“You say ‘was.’ Has she passed away?”

He nodded.

“Yes … a while ago. When I was fourteen.”

He saw restraint in her eyes. It was clear that she wanted to say something—sorry, perhaps—but didn’t want to seem maudlin.

“You said she was privileged. In what way?”

“Well, to be educated in any third world country is to be privileged. To have a piece o’ land to call your own makes you more so,” he said, thinking of his mother’s considerable acreage. “In all honesty, she came from a well-off family. But her father wanted to marry her off at twenty, and she said no and went to the bank and forged his signature and withdrew the money he’d been setting aside to give her at twenty-one, and bought some land out east. I grew up on that property until I was ten and ready for high school. Then I went to Kingston to live with my father. My parents got divorced when I was three.”

“What did your mother do besides farm?”

“Worked for Air Jamaica.”

“And what’s your dad like?”

“Humphrey is a nice guy in an ole-time kinda way. Calls himself a socialist. And he’s really progressive in some ways and really conservative in others. Thinks free college tuition is a basic human right, but can’t wait for them to bring back hanging.”

She cocked her head and spread her arms, grabbing the railing. Leaning forward now, her arms trailing like wings, she stopped her face inches from his and asked: “Okay, where’d you get the name Fire?”

“My father gave me that name when I was eight. I was playing with one of his welding torches and almost burned down the house.”

“Is he a welder?”

“No … he’s a teacher,” he told her—guiltily, veering toward a lie. “He teaches at the school of art in Kingston.”

True, his father had taught there for years. But he’d also been a professor of art history and painting at Cooper Union in New York and the National School of Fine Art in Mexico City, and his work was well placed in the best galleries in Europe. So to call him an art teacher was like saying Colin Powell had done some time in the service. Seeing doubt in her face—as if she were comparing what he’d told her to something that she’d heard—he thought, Fuck, she might know him. She collects art. But maybe not. He added, “And he paints and sculpts as well.”

She seemed satisfied.

“And you and Ian have known each other since childhood?” she continued.

“Through an uncle of ours, I-nelik, who’s a musician.”

A breeze flipped her dress above her knees, flashing her thighs, which were pressed together, forming a shape like the trunk of a cotton tree. He glanced at the strollers and sunbathers. If he were alone with her … or if the sky were darker … or, he was thinking now, if they were far away from her home, he’d slip his oarsman in her canoe and grunt her name as he paddled.