My mother was on the front porch complaining about my father. I drew closer to the crack beneath the floorboards, holding my breath hard, afraid of being discovered. I looked up the crack, and a shaft of soft light poured down my left eye.

My aunt was here with us in Kisumu, by the shores of Lake Victoria, to help my mother harvest our sugarcane. They were both seated there, on sticks of furniture, facing the yellow-stemmed forest of cane, while they swatted flies with their hands and talked about father. I could see their hands as they moved in the hot air, all ridged and spurred, like dry riverbeds.

They had been cutting sugarcane the whole day and were now resting. I liked creeping up on them at such times and listening to whatever it was they were talking about. When they sat together like this at the end of the day, their faces stained with sweat, blindly staring past the blue forget-me-nots growing in the unkempt grass to that yellow-stemmed forest of cane, they seemed to be exchanging deep secrets that only women knew about.

“Jessie?” my mother’s voice rang from above.

My mother’s summonses were always unanticipated; she could talk about fish and me in the same line. I drew back from the crack into the darkness.

“Jessie! Jessie, yawah!” she exclaimed in our native Dholuo, getting off her chair, the floorboards creaking underneath her feet. “Are you down there again?”

It was then I ran out of my hiding place below them and into the safety of the long grass beyond the porch. She ran after me, her long burgundy skirt billowed out like an umbrella. I sank into the grass and hid my face against it, unmindful of bees or snakes, and shut my eyes. The grass smelled sweet and sunny. I heard my mother wandering in it. Had I fetched water? she asked. I had, the much I could.

I heard our donkey cart coming up the grass trail. Father was back. He should have ferried all the cane my mother and aunt had cut to the factory, but he had not returned after the first trip. “How are you doing, my sweet sugarcane?” I heard him say to my mother. His voice was slurred.

My mother was breathing hard. She did not answer him.

I heard him hit the ground with his boots. He had only one pair of boots, hand downs from his brother who worked as a night watchman in Nairobi. “Kiss me,” he told my mother.

She slapped him with one of her iron hands. Then she kissed him with wet, loud kisses.

I waded deeper into the grass, startling bees and butterflies into the air, hoping that my mother and my aunt had more secrets to tell than the old ones they kept repeating.