On the drive over to his house, he got reacquainted with me like an old tv show. So what grade you in now? You still friends with that little girl? What she name again? You remember that time you used to… 

The recap reel trailed further and further back till I was a baby gnawing at his shoulder again, soaking the t-shirt through. “You used to get up to some trouble enuh,” he teased, his laughter canned, his gestures broad and over-embellished like a fun day mascot as he acted out stale memories. I smiled and nodded on cue. It always made him feel good to reminisce about the past. At the light, he pulled up the photo gallery on his phone to show me the same few snapshots, as if to remind me of myself. The phone was new, one of the recent models that I had seen advertised in the electronics shop window after school, as I walked to the small office where my mother worked as a receptionist downtown. When it was time to drive again, he let the phone clatter back into the cupholder and grabbed hold of the wheel. 

We stopped at his favourite Chinese restaurant to buy lunch like we usually did on our rare Saturdays together. The cashier lady cooed over our likeness and this image of the doting father. He played along, pulling me into his side for a hug. He made his usual order: roast chicken with sweet and sour gravy, and white rice. A single meal to share for two. You never want anything else? he asked as we got back into the car, as if to confirm something he already knew. No, daddy, I said, steadying the hot takeout containers on my lap. Mi know you don’t eat much anyway, he said, pleased with his stellar recall.

The closer we got to the house, the more serious he became.

“There is someone I want you to meet,” he said as we pulled into the driveway. He rented a small apartment sectioned out of the landlord’s big house. The arrangement gave him a personal driveway and a small porch where I now saw his girlfriend sitting. I had already met this one but I wouldn’t put it past him to forget that. It had happened before. A lick of dread started curling in my belly as I anticipated the awkwardness this second first meeting would bring—Kim, the girlfriend, incensed, and my father fumbling his way through excuses. By Kim’s sullen expression I knew she wasn’t happy to see me. Then a little girl pattered onto the porch.

She looked like him. 

She was dressed up like a present in a pink, star-spotted t-shirt and shorts combo, hair braided and looped into little buns at the top of her head, white velcro sandals hugging her chubby feet. Her appearance signalled that somebody somewhere cared about her, that they wanted to inspire that same nurturing instinct in other adults, wherever the child went. And now she was here.

Brief introductions were made. 

“This is Candy,” he said, proudly, patting her on the head like a puppy. 

I overheard my mother telling a friend once that for every one Jamaican man there were at least 3 stray children scattered across the island. Knowing this equation, I thought I was prepared for any surprises. 

But, until seeing this girl in the flesh, I never considered that the surprise could be so big—not a squealing baby cradled in a new girlfriend’s arms, but a small child already half the life and size of me. 

The little girl looked at me with the quiet wariness of a child thrust into unfamiliar company. I searched within myself for some internal tug, a yank of the blood that supposedly connected us. I felt nothing but the sagging weight of the takeout containers in my hand. I went inside to put them in the kitchen, leaving Candy to take in the adults’ tense bickering. She’d have to get used to it around here. 

I heard bits and pieces from inside. Kim’s agitated protests: You just left her here…I don’t know her from anywhere. My father’s weak responses: You’re a very capable woman, babe…Of course I trust you.

When I came back out my father was already shepherding Kim towards the car. “You’re just going to leave them here alone?” she said incredulously, her voice climbing.

Annoying. I wished she would shut up and leave me to eat my roast chicken in peace. 

Then Candy shuffled to my side and the weight of responsibility settled in. I’d played big sister a couple times in my community, with the neighbours’ young children, coordinating ring games and marble wars in the dusty lane. But, for all the lack of direct supervision, by virtue of chronic underemployment, and close quarters, the walls and fences and roofs of our homes crowded against one another, somebody’s somebody was always a few shouts away. The cool quiet of my father’s neighbourhood, where each concrete house was an island in its own sea of land, felt isolating in comparison, like we were alone in the world. 

“I just dropping you ‘round the road. I soon come back,” my father said to Kim. 

This was a man who was always ‘round the road and coming back. In truth, he would probably be gone for hours but I could manage. I thought I saw a new contempt for my father bloom in Kim’s expression as she settled into the passenger seat.

“Di key same place,” my father called to me from the driver’s side window as he buckled his seatbelt. 

He meant that there was a spare hung on the refrigerator, put there in case there was an emergency, like a fire, and I needed to get out. If we needed to get out. I stepped up to the grill and raised my fingertips to cold, branded metal. I stepped away satisfied that, at 12 and a half years old, I was now tall enough to reach the padlock without climbing onto the porch chair. My father’s Toyota van peeled out of the yard, leaving the paint chipped front gate yawning open in a Y.

Candy was a quiet little girl. At first, I wondered if she could speak at all. She was silent all throughout my practiced ritual of getting plates out from the bottom cupboard, retrieving utensils from the kitchen drawer, scooping out steaming heaps of white rice and roast chicken dripping with sauce.

She took for granted that she would be eating too, climbing up onto a dining chair and watching expectantly as I dipped the spoon into the takeout containers, full of a yet-unmarred faith that the world would take care of her. A spiteful part of myself wanted to rattle that presumption, fling it back to wherever she was coming from with her sparkly white slippers. To share the meal into one plate, leaving the other empty. To eat it all while she sat across from me, teary-eyed, and ate the lesson.

A blink and the dark thought passed. I split my portion of meat into two, dipped a little more into the rice dish, shared her a plate, gave her a spoon, put the rest of the food into the fridge. Her first words to me were Thank you. The tightness building in my chest lessened a bit. Her voice was scratchy for a child.

After eating, we sat letting the food settle in our stomachs. I pulled more out of Candy bit by bit. My guess was almost right—she was 5. She went to a primary school that wasn’t far from mine. She liked running. Her favourite colour was purple. Daddy picked her up after school sometimes. 

“Is this your first time here?” I asked.

She nodded, and I felt like she had given something back to me somehow.

If it were just me, I’d haul myself over to the bedroom and put a movie on, laying atop a throne of pillows as the hours of my visit ticked by. But I could imagine how strange this place would be in Candy’s eyes. I would have to show her around.

As small as the apartment was, well-equipped to host a single person and maybe another half-a-person from time to time (be it a child or a short-term girlfriend), it was hard to decide where to start the tour. How could I introduce this man to her? What part of the home spoke the loudest? I decided to start with the trophy stand. 

My father was so proud of his accomplishments that they had their own tower, set to be visible upon entering the house. They were sales awards mostly, with a few semi-professional sports trophies in the mix. My baby picture was tucked beside a plastic gold cup awarded to the 2nd runner up in the 2009 D&G golf tournament. I knew a picture of his own father, Senior, was framed somewhere on the top shelf, too high for me to see. Candy was nowhere.

“He’ll probably add yours soon,” I lied, hoping she didn’t feel left out. Next we explored the closet. I knew everything that was in there already as I’d done this all before, so I encouraged her to root around in all the shelves, baskets and cabinets. It was our heritage afterall. “Sometimes, if you get to sleep over, he gives you one of these to sleep in,” I told Candy, rummaging through a drawer of neatly folded novelty shirts. They were all marked with different place names like Aruba and Panama and Mexico and had illustrations of sandy beaches and colourful instruments. I had never been to any of these places before but just touching the worn and stripping vinyl images made them real under my finger tips. I showed Candy how to stroke the fabric in the right direction to avoid further shedding.

When we were done, I folded everything back the way we had found it and shut the drawer so he wouldn’t notice.

Afterwards, we looked at his perfume collection. He didn’t have a vanity, like the old wooden one I had at home, crammed into my mothers tiny box of a room, inherited from my grandmother. He laid the scents out on a small end table instead. The angular crystal bottles refracted the light filtering through the window amongst themselves, casting rainbow streaks across the table top. I let Candy spritz just one, a heavy, musky scent that seemed to be his favourite—it had gone down the most. For the other bottles, we held their necks to our faces and took deep inhales that left us wrinkling our noses, giddy and giggling together.

We finished off with the DVD crate. I was careful to direct Candy’s gaze away from the bad ones depicting cold steel weapons and busty women on their covers. There were a few animated kids movies in there, stocked in days gone by. I let her pick one to watch even though I had seen them all dozens of times and I was too old for them now.

“Are you my sister?” Candy asked me, as we lay side by side watching the tv, our heads hanging upside down at the edge of the bed.

“Yeah, I’m your sister,” I replied, knocking her hand gently with mine. Her chubby grip caught my thumb in a pillowy squeeze. She didn’t let go for the rest of the movie, even when we turned right-side up. 

I had a sixth sense for when the Toyota van was chugging its way back home. It was something about the way the rattle of the engine reverberated in the stillness of the neighbourhood. It was hours later, long after the movie had finished and we had napped away the fullness of our bellies. The sun was sinking in the sky. I rose to start rearranging the kitchen, putting dishes in the sink, fixing the dining chairs, the rest.

He never made me do dishes over here, I think because he thought I didn’t know how to do them. I let him think that but still piled the plates and utensils like nesting dolls, filling them with water to soak the dried sauce and hardened rice stuck to the ceramic. Everything in the kitchen was more or less in order by the time I was done. It would almost be like we were never there. The van was humming into the driveway by the time I made it back to the bed to straighten out the covers underneath Candy’s dozing body.

“You guys had fun?” our father asked, after jangling the grill open, his face split in that plastic grin again. I smiled and nodded. Candy blinked her wide sleepy eyes slowly at his tall form craning over us. He stooped to her level.

“Maya take care of you?”

Candy didn’t speak. She didn’t know how this worked yet, but she’d learn.

“It was fun,” I parroted. She allowed me to squeeze her to my side. 

We dropped Candy home first, rolling up to a house I’d never seen before. It was on the opposite side of the city from where I lived. This neighbourhood too had a different feel from mine, the small houses same-shaped and neatly aligned in their rows. I made out the shadow of who I figured was Candy’s mother on the other side of the open grill. Candy gave our father and I quick hugs before scurrying inside.

“I’m glad that you guys got along,” he said on the way to dropping me off. “Mi always seh my kids will stick together, you know. And live loving no matter what.”

He went on, waxing poetic about family and loyalty like he was wont to do, till he became tangled up in his own thoughts, falling silent. I had never met any of my father’s siblings. What I knew of them I only knew by my mother’s limited account and the little my father had mentioned of them. I wondered if they thought lovingly about him back in the day, living up on that hill with Senior in the big house, my father growing up under a zinc roof in a small village tucked away in the shadow of the valley. I wonder if they thought of him now.

It took a while to get home. The closer we got, the more solid the streets became, the more I felt the flickering tongue of heat licking over my face from the window. My world was reinserting itself, but my mind was elsewhere, trying to calculate the distance of six years in kilometers across a city. I had forgotten to ask Candy for her birthday. I did not ask my father. Would he remember hers if he could never remember mine? I vowed I would ask Candy about it the next time I saw her. I knew where her school was.

My mind had already started plotting a route from the nearest bus stop. I wondered if she would be happy to see me, if the people around would see our father’s mark in the both of us and call us siblings.

Soon, the blur of passing light posts and business complexes on Archer Road resolved into the grooved concrete designs etched into my neighbours’ unfinished walls, into the dense, overarching canopy of crowded fruit trees common to us all in the community. We rolled up the patchy road to the yard. A warm light emanated from the belly of my small house on the lot. My mother stood in her house dress, arms akimbo, leaning on the front gate, reproachful, awaiting my return. My father offered a gruff greeting to her and passed an absentminded kiss over my crown. He was still in his head. At some point in his reflection his mood had turned and he was now closer to being another man, a real one. After a moment’s hesitation, I spoke, careful to transfigure the heavy press of need into a light nudge. 

“Daddy,” I said, softly. “Could I get some lunch money?”

“Of course,” he said, reaching for his wallet.

He pulled a few bills from a wad of cash, explaining to me that he did remember but this was actually his workers’ pay and things have been tight in the business and he’ll have to get the car serviced at the end of the month and he’d have to pay for registration too and he was flying out soon and the doctor called him about a test and he’d give me the rest later on in the week.

I said, Yes, daddy and allowed him to squeeze me to him one final time, the center console of the vehicle jabbing into my side. We should spend more time like this together, he said as I withdrew.

My father’s car pulled away with a pip pip of the horn. I stood with my mother at the gate, watching the departing van turn the corner, knowing it was not likely that I would see it again before another long while. My mother rubbed a hand between my shoulder blades. I slipped the money into my jeans pocket and flexed my fingers at my side, grasping at air, trying to recall the phantom press of a little hand holding mine.