Halfway to a Hundred

3: Toasted Bread

Daddy comes home just as the sun is beginning to set in the sky.

Just as I thought, he's brought some extra supplies with him, but only one cake.

After he's brought everything in, I help Mama tie the cover on the door down, and then we light a candle in the kitchen.

Mama and Daddy go over all the rules for the dry season--which I've heard five or six times already, but I do like being reminded--and then they organize a schedule for what gets to be eaten or drank when, and how much.

By the time they finish, it is late night, and I head back into my room to sleep.

I change into light sleeping clothes and crawl onto my bed, not bothering with the sheets.

~~

It's still hot when I wake up, but not as hot as yesterday morning.

I walk out into the main room, where I find nobody awake. It makes sense; there's not a whole lot to do during the dry season.

That's why I save up my money each year and buy a sketchbook and sometimes new pencils so I can draw during the long days indoors.

I walk over to the front door and peek through a gap between the cloth and the doorway.

No storms yet, I can see. The ground doesn't have much extra sand on it yet, but the sun is beating down and it's very hot.

I walk back to my room and pull out my brand-new sketchbook from under the bed, along with the pencils from last year, and the rubber eraser.

I lay down on the bed and start to draw pictures.

Sometimes I draw pictures of dogs, sometimes of people, sometimes of random items.

But it's all the same things over and over again.

Every year I fill up a sketchbook with the same stuff, and sometimes I look through them.

It makes me sad to think that in all these years, all I can produce is page after page of smudgy sketches of dogs, faces, and pots. They get better over time, obviously, so my drawings from last year are way different from my ones from four years ago, but they're still of the same things.

Only one year did I get different drawings, and that was because the dry season ended early, so by the time we were allowed back outside, I still had room leftover to draw, so I went outside and drew pictures of the town and the marketplace.

I draw for an hour before I get bored and decide to go turn on the TV.

I find the news lady reporting from Jacobville, one of the bigger cities close to where I live. She's saying that this year, the storm is hitting fast, and we have a starting low point of two days, today and tomorrow.

A low point is basically a short bit of time between when the sandstorms are predicted to when they actually come, when you can go outside to get your last supplies before staying in for three months.

There are usually a couple low points here and there throughout the dry season where it's cool enough to go outside, but usually you can't buy much, because people can't grow much to sell. It's usually bread, preserved meats, and dry.

Even still, those occasional grace periods are nice, especially in emergencies.

Mama and Daddy awake in about fifteen minutes, but they don't come out to say good morning to me right away.

It's okay. I know they're caring for Connie.

Later on they tell me that she's stable, that her fever hasn't gotten any better, but it hasn't gotten any worse.

In the morning we talk about Connie and her sickness.

We eat one serving of plain rice for lunch, and I mash some up and mix it with spices to feed to Connie.

In the afternoon Daddy naps and Mama and I do nothing but watch professional golf on TV.

In the evening--or more like the late night, we light candles and Mama toasts one of the pieces of bread I bought from the market and then splits it four ways--bigger pieces for Connie and me, smaller pieces for her and Daddy.

After we eat I go in to see Connie. She's awake, looking at one of her books.

The bread we gave her twenty minutes ago is lying discarded on the table next to her bed.

"Connie," I say, coming in.

She looks up.

"You have to eat your bread. It'll make you stronger."

"I'm not hungry, though," Connie says. "I'm too hot to be hungry."

"It's because you have a fever," I say, picking up the bread and putting it in her hands. "You have to eat it."

"But I don't want it!" she whines, and then starts crying.

I reach over to hug her, but recoil when I find her even hotter than she was this morning. I scream for Mama and Daddy.

Mama pulls the thermometer from her pocket, takes Connie's temperature. She doesn't say it, just shows it to Daddy, and then she starts shushing Connie and trying to feed her the bread.

I don't like this.

I know from the looks on Mama and Daddy's faces that Connie's fever is getting worse, and there's no way we can bring her to the clinic.

I lock myself in my room and start to cry.