A Bridgetown Barbados Love Story of Second Chances

The fish market at Oistins opens before the light is properly settled, and in that pre-dawn blue, the women who gut the catch work with a speed and efficiency that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with a craft passed through generations. The flying fish come in silver and phosphorescent, and the sound of the knives and the smell of the sea and the particular rhythm of the vendors calling to each other across the market — this is Barbados at its least theatrical, its most itself. Winston Skeete had been buying his flying fish here every Friday morning for twenty years, and the routines of Oistins were woven into him in ways that outlasted two marriages, three career changes, and one attempt to emigrate to the UK that had lasted four months before the cold drove him home.

He was, at fifty, a man who had made his accommodations with the island and with himself. He ran a small rum shop in Worthing — not a bar, a rum shop, the distinction mattered enormously to Winston — where the regulars came for Mount Gay and conversation and the assurance that some things in Barbados did not change. He was stocky and bald and had a voice that carried without effort, and the young people in the neighborhood called him Mr. Winston with the automatic respect that Bajan culture extends to its anchor figures. He had not thought seriously about love in several years.

Audrey Prescod returned to Barbados in February, after twenty-two years in Canada, for reasons she had been rehearsing a simple explanation for and had not yet perfected. The simplest version was that her mother was sick. The fuller version was that her mother was sick and Audrey had realized, booking the flight, that she did not want to be in Mississauga anymore. She was fifty-three, a retired pharmacist, divorced, with two grown children who were Canadian in ways she admired and could not quite share.

She had grown up in Worthing, three streets from where Winston’s rum shop now stood, but their childhoods had not intersected — he was from one side of the area, she from another, and class in Barbados, invisible to tourists, shapes its own geographies. They met at Oistins on a Friday morning because Audrey had gone there on the advice of her cousin, who said that if she wanted to feel like she was back in Barbados she should go to the fish market. She stood for twenty minutes just watching the women gut the catch, and when she came out of it, Winston was standing beside her in the companionable way of someone who has witnessed this moment of return before.

He explained the different cuts without condescension, suggested the vendor he trusted, and when she seemed uncertain how to carry everything home, offered to carry it for her. She declined, as any sensible woman would, then reconsidered when she remembered she had no car. He drove an ancient Datsun that smelled of salt and rum and old upholstery, navigating the roads with extreme familiarity and minimal deference to their theoretical rules. She sat in the passenger seat watching the island organize itself in the early morning light and felt the specific relief of being somewhere that did not require explanation.

The rum shop became her base of operations — the corner table nearest the door became the place where she sat with her laptop in the late afternoons, ostensibly researching pharmaceutical locum work on the island but increasingly drawn there by the quality of light and conversation. Winston’s regulars absorbed her the way that Caribbean communities absorb returnees: with gentle ribbing, comprehensive curiosity about her time abroad, and the implicit understanding that she was being evaluated. She passed, apparently. The women who came in for evening drinks after work told her she had come back looking well for a person who had survived a Canadian winter.

Winston did not rush things. He was a rum shop man — he understood that the best conversations happened in the middle, not at the beginning. They talked about Barbados as it had changed and as it had not, and she talked about what it meant to make a life somewhere that was not where you were from, and both of them understood, without laboring the point, that they were also talking about themselves. He took her to Bathsheba one Sunday — where the Atlantic breaks against the boulders in great theatrical surges and the soup man’s bowls are enormous and thick and the sheep graze on the cliff paths as though they are not adjacent to one of the most dramatic coastlines in the Caribbean.

Her mother improved slowly and then more quickly. The locum position materialized at a pharmacy in Speightstown. Winston told her he was not a romantic man in the way of romantic films, but that he had spent twenty years at the fish market and had never once looked forward to the fish so much as he looked forward to the Friday she would be there. Audrey, who had crossed an ocean twice and was done performing emotion she did not feel, told him that was more than enough. They married quietly, in the garden of her mother’s house in Worthing, with the flying fish on the table and the rum punch in abundance and the sea, as it always is in Barbados, close enough to hear.

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