Free Small Damages by Beth Kephart Page B

off to one side; they are iron and thin, and they look creaky. Whoever she is kisses Miguel on the cheek and tells him to go skyward, then tells me too, in Spanish. She has been told about me, I can tell. She is glad that my linen dress is ironed. I feel her eyes on me as I climb the winding stairs up high, and now there are steps that twist the other way, and suddenly I’m on a rooftop, standing not underneath but inside the sky, and I feel my eyes go wide, and I think about Angelita’s cat tail, which I’ve slipped in my bag, have brought with me.
    I feel you turn inside me, swim toward the edge of us, bubble through me.
    I feel dizzy, but there is no wall to hold me. Hold us.
    There’s an old bathtub in one corner of the rooftop stuffed with oranges, bottles, orchids, and blossoms. “Bull business,” is all Miguel says, and I don’t ask questions, and now I watch him go off toward the tub, where five men and two women lean in his direction, nearly bow. Miguel removes his jacket and hooks it over his shoulder. The man beside him does the same. Miguel is taller than any of them, quieter when he talks, dipping his chin toward me now, saying something I can’t hear, so that all the others look my way, dip their chins, turn back to him, and keep on talking.
    Across the street, an old woman on her own rooftop is knitting. Down the way, on another roof, kids bat at the balls that are tied by thin strings of elastic to wooden paddles. Down on the street, a flock of nuns in white go by. A band of boys. Babies on shoulders.
    Back on this roof, the talk is all bulls. Whatever I can make out—it’s bull talk. The price of one bull against the price of another. The failures of a third in a ring. Miguel is talking now, about his six, and a man beside him is writing down numbers—standing there with a little pad, taking a second pencil out of the brim of his hat when the point on the first one gets shattered. Miguel is the star of this party, that much is clear. He’s the oracle of bulls, and now a woman in a purple dress with a hot pink belt stands on her toes to whisper something in his ear. The man beside her, the taking-notes man, stops writing to see what Miguel will do. He doesn’t blink, Miguel, not either eye. He is used to this, I realize, and then I realize that my mother was right about at least one thing: the guy is royalty, and he knows it.
    Now the woman from downstairs appears—her white head rising from the puzzle of stairs, both her hands cradling a cup of tea. She brings it to me. A wedge of lemon floats on its surface.
    “
Para usted,
” she says.
    “
Gracias
.”
    She stands beside me, not talking.
    The sky goes on for miles. Wherever there are cathedrals on the horizon, there is gold, and whenever I breathe, I smell oranges, and more and more, I feel confused. Across the way, the kids aren’t banging with their paddles anymore, and the old knitter is staring down toward the street, her eyes on the pack of Gypsies who have begun to dance and sing flamenco, who move forward now, slow, a parade. One of the rooftop kids disappears and then returns with a basket of carnations on his arm. He tosses a red bud down to the ground, toward the Gypsy song. He tosses another. The Gypsies look up and a crowd starts to gather, and the boy keeps tossing flowers. Now the knitter leans and takes a stem and throws it.
    “
Olé,
” says the boy with the basket.
    I turn to the woman beside me. She says nothing, explains nothing. I turn and watch Miguel and his friends, who aren’t talking anymore, who have started to lean out, toward the flamenco. Miguel goes first—grabs a fat fistful of the blossoms from the bathtub, opens his hand, sprinkles them down, and all of a sudden, it’s like Seville is raining flowers in the sun. The others collect their own blossoms and toss them down. This I think, is Seville, and suddenly I’m remembering last September, with Kevin, when I thought the world had lost its color and he