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She wondered if the Garden of Eden had been anything like Grenada. Stretching in her seat, she thought of Henri-four whole days in paradise!-and felt a languid bliss seep through her. Then she remembered this could well be their last time together, and felt a hollow thump inside her, as if the plane had suddenly dropped several thousand feet.

/ have to tell him. No more. I can’t do this anymore—sneaking around behind his wife’s back, seeing him only five or six weeks out of the year. I love him too much.

Dolly shut out the awful prospect of breaking the news to Henri. Instead, she imagined his surprise when she showed up at the plantation. How delighted he’d be. And, okay, maybe a little bit annoyed with her, too. Hadn’t he warned her not to come? Dolly replayed their phone conversaton last week, Henri telling her he had to fly to Grenada to sort things out at the plantation. She had jumped at the chance of having a long weekend in the tropics, just the two of them. But Henri, though she could tell he was sorely tempted, had been adamant in his refusal. The Grenadian governmentA was in chaos, and there

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were leftist gangs stirring up trouble. It might be dangerous.

Physical danger? No, that wasn’t why Dolly’s heart was racing now, or why her hands felt cold as ice. She didn’t give a hoot about Communists or gangs … what was scaring her was the prospect of losing Henri. How could she? How could she bear to be without him?

But how could she not tell him? How could they go on this way, rattling along like a three-wheeled cart?

Dolly heard something snap, and looked down at the empty plastic glass in her hand. She’d squeezed it so hard, it had cracked apart. Cold droplets from the melting ice cubes inside dribbled onto her lap, soaking into her lemoncolored skirt.

You don’t have to tell him right away, she reminded herself, clinging to the thought of the blissful days that lay ahead and concentrating on the green paradise looming below her.

Grenada … an island … another world … where they could be together without Girod’s, or her nieces, or Francine, or Henri’s children. A safe place, maybe a magical one, where for a few days they could forget everyone else in the world. And where she could postpone, for just a little while longer, the terrible pronouncement that lay ahead.

She glanced at her watch. Four after two. They’d be landing in minutes. It felt like a hundred years since she’d last seen him. Three and a half months since the Montreal Confectioners’ Exposition, and then it had been only one night-a few hours snatched between visiting booths, meeting with customers and prospective buyers, discussing new products.

Over the phone at the shop, it was always the same with him: talk about which items were selling best, currency fluctuations, new hotel contracts, the merits and drawbacks of this or that shipper … never about how much they missed each other. Even when he called her at home, usually late at night, she felt like she was doing some elaborate old-time minuet, telling him how much she missed him, loved him, but dancing around the thing that

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was really eating at her: that after eight years Henri still wasn’t any closer to getting a divorce than he had been in

the beginning …

… and she certainly wasn’t getting any younger. As the plane circled in to land, Dolly spotted buildings, roads, runways, and then the corrugated roofs of shanties, a massive pile of rubbish spewing down a hillside. Welcome to paradise, she thought ruefully.

Minutes after a bumpy landing, she stepped down onto the tarmac in a pouring rain. Then she was inside the stuffy Quonset shed that served as a terminal, soaked to the skin, showing her passport to a scrawny black official who scrutinized it suspiciously for what seemed like an hour before finally stamping it. Inside the sleepy terminal, she rounded up a porter, who collected her luggage and trundled it out to the curb, where several taxis were parked. She chose the one with the fewest dents.

“L’Anse aux Epines,” she told the driver, hoping she’d gotten the pronunciation right. “Spice Cove.”

Then they were splashing off into the driving rain to her hotel, careening over roads so narrow and rutted Dolly was certain they’d be catapulted into a ditch. Wiping a circle in the condensation fogging her window, she glimpsed dense foliage, palm trees like telephone poles topped with green petticoats, pink and yellow stucco houses alongside outhouse-sized shanties. And dotted here and there, thatched-roof roadside lean-tos heaped with unhulled coconuts and sheaves of green bananas, where dark-skinned vendors huddled, waiting for the rain to let

up.

Soon she’d be with Henri. In an hour, Bartholomew, Henri’s overseer, was picking her up at the hotel. She’d called ahead and told him that she planned on surprising Henri, but she didn’t want to risk getting lost in the jungle trying to find her way to the plantation. Bartholomew had agreed to take her there, and also to keep her secret.

An hour, she thought. Enough time to get out of these wet clothes, take a cool shower, make herself beautiful for Henri.

Dolly could feel her heart pounding. How was it that

after all these years, and all the thousands of miles that had separated them, just the thought of Henri made her giddy?

And if she felt this excited now, before she’d even seen him, then how on God’s green earth was she going to have the strength to look Henri in the eye and tell him it was over?

Dollyfelt the Jeep lurch to a stop. Prying her fingers away from her eyes, which she’d kept covered to avoid having to see the frightening mountainous hairpin turns, she saw that they were stopped on the crest of a steep ridge. Below, the junglelike growth gave way to acres of cleared land, in which row after row of banana trees stretched on, seemingly forever.

“Here we be, Miss.” The grandfatherly Grenadian overseer who’d driven her here sounded cheerful and relaxed, as if barrelling willy-nilly up a narrow, twisty road bumpy as a washboard, with trucks and minivans hurtling at you from the opposite direction, was not a bit scarier than a ride on a merry-go-round.

She turned her gaze back to the banana trees, slipping on her sunglasses—great owlish lenses set in a tortoiseshell frame studded with rhinestones—to shade her eyes against the raindrop-reflected dazzle of the sun that had switched on like a klieg light almost the moment the rain ended.

She could see wisps of steam rising from the muddy red soil. The air smelled wonderfully fragrant—like a cup of hot mulled cider. It was the spices they grew, Old Bartholomew had told her. In every village they’d passed, wherever they braked for dogs or chickens or goats, there was an old woman or a gaggle of youngsters pressing up against the Jeep, eager to sell them spices-brown hands thrusting at them homemade baskets filled with bags of shiny brown nutmeg, bay leaves, orange flowerets of dried mace, cinammon sticks, cloves, balls of pressed cocoa.

But here she could see only bananas.

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“Where are the cacao trees?” She pronounced it “kacow,” the way Henri had taught her.

Bartholomew grinned, his seamed black face rearranging itself into new patterns of fissures and folds. Whitehaired, thin and crinkled as a hairpin, wearing saggy shorts and a faded yellow shirt-jac that hung on him like a pup tent, he looked almost as old as the jungle itself. A real crackerjack, though. Henri had once told her that without Bartholomew, there would be no plantation. The old overseer supposedly knew every gully and track of this jungle; he could get shipments through when the main road was impassable, and when workers quit or didn’t show up, Bartholomew seemed to have endless cousins, nephews, and grandsons to fill in. Coming here, in this battered Willys, Bartholomew had told her proudly that he’d outlived five wives, and had eighteen children and forty-two grandchildren.

Snow on the roof maybe, but still plenty of coal in the furnace, she thought.

“Bananas, dey shade de cacao trees,” he explained with a sage nod.

Dolly looked again, and there, yes, she could see them, machetes flashing among the green, the winking of sun on steel. This was the season for harvesting the pods, Henri had told her.

Henri. So close now!

Dolly, climbing from the Jeep to get a better look, felt her knees give a little. Her stomach pitched queerly, and speckles of gray swam before her eyes. The heat felt thick as foam, dense, clinging to her, making her polkadot cotton sundress drag about her calves, heavy and damp as laundry hung out to dry. The air here smelled of freshly turned earth and rotting leaves. She adjusted the brim of her hat, a navy straw cartwheel with a wide polkadot ribbon that hung down to tickle her shoulder blades. The heat, though oppressive, was also having a pleasurable effect on her-she felt heavy and swollen with desire, eager to be alone with Henri.

Closing her eyes against the brightness that stung

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them even through her sunglasses, she thought again, Lord, how can I ever give him up?

Bartholomew touched her arm. “Okay now, Miss? We go down.”

And then she was hoisting herself back into the Jeep, and they were rattling along a muddy, rutted track that veered off from the main road and down through a tangle of weeds and vines that bordered the neat rows of banana trees. A lone breadfruit tree-she recognized it from one Bartholomew had pointed out earlier-marked the spot where the road ended and a smaller footpath led off into the rows of cacaos and bananas just beyond. A perfumy fragrance rose from the hacked-away brush surrounding it.

“De flower, she smell sweet.” Bartholomew braked to a stop, pointing a bony finger at a daub of brightness amid the flattened greenery.

“I don’t think I’ve ever smelled anything so pretty,” Dolly said. “What’s it called?”

“Jump-up-and-kiss-me.” The old man grinned slyly, his gold-crowned teeth twinkling in the sun.

Dolly flushed, then winked to let him know she appreciated his keeping her visit a secret.

Then she saw that Bartholomew was pointing down at her feet, his wizened teak-brown face furrowed with disapproval. Shaking his head, struggling not to smile. Of course! Her shoes. All wrong. She stared down at her flimsy canvas espadrilles, their rope soles already caked with mud. Why in heaven’s name hadn’t she worn something more practical?

Stepping out of the Willys, she could feel the mud sucking at her feet. Trying to follow Bartholomew as he headed down the footpath, she almost slipped, and quickly caught herself before she fell and made an even bigger fool of herself.

The grooved path ended, panning into flat cultivated rows of banana trees, their broad fringed leaves rising in glossy plumes from squat, serrated trunks, clusters of green bananas suspended from their branches like chandeliers. Shaded from the sun’s withering heat by the banana trees,

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the cacaos were set in red dirt rows; some were no taller than she was, others twice or three times the height of a man. They looked unexceptional, except for the purplish, football-sized pods sprouting from their branches and even directly from their trunks.

Dolly stopped to watch one of the workers, a shirtless islander in shorts and thongs, hacking at the pods he could reach with his machete, and piling them into a hand cart at his side.

Pointing at a pod, she asked, “Do the beans come out of that?”

In reply, Bartholomew went over, picked up one from the bucket, and in rapid patois, directed the worker to cut it open with his machete. He turned to Dolly, holding out the split halves, one in each hand. Around each pulpy, whitish center was a ring of pale seeds. A flowery fragrance rose from it. The old man scooped a seed out with his finger, and held it up for her to see.

“Take many, many seeds to make little bit chocolate,” he said, dropping the pod back into the bucket. “Wait. I show you.”

He led the way along a seemingly endless furrow, sprinkled with workers harvesting pods, some with machetes, others using long, blade-topped wooden poles to reach the highest branches. There was the rustle of leaves, the twinkle of steel amid the lush, dripping green. Voices calling to one another in Grenadian patois-a combination, she’d been told, of English, French, and some African languages-blending in a tatterdemalion chorus.

While they walked, Bartholomew explained in his quaintly truncated English that each tree produced only about five pounds of chocolate a year. And these, she knew, were the criollo variety-originally from Venezuela-which produced a lower yield than the hardier alemondo. But the ซquality was better, and that was one of the reasons Girod’s chocolate was world-renowned.

Up ahead, she caught sight of the drying and fermenting sheds—long barnlike buildings made of aluminum siding with corrugated plastic roofs, set on a slight rise on the other side of a rickety wooden bridge built across an

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But the boy hung back, cupping a hand over his mouth as he smiled. She saw in an instant why he was embarrassed—he was missing several front teeth. What a shame. With some dental work, and a little meat on his bones, he’d be right handsome.

When they were outside again, she said to Bartholomew, “Nice-looking kid. But he should see a dentist.” She knew that might sound rude, but she wanted to see what Bartholomew’s reaction would be.

The old man shrugged, patting the pockets of his baggy shorts.

Just what she’d thought. Well, heck, how much could a dentist cost down here? And even if it meant offending the old man. Well, she’d been wondering about how to tip him without making him uncomfortable. But this seemed like a better idea, and it just might do some real good.

She reached into her straw bag, and fished out one of her business cards. “Look, you may think I’m being awful pushy, and you can say no, if you like. But here’s my address. You take that boy to a good dentist, and just send me the bill. I’ll take care of it. You’ve been real nice to me, and I’d like to return the favor.”