The Sea Grape Tree by Gillian Royes

puff sleeves and aproned skirt reminding Sarah of a chocolate Swiss maid ready to burst into song.
    â€œI’m done,” Ford said. He laid his fork down and looked up at the young woman with a dutiful widening of lips.
    â€œBut you haven’t finished,” the helper protested, shaking her beads.
    â€œI’ve had enough for tonight.”
    â€œYou didn’t like it?”
    â€œIt was delicious. I don’t have much of an appetite.”
    â€œI going to cook some nice food for you. We need to fatten you up.” Carthena’s smile remained fixed while she collected the dinner plates, and Sarah wondered if she’d heard some of their earlier talk.
    â€œCarthena cooks a mean escoveitch fish,” Roper said. “Can we have that for breakfast tomorrow?”
    â€œNobody make it better than me,” the woman said, beaming. “I’ll buy some fresh snapper in the morning.”
    By the time they moved to the deck with a pot of coffee and a tray of cups and saucers, some sense of normalcy had returned, although the hostess made sure to serve Ford his coffee first. Around them, fireflies— peeny wallies, Roper called them—buzzed in and out of the darkened bushes.
    Settling back into a lounge chair with her coffee cup, Sarah pointed to the lights on the far end of the bay. “I went walking over there a couple days ago. There’s a bar there, right?”
    â€œA bar and a house on the hill—there on the left. It’s a beautiful house where a family called the Delgados live,” Sonja explained. “That other light—lower down, see—is the bar. It’s on a cliff overlooking the water.”
    â€œSounds lovely,” Sarah said. “I met the bartender when I was taking a walk.” She decided to say nothing about the man’s warning, which, remembered on a soft tropical evening, now seemed like an overreaction.
    â€œWe’ll take you there,” Sonja said. “It’s a cute bar, very—rustic.”
    â€œIt’s right across from an island,” Roper added. “We’ll go before sunset so you can see it.”
    Ford leaned forward, showing some energy for the first time. “Do they have music in the bar?”
    â€œNot much live music,” Sonja answered, shrugging. “An American man owns it.”
    Roper entertained them with the bar owner’s saga, and they all tsk-tsked about the hurricane that had wiped the roofs off the villagers’ houses and resulted in the death of the hotel and the birth of an island.
    â€œYou think your problems are bigger than everyone else’s,” Ford said, “but there’s always someone with a tougher story.”
    â€œI hear an investor’s come down to talk to Eric about building another hotel,” Roper interjected. “Maybe there’s hope for him after all.”
    After the hosts had excused themselves, Ford and Sarah continued sitting on the deck. They listened for a while to a CD that Roper had put on before he went to bed, and the trumpeter explained that he and his band had recorded it live last year at Ravinia, an open-air theater near Chicago. All around them, the squeaks and honks of crickets and frogs accompanied the music. Sipping a second cup of coffee, Ford commented on the many bright stars overhead, and they compared notes on the difficulty of stargazing in urban centers, a mutual pet peeve, it turned out.
    â€œWhen I was little,” Sarah said, “my father took me to this village where my uncle had a church—he was an Anglican minister—just south of Scotland. We went walking on a country road one night, and I remember being all bundled up and my father pointing out the stars. They were so bright, just amazing.”
    â€œThat’s a great memory.”
    â€œFunnily enough, I don’t have a lot of memories from childhood.” She laughed. “There are these great blocks of time that are blank,