Right now, Mrs. Dunwiddy was eating lumps of curry goat with her fingers from a small Tupperware bowl. “Pity to waste it,” she said, and dropped the bits of goat bone into a china saucer.

“Time for you to eat, Fat Charlie?” asked Miss Noles.

“I’m fine,” said Fat Charlie. “Honest.”

Four pairs of eyes stared at him reproachfully through four pairs of spectacles. “No good starvin’ yourself in your grief,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, licking her fingertips, and picking out another brown fatty lump of goat.

“I’m not. I’m just not hungry. That’s all.”

“Misery going to shrivel you away to pure skin and bones,” said Miss Noles, with gloomy relish.

“I don’t think it will.”

“I putting a plate together for you at the table over there,” said Mrs. Higgler. “You go and sit down now. I don’t want to hear another word out of you. There’s more of everything, so don’t you worry about that.”

Fat Charlie sat down where she pointed, and within seconds there was placed in front of him a plate piled high with stew peas and rice, and sweet potato pudding, jerk pork, curry goat, curry chicken, fried plantains, and a pickled cow foot. Fat Charlie could feel the heartburn beginning, and he had not even put anything in his mouth yet.

“Where’s everyone else?” he said.

“Your daddy’s drinking buddies, they gone off drinking. They going to have a memorial fishing trip off a bridge, in his memory.” Mrs. Higgler poured the remaining coffee out of her bucket-sized traveling mug into the sink and replaced it with the steaming contents of a freshly brewed jug of coffee.