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cannot have forgotten that he told her how he met her mother. A modest woman does not sway her hips like a stripper. Badoom, badoom, badoom . “What do you mean, she’s modest?”
    “Privacy is not the same as intimacy, Anna,” her father says quietly.
    She does not understand.
    “You make a mistake if you think I meant intimacy. Your mother and I are intimate.”
    Unexpectedly, she is embarrassed. Even when children become adults they still prefer the story of the stork to the truth about how they were conceived. She turns away from him. “What do you want me to say to you?”
    “Don’t oppose her. She has made up her mind. She will be treated here, in our country, in our homeland. She is proud of our doctors.”
    “And you? What do you say?”
    “I support your mother, Anna. That is what I’ve always tried to do.”
    “You are giving her a death sentence,” Anna says.
    “You live in America. We live here. We don’t think everything in America is good. She doesn’t think everything in America will necessarily be the best for her.”

C HAPTER 6
    T here is, her father says, a difference between intimacy and privacy. Her mother is modest, he says.
    Intimacy: the condition of being intimate. Intimate : relating to one’s deepest, innermost nature.
    Privacy : the condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others.
    Modest: a disinclination to draw attention to oneself, retiring, diffident.
    In the intimacy of her parents’ marriage, she was conceived. In the privacy of their bedroom, her mother and father protect each other’s secrets with such fervor that neither will acknowledge what the other knows. Her mother will not admit to her father that she knows he knows about the lump on her breast and the blood on his vest. He will not reveal that he knows she knows.
    Anna does not doubt her parents are privy to each other’s deepest, innermost nature. But it strains credulity to think of her mother as modest. At breakfast, Anna was her father’s ally as he threw darts at her mother, accusing her of bossiness, arrogance, snobbery, suggesting a lack of modesty. Now he has turned the tables on her, his daughter, hinting that she is the one who is immodest, the one who is the snob, the one arrogantly listing their island’s inadequacies. But Anna is convinced her mother will die if she remains on the island, if she is treated by the doctors here, who are not as informed as the doctors in America. Her mother will not survive surgery in a hospital that does not have sufficient sheets for its insufficient beds, a hospital with equipment that is decades old, that is supported by a technology which has barely kept pace with the inventions of the previous century.
    Why does her father give in to her mother? Why does he always submit to her will, to her plan, not his plan? For surely it was not his plan to wait, to simply stand by silently for a miracle, to find out if six rosaries said in the night would shrink the tumor on his wife’s breast, make it disappear.
    The lump on her mother’s breast is as large as a lemon, the one under her arm not much smaller. Both of the tumors have festered for months. Years, perhaps. At what stage is the malignancy? Anna is certain it is close to the last stage, not far from terminal. Yet her mother refuses to have surgery in the States where she can be saved and her father says he supports her. It is all he has ever tried to do, he says.
    How much penance is one required to do for one’s sins? She knows bad things have happened between her parents. Her father was to blame. But how long will it take for him to earn absolution?
    “Miss Anna, you speak to madam?”
    Singh has come so quietly upon her, she is startled. Her shoulders jerk upward, her back stiffens, and her eyes skate down to the machete at the side of his leg. He is holding the handle loosely in his palm. The blade glints in the sunlight.
    “I frighten you, Miss Anna?”
    A reflex response she has learned