Free Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber Page A

relative sizes, it’s hard to tell me from him. I guess my brother must have snapped them; he took all the family photographs, which is why there are almost no photographs of him. Yes, it would have been Josey, because I don’t recall my mom ever going out in weather, or Mary. That damn boat, Mom called it, although it was Kite, officially.
    Mary took after our mother in a number of other ways, as well. The red-gold hair. The heart-shaped face. The thins. When I was small and just learning go fish, I thought the queen of diamonds in a deck of cards was a portrait of my mother. I had a photograph of Mary, she must have been nineteen or so, when she was being a model in New York, a candid shot, not professional, and in it she has a look on her face that I don’t imagine has ever been on mine, a look that says Oh, I’m so fucking terrific, don’t you wish you were me and doesn’t it just kill you that you’re not? The eyes are void of any inner life at all. She was calling herself Mariah Do then and was extremely hot. When I was in Paris, I once saw her picture on the cover of French Vogue. I told no one at the museum. There was no danger of anyone commenting that I resembled her.
    Her mother’s girl, certainly, as I was Daddy’s. Families do split that way, although around the dinner table we were cordial enough, good manners being a family value at the Does’. Josey, being the child of Mom’s previous and never-to-be-mentioned marriage, did not have a horse in this race. Oddly, although he was a Mount, too, he looked rather more like us than he did like his mother or Mary. My dad tried to reach out to him, decent guy that he was, but Josey wasn’t buying it. Pride, I think. He had a terror of being beholden, something he certainly didn’t share with his mother, or other half sister. He wanted to be the one giving the gifts. Also, it was probably not much fun being Lily Mount Doe’s son. He left home early, which broke my heart. In my girlish dreams it was always the three of us, out on the boat, having adventures, learning stuff. Boy stuff, naturally. My mother gave up early trying to teach me girl stuff, especially as she had such an expert and willing pupil in Mary.
    I am a little shaky in the pins on the way back to my post. Mrs. Waley looks meaningfully at her watch as I enter and exchanges some words with the filers. Smirks all around. It does Mrs. Waley good to note the deficiencies of her one white subordinate, and I don’t begrudge her that pleasure. I continue pulling files until lunchtime, which for me is one o’clock. Then I travel down dingy corridors to the cafeteria. Most of the time I go outside and find a patch of shade somewhere and eat alone, but today I am feeling too exhausted to make the trip. A spasm of nausea when the institutional food smell hits me. I pull a vanilla yogurt out of the cooler box.
    I wish to be alone, but I’m spotted by two other medical recorders. Lulu waves me over to a table where she is sitting with Cleo. Dead Dolores, were she here, would be glad of company, and so I go also, doing this in her memory. They’re both eating salads from the bar, where you make them up and buy them by the ounce. They are both sturdy, round-bottomed and -breasted dark women with straightened hair, looking very much alike, although I do not think they are related. Both of them are American African Non-Americans, being naturalized immigrants from the island of Barbados.
    Cleo makes a comment about my yogurt and they both chuckle engagingly. Both of them have acquired along with their citizenship the American body thing and wish to keep their size under control. They know that only the thin rise in America. They’re better educated than Mrs. Waley, and speak a more precise English. Both are enrolled at Miami-Dade, and will get their degrees and will ride their clipped imperial accents beyond even Billing, perhaps as far as Administration itself. Mrs. Waley regards them with suspicion; how