The Gingerbread Boy by Lori Lapekes

himself. “What language did your parents speak?” she asked.
    “Some local tribal dialects, plus Spanish and Portuguese.” Daniel replied.
    “Do you speak any of it?”
    “It’s kind of fractured, but I can speak a little Portuguese if it benefits me.” he said, then added a few words Catherine found incomprehensible.
    Her eyes widened. She cocked her head slyly. “All right, how did that just benefit you?”
    Daniel chuckled. “I just said, in Portuguese, that you are much too lovely to be spending time with a bum like me.”
    Catherine raised her eyebrows and shook her head. How could she tell him how fascinating she found his background, when her own father had been a cruel alcoholic, and her mother a promiscuous factory worker who ran around with anyone who would take a second glance at her? How could she tell him how she and Tony had to clean out cow stalls to help make a living and then explain that the same brother had vanished off the face of the Earth? How dysfunctional was that? Could she even admit that her best friend back East was an eccentric seventy-seven-year-old lady that little kids called ‘Witch Hazel?’
    Catherine closed her eyes against unsettling thoughts
    You have no right to be in Daniel’s house, a voice in her mind scolded . The fact you’re here now is a fluke. Daniel is just playing with you.
    Catherine recognized the voice in her subconscious as Beth’s, again. Why did so many people’s opinions flood her mind in times like this? Beth’s, Hazel’s, and sometimes, even Tony’s? Didn’t she have a will of her own?
    “Tell me more about South America,” Catherine said before Daniel could ask any questions about her upbringing. That could only lead to disaster in what she hoped might otherwise be the start of something interesting.
    Daniel folded his arms, “I don’t want to talk all about myself, it sounds vain. Let’s hear more about you.”
    “I asked first.” Catherine reminded him, “I’ll tell you more about me another time. Learning about someone as wretched as Calvin is enough for anyone to know about for a while.”
    Daniel shrugged. “If you insist. But living in South America was such a long time ago. It seems unreal to me now. I mostly remember that it was hot and sticky much of the time, and muddy. Twice a horse stumbled and fell on my mother while she was riding it along a trail, or a road, as they called it. Luckily, the horses there were small, and the mud deep,” he added, laughing.
    “And there were bugs everywhere. Some would bite so hard it’d itch and burn for weeks.” He tiptoed his fingers across Catherine’s arm as though they were an insect’s legs, and Catherine laughed and shook him off as he continued. “I wish I could remember more of the Indians, but all I can recall is the low-key nature of their lives. They were extremely friendly. They made a kind of drink called chechwa they’d sometimes offer visitors. It’s kind of how we’d offer someone coffee here, but chechwa was made from chewed up corn or yucca root mixed with water and sugar cane and left to ferment. Slimy pieces of the roots were usually still floating in it when offered. Fortunately,” he added with a wink, “Mom thought I was too young to taste it. And time wasn’t a factor there. You could never be late for anything. In the States, everything is run by the clock. The tribes we worked with in Peru and Brazil had no conception of time. Yet no one was lazy, everyone had a job to do and they did it well. When I got to the States, the pressure of having a clock control my life was the hardest thing to get used to. That…” He grinned. “…and wearing coats and boots in the winter.”
    At that, Catherine remembered his scarf in her purse. She hoped to give it back to him, as she’d forgotten about it in all the excitement last night. It was the last thing she thought of when they left the bar at two o’clock in the morning. She’d been so tired she barely