A Nail Through the Heart by Timothy Hallinan

Author:Timothy Hallinan [Hallinan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780062049414
Google: A2_ZQGXK4cgC
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-08-01T12:34:25.528000+00:00

29

Send Me Number 57

Madame Wing does not telephone to demand an update that night. Rafferty calls anyway to report that he has identified the Cambodian man, but Pak says she is too busy to come to the phone. “Nothing else is happening,” Rafferty says.

“According to you,” Pak says mysteriously, and hangs up.

“Why do I have the feeling,” Rafferty asks Rose, “that things are being kept from me?”

Rose is settled at Rafferty’s desk, doing her business accounts. She has a pencil in her hand, another behind her ear, and a hank of hair between her teeth, usually a prelude to some frustrated pencil chewing. Twice a week she writes down in a ledger every baht she has earned and every baht she has spent—for food, rent, shampoo, soap, clothing, pink plastic hair clips, donations at the temple, money sent to her family, and—finally—her business expenses: tuk-tuk fares, advances to the women, new T-shirts and jeans for their interviews, cell-phone charges. The exercise does little for her mood.

“When I think of all the money I threw away when I was dancing,” Rose says, studying the numbers on the page, “I could scream.”

Rafferty looks at the familiar terrain of her profile, at the play of light on her hair, at her straight back and at the smooth skin over the curve of her neck. At the carefully ironed shirt she wears tucked in to her jeans because the bottom is frayed and it embarrasses her. “I haven’t heard you scream in a while.”

“Since you gave me that money, I have nine thousand baht in the bank,” she says, ignoring him. “A little more than two hundred dollars. Do you think I should send some of it home?”

“Save it for a rainy day,” he says in English.

“Poke,” she says gently in Thai, “it rains nearly every day.”

A wave of longing, mixed with something like loneliness, washes over him. “All the more reason,” he says, also in Thai.

“I’ll send them five thousand. Half and a little bit. That will make them happy.”

“You make a lot of people happy, Rose.”

She says nothing. Rafferty can almost see the words hanging in the air between them. He feels the same breathless awkwardness he experienced in junior high, when he first asked a girl for a date. The stillness in the room presses in on him like water.

“Rose—”

“Don’t confuse me, Poke,” she says. She closes the ledger with a soft pop. She still has not turned to face him.

“I’m not trying to confuse you.”

She waves the words off. “But you are. You’re making me think too much. And don’t tell me I said I’d think about it. I am thinking about it.” The chair’s hinged back creaks when she leans away from the desk, as though she wants to be farther from the ledger and the numbers it contains. Her right hand tightly grips the arm of the chair. “We were fine until you started. We got along, we laughed, we didn’t…we didn’t ask questions. I was comfortable here. Now you want to change everything—adopt Miaow, bring the boy in, marry me.

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