Eat, Pray, Love

person to them because I’d produced so much money out of nowhere? (Such an unthinkable
amount of money that maybe it’s like black magic?) Or maybe when you’ve had such a fragile
life as these kids, any change is a terror.
When there was a lull in the celebration I asked Wayan, just to be sure: “What about Big
Ketut and Little Ketut? Is this good news for them, too?”
Wayan looked over at the girls in the kitchen and must have seen the same uneasiness I
had seen, because she floated over to them and herded them into her arms and whispered
some reassuring words into the crowns of their heads. They seemed to relax into her. Then
the phone rang, and Wayan tried to pull away from the orphans to answer it, but the skinny
arms of the two Ketuts clung on to their unofficial mother relentlessly, and they buried their
heads in her belly and armpits, and even after the longest time they refused—with a fierce-
ness I’d never seen in them before—to let her go.
So I answered the phone, instead.
“Balinese Traditional Healing,” I said. “Stop by today for our giant close-out moving sale!”
Eat, Pray, Love