“You’re the only one who thinks so.” She paused to dislodge a pebble from her shoe. “Shall we go to Milk Queen?” She pointed down Tillery Street in the direction of the ice-cream parlor.

She ordered a banana split with peppermint ice cream. He got nothing for himself. He would have felt foolish eating in front of her. Sara ate her ice cream with the same weariness with which she’d responded to his compliments. She picked at it, licking tiny spoonfuls with a tongue like a cat’s, setting the spoon down, then sighing and picking it up again, as if this were merely one more in an endless line of tasks she must complete before she could be dead. Why had she said yes to his invitation? He wanted to touch the secret world inside her. Instead, he watched dumbly as she ate. When at last she’d scraped the glass dish clean, she murmured, “You’d best take me home now.”

They didn’t speak on the walk from Milk Queen to her house. His throat felt clutched by a hand. He had not the faintest idea what had happened in the past hour, and he supposed that was what everybody meant when they talked about the mystery of women. There was some consolation, at least, in joining the ranks of mystified men.

Sara’s house was a single-story cinder-block-and-plaster home like everybody else’s, but the paint was fresh—white, with sunshine-yellow trim. The short front walkway was lined with purple flowers and there were no enervated donkeys or dogs cluttering the yard. All of this contributed to an air of gentility that Clive felt befitted a minister’s widow and daughter brought down by circumstance. The only discordant feature was an old, tumbledown cookhouse out back, with a rusted galvanized roof.

As they turned off the road and walked up to the house, Sara’s mother appeared in the doorway. Miss Agatha, like her daughter, was a meager woman, no taller than a child. Growing up, he had seen her at church every Sunday. But as she stood in the doorway, her stance slack and desultory, her eyes darting like a hen’s, it occurred to him that he had not seen her there in years.

“G-g-good evening, Miss Agatha,” he managed. The mother had the same effect on him as the daughter.

She did not respond, just continued to stand in the doorway with her arms at her sides. Past where she stood, he could see the parlor. There were piles everywhere, and dirty dishes stacked on a table. A framed painting hung askew on the wall; beneath it a planter held the brown husk of a dead plant. As he took it in, mouth agape, he thought of Sara’s pristine speech and dress, everything that made the other boys call her snob and prude. He thought of his grandmother’s house, its smell of bleach and not a thing out of place. He thought of his mother’s house, and of his mother. When he felt Sara looking at him, he tried to avert his eyes from the scene, but he was too late—she had seen him seeing it. She bent her head. He wanted to tell her that her secret was safe with him. He wanted to tell her he understood how the shame came not just from being from a home like this, a mother like this, but from loving a home like this, a mother like this. But before he could do anything but fidget, Sara shook her head, and when she raised her eyes to meet his they were rinsed clean, bright and flashing as always. Miss Agatha turned and walked back into the dark house.

“Your mum vex?” he asked.

“My mum is nothing.”

“I hope you did have a good time,” he said pitifully.

Sara kept her eyes fixed on the ground.

Clive turned and walked down the porch steps, past the purple flowers that lined the front walk. He was about to turn back onto the road when he heard footsteps behind him. Then he felt Sara grab his hand. He turned, and she met his gaze. Her eyes were shining, he couldn’t tell if there were tears or if it was the moonlight. She pulled him off the walkway.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Hush,” she said. She led and he followed, around the house to the yard and into the old cookhouse.

TWO MONTHS later, when Sara told him that she was pregnant, Clive had the feeling that this eventuality had been waiting for him all along. He was scared as shit, but it had a rightness to it. Clive and Sara. He looked at her belly and tried to get his mind around the truth that a person who was half him and half her was inside, blooming into being day by day. It seemed like a thing that could not possibly have happened to anyone else ever before.

“I want you to know I’m going to take care of you,” he told her. “Both of you.”

“You don’t even have a job,” she whispered. Her voice was not angry or accusatory. There was nothing in it at all. She blinked.

“I’ll get one. We can rent a place of our own. Buy a car. It will be okay. I promise.”

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to make promises you can’t keep?”

“I will keep it, Sara. We can be married. We can be a family.”

He did not stumble on the words. He had at last found something worthy of his conviction.

Sara looked right past him. “What kind of family would we be? You out all the time carrying on with your friends, and me … you’ve seen how I did grow up.”

“It won’t have to be like that. I’ll stop all of it. We can give this child everything.”

“I might be crazy like her. I know I might.” Her voice was a whisper.

“Sara.” He took her hands in his, but she yanked them away.

“You think because you did rut with me like a goat in a shed I must marry you?” she snapped.

He wanted to tell her he would weather any storm with her. He wanted to remind her that what happened in the cookhouse had been her idea; that as he emptied himself into her in the pitch-dark, breathing in the smell of must and rusted metal, he felt such sadness, because he didn’t want to do it like this, that he would be angry with himself forever for letting it happen the way it did.

“I know you come from a good family,” he said instead. “I’m prepared to set you up how you deserve.”

She stared at the dirt. “If you believe I’m a minister’s daughter, you’re a fool for true.”

“SWEET BOY LIKE honey. Always stick to the most venomous girl.” His grandmother said this as if it could not be helped. Clive had waited nearly a month to inform her that he was going to be a father, telling himself he was withholding the news simply because it was none of her business.

“Sara is not venomous.”

“Don’t give me that backchat.”

“You don’t know anything about her.”

She snorted, then released a laugh like vinegar. “I know she crazy mother. I know goat don’t make sheep.”

He slammed his fist on the table. “She’s the mother of my child and I won’t let you speak low of she!” he shouted.

For the first time in his life his grandmother averted her eyes from him. Looking back, he would realize this was the moment when she relinquished him to himself; never again would she pester him about his late-night liming or encourage him to enter a training program so that he might learn a vocation.

“Oh, you’re a real man now,” she whispered.

He wanted to press himself to her and weep.

HE BEGAN looking for a job the day Sara told him she was carrying his child, but found nothing. He was beginning to despair, and to think that Sara was right when she’d told him not to make promises he couldn’t keep, when Edwin announced he’d secured interviews at a new resort for both of them. “I thought nobody ever got rich working for somebody else,” Clive said when Edwin told him.

“What you think, I’m going to abandon my bred in he hour of need? Beside, we gonna make mad service charge.”

What would he do without Edwin? They were hired. The job came with a uniform, crisp and white, with Indigo Bay embroidered on the lapel in gold thread. When he went to Sara’s house in the uniform after his first day of work and gave her the tips he’d earned, she smiled the secret smile he’d seen all those years ago at the Christmas pageant, the one he’d been chasing ever since.

Clive made plans. He spent a Saturday at the small island library, paging through a mildewed book about pregnancy. He brought Sara ginger candies to quell her nausea. He purchased bottles and diapers and a soft brown bear he imagined would become his child’s favorite. He made sure Sara had the phone number for the back office at Indigo Bay so he could be reached when it was time.

But in the end, Sara went into labor at night, three weeks early. He was at Paulette’s with his friends. He stumbled home that night the same as usual, woke from his hungover sleep the next morning like always. It was only when he went into the kitchen and saw his grandmother sitting stiffly at the table that he knew something had happened.

“You have a son,” she said.

He could not square in his mind how, as he’d been drinking with his friends, elsewhere, he was becoming a father. He would never know exactly when it had happened. The moment he went from being one thing to another was lost to him forever.

When he went to Sara in the hospital that morning, she would not look at him.