Grown up in Bali

It had been four years since I’d seen Putuh. Then, even after recently having her second baby, vestiges of girlishness remained. I’d known her a few years before that when she visited her Balinese brother and Irish sister-in-law in San Francisco for a year, helping them after their first child was born. Now I look at her face, and see small worried lines around her mouth. She is a woman now, not the girl I first met. She talks about the same thing she discussed when I last saw her, four years before. They have trouble with their mechanics shop in northern Bali because they don’t have the money to buy proper inventory for a full-service operation. I hand her the envelope and the baby clothes sent by her sister-in-law in America as she rocks her third baby, who has begun to fuss.