A stone pings my leg, and I see that I’m cut. I wipe the blood away with white powdered fingers and step back onto the street. This is where Mother usually says, Hooligan! His father would die twice if he knew how spoiled that boy has turned out. He saw us walking in the dark. Don’t you think he didn’t. Two females. Alone. Yet he doesn’t even slow down. Imagine!

But tonight is different. Instead of criticizing Fergus Meadows’s manners, she flicks dust from her skirt and tucks her arm through mine. She hums and smiles at the half-moon in the sky. The neighborhood gossip and the sly glances thrown at her in the aisles of the new hypermarket on Louw Street can’t touch her. She is bulletproof. She is armored by a simple fact:

He is coming.

• • •

I lie awake to the rasp of my little brother’s asthmatic breath in the next room and the hard scrap of steel wool on the kitchen stovetop. Mother is cleaning in preparation for the visit. A maid comes every day except Sunday, but you can’t trust them, Mother says. They don’t know how to treat nice things. They are careless, and you have to watch they don’t break the fine china cups or leave streak marks on the windows.

It’s better to do the important things yourself, she says. That way you know they are done right. His arrival is the number one most important thing. The house has to be perfect when he walks through the door on Saturday, so Mother takes care of the details. She cleans the stove, washes the floors, and dusts the porcelain angels on the sideboard next to the settee. Tomorrow, on Friday, she will choose our outfits for his visit: a pretty dress with strappy sandals for me, and a pair of khaki shorts and a collared shirt for Rian. We will be clean and neat, to match the house.

The oven door opens, and the scratch, scratch, scratch of the steel-wool pad continues. To my knowledge, he has never once looked inside the oven or opened the cupboards. Maybe this visit he will, so Mother has to make ready.

I roll over and blink at the windup clock on my bedside table. It is twelve minutes to midnight.

Rian coughs and Mother cleans, and I think of the moths suspended above the phone booth, their delicate wings beating the air until dawn.

• • •

Sixteen is four years too old to be sitting on his knee, but when he collapses on the lounge chair, all rumpled and sweaty from driving tar roads and gravel paths and narrow dirt lanes to get to us, I do just that. I take his right knee and Rian takes his left, and we simultaneously plant kisses on opposite cheeks: a ritual that goes back to before my memory begins. Bristles prick my lips, and I think that he is tired, that he is older than when he delivered our Christmas presents five days before Christmas Day. He wanted to spend the holidays with us, Mother says, but you know how things are.