We traipse up a couple of flights, maneuvering around folks loitering in the stairwell who give us the once-over (Jamaica = smiling strangers? Wrong.), for lunch at a hole called "Bobby's Place," an open-air, roof-top terrace with a limited menu--fried chicken, curry chicken, curry goat are the primary offerings.
I'm happy.
Dane's happy:
After:
Because more family business needs to be transacted--Social Security cards, bank stuff, etc.--I brilliantly suggest that Y and I take the kids for ice cream at the pier, so that we're not a huge, slow-moving cluster-fuck. The kids seem amenable, and off we go.
The only offerings, they tell us at the ice cream shop at the marina, are orange pineapple, chocolate, Fruit Basket, and Something Stout--a beer-flavor that I sample but pass on, quickly, for the orange pineapple (slivers of pineapple--yum) that the kids are also having.
I make weird conversation with the kids, asking them their favorite books/food/ice cream flavors, stopping for Seneeka's intransigent sandal strap, teasing the kids when they start panting from the vast amounts of ice cream we're consuming, then amusing them by patting my own stomach when the ice cream nearly defeats me.
The rest of the crew is to meet us by the pool at "Norma's at The Marina," a restaurant/bar with a little bit of a shopping complex feel to it. We set up shop, and Seneeka takes a phone call from her mom, repeatedly explaining, "Me wid Auntie Tamara friend!" Y eventually crawls onto a sunlounger with her iPod, and the kids intermittently disappear on mini-expeditions (to my paranoia), then returning to crawl onto another sunlounger together, giggling and pretending to sleep (the arm over the forehead, the fake-snoring, the fetal position).
T comes to collect us--apparently the ice cream shop was holding back on us and had mango and guava? The fuck?! I refrain from an unholy rage so as not to frighten the kids. We drop the kiddies back off at their grandparents'--T walking them inside the house, explaining that in Jamaica, you don't just drop kids off--then return to the villa, where I drink lots of fluids, take yet another Advil, and eat dinner that Angela and Lorna have left on the stove for us.
After grubbing, I fill a glass pitcher with ice and bottled water, arrange myself in my usual spot by the patio to download photos, suck contemplatively on guinep, nurse the ice water, and fend off t’s insistence that we go out to a dancehall. Not happening, homie.
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