I hoped I'd never see again. I don't want to watch men flipping coins to see who gets me. I don't want to lie to everybody about working here a month or two when it's been almost two years. I want to tell the truth to somebody, and I want to tell the truth all the time. And I don't want to remember any more names.'
Fon plucks the forgotten cigarette from Rose's hand and knocks the ash onto the floor, then takes a deep drag. 'So,' she says. 'What does he want with you?'
Rose says, 'He wants to marry me.'
Fon puts a forearm on the table and rests her forehead on it.
Rose lays a hand on Fon's hair. 'It'll be fine. He'll take care of me. I won't have to work like this.'
Without lifting her head, Fon says, 'What about the dowry?'
'He understands about the dowry. He's going to-'
'Why?' Fon demands. 'Why does he understand about the dowry? Farang don't know about dowries.'
On the other side of the curtain, the sound of the rain doubles. 'I explained it to him.'
'He didn't learn about it by promising to marry any other-'
'Stop.' Rose listens to the rain hammering down, wishing it were so loud that she and Fon couldn't hear each other. 'We talked about it. He's going to give my parents more money than they ever thought they'd get.' She caresses Fon's hair. 'Fon. He's going to take care of Mai. Of my sister. He says he'll frighten my father so much that my father won't even think about doing anything bad.'
'He'll even take care of your sister,' Fon says as the lights go out, plunging the bar into blackness, and the music stops dead. Fon says, 'He's thought of everything.'
When she asks herself later whether she should have known that something was wrong, she remembers a hundred things. Inconsistencies in some of the things he told her. The friends, big, fit men very much like himself, but taciturn and reserved, whom she instinctively disliked. The occasional flashes of anger over things most Thais would have laughed off.
One evening in the hotel room, she had drawn a house, just an ordinary village house. It was a daydream in pencil. Like half the girls she knew, she was hoping that she could build a new house for her parents and her brothers and sisters someday, but her imagination went no further than the kind of house she'd grown up in.
She'd been sitting at the desk, hunched over a piece of hotel stationery. Her lap was full of bits of pink eraser, from the messy, rubbed-looking spot in the house wall where she'd placed a second window, which she thought was a daring innovation. Still, the house would have fit into any Isaan village without attracting a glance: a single room raised a meter above the ground, a door in the center of one wall, a few steps leading up.
She had run out of ideas, so she'd put a sun in the corner of the sky and was drawing a dog under the house when she felt him behind her.
'For your mom and dad?' Howard asked over her shoulder.
'Maybe,' she said, suddenly shy. She covered the sketch with her hand, but he slid the hand aside.
'Scoot,' he said. 'It's a big chair.'
Rose shifted sideways, and Howard perched himself on the edge of the seat. He took the pencil from her hand, moving so fast she barely saw it, and began to make bold, heavy strokes, ruler-straight. She watched as the house got bigger, saw a second room appear, and then Howard sketched a big central window, four times the size of the one she'd drawn and all one big pane, like the windows in the hotel. Finally he tilted his head, studied the page for a moment, and added a modern roof, raised in the center, instead of the flat pitch of corrugated iron she'd visualized.
It was a real house.
'Room,' she half whispered. 'Mai can have a room.'
'Here,' Howard said, and he scrubbed at the paper with the eraser for a moment and blew on it, and in the blank space a third room appeared, with its own little door and window. He obliterated some of the deck on the left and redrew it, bigger, to accommodate the addition. 'She gets her own door,' he said, pointing the pencil tip at it.
'Lek, too,' Rose said, looking at the door as though she wanted to go through it.
'Who's Lek?'
'Other sister,' Rose said. She let her index finger hop up the stairs.
'Yeah?' Howard said without looking at her. 'How old?'
'Only eight. No worry yet.'
'Sure,' Howard said. He drew a little stick figure in a skirt on the stairs and then rubbed the eraser on her index finger until she moved it. 'She can stay here, too.'
She stared at the page and at the strong hand resting at its edge. The desk light was on, and it made a reddish gold fringe out of the hairs on the back of his fingers.
Howard said, 'We can do this.'
Rose reluctantly stopped looking at the house and met his eyes. 'Can…?'
'Build this. We can build this for your family.'
'I save money,' Rose says. 'Have. In bank.' She passes a finger over Mai's room. 'But this-maybe not enough.'
'I can pay for it. I will pay for it.'
She said, 'Oh, no. No, no, no.'
'They're going to be my family, too.'
Rose leaned forward and rests her head on the pad. She closes her eyes.
Howard said, 'Are you okay?'
'Yes,' she said. 'Just happy. Want to stay like this.'
He put his hand on the back of her neck and rubbed, and she lifted her head and saw his other hand, still holding the pencil, only inches from her face. 'You hand,' she said. 'You hand have hair too much.'
'Because I'm a guy,' Howard said. 'More guy than a roomful of cops.'
'Hair too much,' she said, and she picked up his hand, closed her teeth on a few of the hairs growing on the back of his ring finger, and yanked them out.
'Shit!' Howard said, and he shoved her away, so hard she slid off the chair and hit the floor. 'Goddamn.'
She looked up at him, amazed, and found him shaking his hand in the air, and she thought it looked funny, until she saw his eyes. When she saw his eyes, she backed away, two or three feet across the floor, without even getting up.
He looked down at her and through her, and it seemed to take a few seconds for him to bring his eyes out of the hole he had stared in her so he could focus on her face. When he did, he grinned. 'That hurt,' he said. 'Did I push you off?'
She nodded, still watching his face.
'Well, you had it coming.' He looked down at his hand and then blew on his fingers. She had taught him how to blow on what hurt, to make it feel better. 'There,' he said. He shook the hand as though it were wet. 'All fine now.' He extended the other hand. 'Come back up here. I'm sorry. And look, I have a new idea for the house.'
She stayed where she was, so he sat and began to draw. After a moment she got onto the chair again, leaving an inch or two between them, and watched the pencil as he sketched a litter of puppies gathered around the dog she'd drawn.
'That one's Donder and that one's Blitzen,' he said, indicating two of the four. He wrote the names above them. 'You name the other two.'
She took the pencil, still feeling the agitation in the air. Trying to find her way back to the feeling of a moment ago, she said, 'This one name Dog.'
'Write it,' Howard said.
She wrote 'D-O-G' slowly above the puppy.
'And that one?'
'This one name Howard,' she said. 'Because he bite.'
Howard took the pencil and drew exaggerated fangs on the puppy named Howard. Then he took a new piece of paper and covered it with squares and filled the squares with a comic about a dog named Howard, the meanest dog in the world, a dog who was so mean he bit rocks, and ten minutes later they were both laughing.
But that night, dropping off to sleep, she saw again the look in his eyes. THEN THERE WAS the drinking.
