor and sold it out of old shampoo bottles.
“Aimé.”
They bumped foreheads. Ghislain gestured to the log he was sitting on.
“Ça va?”
“Ça va.”
Aimé sat heavily and stared down the hill, past the wattle and daub houses to the glinting lake.
“I need money.”
“Everyone needs money.”
“Yeah, but some people need it more than others.”
“Maybe so.”
“You hear of anything lately?”
“Anything like what?”
“Like any way to get money?”
Ghislain chuckled. “If I knew a way to get money, then brother I would have that money.”
“Yeah. Well, if you think of anything, you cut me in, alright?”
“Cuz you’ll cut me in on anything you think up?”
“Of course.”
Ghislain squinted against the sun, considering this. He picked up a muddy twig, wiped it on his heel, and cleaned under his fingernails. “What about those mzungus you work for?”
Aimé shook his head. “Everything is locked up there. Always. Besides, that’s my regular job. I got eight kids. I can’t lose my regular job.”
Ghislain glanced sideways at him, nonplussed. “God provides,” he said, this being what he told himself, and his women, whenever they came asking him for money—not that Ghislain ever paid them. He didn’t even know how many children he had. If he were to pay for them all, then he would be like Bien-Aimé, eating fish. He preferred goat.
Bien-Aimé looked back and saw his family looming there, up the slope, over his shoulders. Shilla was peeling cassava with a short, blunt knife. Laundry hung across the paths in dripping panels. The second-oldest girl had tied the newest baby to her back and his tiny head stuck out at a funny angle, like a broken toe. A small, merry gang of young ones were playing a game that involved a lot of shouting and ducking under the flapping clothes and snarled electrical lines.
Bien-Aimé stood. “I’m gonna get some sleep.”
“You do that, brother.”
When Bien-Aimé arrived at the mzungu house the next morning, there was power. Power! Everyone was in a good mood about it. Ferdy was listening to the radio and charging his phone. Maman Dudu was hurrying to fill the washing machine. The current was so strong that she could even boil water in the electric kettle. Humming along to the radio, she sanitized the breakfast tray and filled the French press.
Bien-Aimé sank into his chair and tipped back against the guardhouse wall. The guardhouse was small but it was made of bricks, not mud, and its roof was of proper tile, not zinc. When it rained you didn’t have to wonder if the wall would fall over, and the rain sounded like rain, not like a hailstorm of wheelbarrows. Sometimes Bien-Aimé dreamed that the Madame and the Monsieur invited him to live in the guardhouse permanently. He wouldn’t mind staying alone, as long as he could keep using Ferdy’s radio and as long as the mzungus kept sharing their leftover chicken and rice with him.
The curtains in the ice cube house jerked apart. Bien-Aimé heard a key in the lock.
Impossible! They always left at seven forty-five. He checked the sun. It was barely a quarter past seven.
The Madame pushed the door open and shoved a wheelie bag out ahead of her.
Bien-Aimé hurried down the stairs and grabbed the bag. It was heavy.
“Bonjour, Madame.”
“Bonjour, Aimé.”
He loaded the bag into the truck. She passed him her shoulder bag and a box of mineral water.
“I am traveling to the field today.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“I will come back in a few days.”
“So long! The Monsieur will miss you.”
She laughed. She was wearing a yellow skirt and a creased white blouse. Her long hair was stuck in a lump and fastened with a long silver pin.
“He’ll be okay. It’s an important trip. We’re supporting half the school districts in the region, you know?”
“Oui, Madame,” Bien-Aimé said, although he didn’t know at all.
“It’s so exciting! We are really changing people’s lives! We just finished constructing fifteen schools. Fifteen! I’m going to the field so I can pay the contractors their last installment. And then I’m going to pay the salaries for two-hundred school teachers. Two hundred! So you see it’s an important trip. And the roads are bad so it will take a while to drive around the villages and then come back.”
“Oui, Madame.”
“Will you water my herb garden while I’m gone? The thyme is looking poorly.”
“Oui, Madame.”
When he got home the next day, Bien-Aimé ignored Shilla and slid straight down the hill to Ghislain’s.
They bumped foreheads.
“Brother.”
Bien-Aimé fingered the paper in his pocket. Maman Dudu had given it to him—a scrap of twice-used notebook paper that the mzungus would never miss.
“The mzungus are going to the villages with cash. They left yesterday.”
Ghislain looked up sharply. “United Nations?”
“No, no escort. No guns.”
“How much money?”
“I don’t know. Could be fifty thousand.”
“Dollars?”
Bien-Aimé nodded. Ghislain whistled.
“And you know where they’ll be?”
Bien-Aimé handed Ghislain the scrap of paper. It was crumpled and smeared from the moisture in his palm.
“You have family out that way, don’t you?”
“I have family everywhere.” Ghislain smiled. “God provides.”
That night Bien-Aimé couldn’t sleep. It was impossible to imagine such a sum of money. It took him the entire night to come up with a list of dreams long enough to spend it all on.
The next morning he reported early for work. He was tense with excitement. It was a slow day and he found it hard to sit still. He paced. He whistled. He watched the plumber and electrician try to fix the broken water pump.
Maman Dudu spread a reed mat on the courtyard stones and gossiped as she scrubbed the mzungus’ shoes with a stiff brush. Her sister was pregnant. Her brother had broken his arm. There had been a lynching in her neighborhood, the second one this year—some men just didn’t know how to keep their junk in their trousers and their business at home.
In the afternoon a horn beeped insistently outside. Bien-Aimé checked through the peephole and saw a white truck with the mzungu logo on it. He opened the gate and the truck reversed in. There was an African driving, instead of the Monsieur. The Madame was in the back seat, her long hair hanging over her face. Bien-Aimé felt his heart do the kwassa-kwassa. He went to pull her wheelie bag out of the back, but there was no wheelie bag and no shoulder bag and also no box of water.
The Madame dribbled out and slipped wordlessly through the front door, locking it behind her and pulling the curtains shut. The chauffeur switched into drive and prepared to pull away but Bien-Aimé stopped him.
“What happened? Why’s she back already?”
“The convoy was ambushed.”
“No.”
“Everything was stolen.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Half the schools in the region might have to close, at least for a little while.”
“But why? The mzungus will just send more money, won’t they? They always send more money.”
The chauffeur rubbed his eyes. “Dunno, brother. It was a lot of money. They’re talking about shifting the project to Lodja.”
“The Madame would never agree to that.”
“The Madame is just an employee, like you or me. She’s in trouble for losing the money.”
Bien-Aimé shrugged. “God will provide.”
The chauffeur nodded. “Everything comes from God.”
The Monsieur came home late. He was carrying two boxes of pizza and a bottle of wine. Bien-Aimé’s belly rumbled at the thought of their leftovers. The Monsieur locked the door behind him but the curtains stayed open a crack, allowing Bien-Aimé to watch the two white, pinched ghosts striding back and forth through the split in their shell. Their voices went on for a long time. The power went out and Bien-Aimé turned on the generator. The lights in the house flickered and dimmed. The Madame poured water out of a yellow jerry can and into a pot. They lit a flame and made tea. They kissed and turned out the lights and hunkered down together in front of a glowing computer screen. In its concentrated light, Bien-Aimé saw the Madame had big dark patches on her face, and one of her colorless eyes didn’t open properly.
They selfishly ate all the pizza.
The next morning Ferdy was late. Bien-Aimé felt trapped. Terrorized by his own skin. He ran all the way to the bus. When he got home, Shilla was feeding the baby and waiting for the girls to bring water. She tried to hand him a bowl of small roasted fish but he waved it away. He slid down the hill.
Ghislain was waiting. His stained white door curtain sucked in and out on the breeze.
“Brother?”
Ghislain beckoned him inside.
“Close the door behind you. And by all that is holy, speak quietly.”
Bien-Aimé did as he was told, testing the door three times to make sure it was really shut. His heart was still doing a mad kwassa-kwassa. He sat on the edge of Ghislain’s sagging bed. The room had no windows, but a bit of light came in through some open brickwork above the door. Ghislain poured him a cup of smoky water.
“We’re fucked.”
Bien-Aimé closed his eyes. It was hard to breathe. The room smelled of sweat and feet and fish fried in rancid oil. He drank a sip, then another, then the entire cup of water. It loosened his throat.
“No,” he said at last. “We can’t be fucked. The mzungus got ambushed. Are you telling me you haven’t got the money?”
Ghislain refilled Bien-Aimé’s cup. “My cousins did the ambush and at first it was fine, it was simple. They took everything. But then the people heard about it and got mad, and they knew who did it because you know there are no secrets in a village. They dragged my cousins off to the police.”
“God have mercy.”
“God was not necessary. You know how much money those mzungus had? The police were quick to let my cousins go, I can promise you that.”
Bien-Aimé jumped up. His cup of water fell and the wet spread around him like the petals of a night flower. He imagined it perfuming Ghislain’s sordid room.
“We’re saved!”
“Well.”
“Well what?”
“Well, depends what you mean by saved.”
“Eh?”
“They’re gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“My cousins. Once the police let them go, the villagers lynched them.”
“Shit. And the money?”
“Gone too. Maybe they paid the teachers. Maybe the rebels took it. Maybe the villagers emigrated en masse to Dubai. Who knows? Anyway, we won’t see a coin of it.”
Bien-Aimé slapped his head again and again.
“Your cousins talk about us?”
“No, brother.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
“Sure?”
“Sure is sure.”
“Shit.”
Bien-Aimé wrenched Ghislain’s door open and strode up the hill to his leaky house and impossible wife. He had to think positively. A man could go mad this way. God always provides, doesn’t He? For today, at least, there was fish to eat, and that was something. Fish was good.
“Eat your meal, Aimé,” his wife said as he came in the door.
Her voice was soft, for once. She was rocking the baby against her big breast, trying to get him to sleep. The baby was fussing and his breath was rattling, but his eyes were half-closed. Bien-Aimé found the bowl of fish under a torn dish towel and fell to eating.
A week later his boss at the security company rang to tell him he would no longer be working at the mzungu house. Bien-Aimé stopped breathing.
“I’m fired?”
“We’re moving you to the Hotel Kahuzi-Biega. The mzungus are leaving, they cancelled their contract.”
It was sad. The mzungu house had been comfortable. Bien-Aimé had liked his cozy guardhouse with the proper tiles and the radio and the blanket. He had liked it when the Madame brought him a cold bottle of soda on hot days. He had learned so much about soil types. He had grown such a lot of beans in black plastic bags. He had eaten so many free avocados.
On his last day, the Monsieur unlocked the front door and left it open as he climbed the six steps to the courtyard. He headed straight for Bien-Aimé and handed him an envelope.
“Thank you, papa.”
Bien-Aimé held the envelope rigidly at his side. He really wanted to open it, but he didn’t.
The Monsieur ran a hand through his pale, fluffy hair. “We’re leaving.”
“Oui, papa. I know. It’s a sad thing for all of us.”
“Our donor has decided to pull out. We’re closing the office.”
“Where will you go now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Darfur. Maybe Haiti. It’s hard to say. We’ll stay with my brother in Minneapolis while we look for new jobs.”
“That sounds nice.”
“I guess so.” Suddenly the Monsieur smiled. “Say, you never brought me that broken backpack of yours.”
“No, papa. I keep forgetting it at home.”
“Right, right.” The Monsieur was looking at him but his eyes were far away, seeing something else. “Well. Good luck, Aimé. Give our regards to your family.”
“Thank you, papa. God bless you.”
“Sure.”
The Monsieur went back into the house and locked the door. When he was sure he was alone, Bien-Aimé tore open the envelope.
No!
What he saw was unbelievable. Incredible! He screamed. He clutched his chest, afraid his heart would give out from doing the kwassa-kwassa so hard. It was…
It was TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS.
This would solve everything! He was saved!
He kissed the bills. They were crisp and fresh and smelled delicious. He kissed each one a second time. And a third. Now he would be able to pay for his problems to go away. And Shilla would respect him. Maybe they would even have another child. A ninth. He had always loved children.
He fell to his knees and pressed the money to his chest. He looked up into the sky, up to the clouds where Jesus lived.
“Merci,” he cried. “Merci, Seigneur! I never doubted You. I never doubted that You would provide!”
