No One Could Eat a Promise

The first year ended with SBD 120,000 in sales and SBD 24,000 in operating profit. Ben's merchant cousin Rex called him the chocolate king without chocolate, since the venture sold beans rather than finished bars. Ben laughed with everyone else, but the joke found an old bruise. Rex wanted him to abandon the slow work and join a quicker trading scheme. He said mature trees could make way for something more fashionable and that anyone clever would leave a falling market. Ben remembered exactly how convincing that argument had sounded in his first life.

Prices weakened through 2017. The difficult days arrived without regard for Ben's private certainty that a later boom would make patience look wise. He reduced batch sizes and kept selling fresh lots instead of stacking old beans as a monument to his prediction. Rose insisted on work they could actually finance. Some relatives thought the caution proved he had lost confidence; others thought continuing at all proved he had lost sense. He wanted to tell everyone to wait seven years. Instead he bought what he could pay for and returned the next morning.

Leah, an independent bookkeeper, helped him make the operation understandable enough that tired people could see what had been paid. When he kept discussing work during a break, she took his hand and asked for a personal answer to dinner. He accepted one date, enjoyed her wit and realised they suited friendship better than courtship. Her work remained paid. She was not willing to become invisible help merely because he found her attractive, and he respected the boundary more after seeing how easily he might have crossed it without thinking.

Sue, a shop proprietor, invited him to sit beside her after closing and made her interest unmistakable. Joy switched off a recorder after an interview and whispered a supper invitation that would not be included in the programme. Beth photographed him beside a cocoa tree, then asked for a date on which he was not holding a pod like a nervous salesman. Each woman had a life that did not begin with his arrival. Sue wanted a larger shop, Joy a paid programme and Beth a journey for which she was already saving. He found their plans more attractive than any admiration offered without a subject.

June ran a café and let him taste something from her spoon while friends talked in the next room. Her second invitation, she said, was personal. Eva, an independent guide, took him on an evening walk and kissed his cheek after teasing him out of a long explanation about export possibilities. Ben told the women he dated that he had not made an exclusive commitment. The truth did not make every encounter effortless. It did prevent him from using the future as a place where he could hide all the promises other people hoped they had heard.

Rose was the person still beside him when a customer complained or a day's work ended later than planned. One evening she kissed him after they had finished covering a lot, and the simple warmth of it unsettled him more than the attention he had been enjoying elsewhere. He kissed her back, then began talking about how good their life would be after the market changed. She stepped away. “I am here now,” she said. “If you only want a future, you do not need me to stand in it for you.”

He slept badly. In his first life he had left when prices disappointed him and treated the decision as if it had happened to someone else. In this life he was staying, but had begun treating the present as a corridor toward a rich man's version of himself. Rose did not want to wait inside a corridor. She wanted an evening, a choice and the ability to believe what he said without having to approve an eight-year forecast. Ben went to see her the next day with food and no speech about the market.

They talked until the light faded. He admitted that he had been enjoying possibilities instead of deciding what he wanted. Rose did not demand an immediate declaration to make the conversation comfortable. She asked him to end the ambiguity elsewhere before inviting her into something serious. He did. Mary accepted the answer with warmth, Grace with teasing and June with a small sadness he did not try to flatter away. The business remained difficult. His life became clearer. There was no reason, he discovered, to postpone every kind of profit until a price chart gave him permission.