This was Wayan talking.

I was back in her restaurant, eating her delicious and nutritious multivitamin lunch special, hoping it would help ease my hangover and my anxiety. Armenia the Brazilian woman was there, too, looking, as always, like she'd just stopped by the beauty parlor on her way home from a weekend at a spa. Little Tutti was sitting on the floor, drawing pictures of houses, as usual.

Wayan had just learned that the lease on her shop was going to come up for renewal at the end of August--only three months from now--and that her rent would be raised. She would probably have to move again because she couldn't afford to stay here. Except that she only had about fifty dollars in the bank, and no idea where to go. Moving would take Tutti out of school again. They needed a home--a real home. This is no way for a Balinese person to live.

"Why does suffering never end?" Wayan asked. She wasn't crying, merely posing a simple, unanswerable and weary question. "Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing--no watch, no T-shirt. You work hard, then you die with nothing--no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old."

"Not Armenia," I joked. "She doesn't get old, apparently."

Wayan said, "But this is because Armenia is Brazilian," catching on now to how the world works. We all laughed, but it was a fair breed of gallows humor, because there's nothing funny about Wayan's situation in the world right now. Here are the facts: Single mom, precocious child, hand-to-mouth business, imminent poverty, virtual homelessness. Where will she go? Can't live with the ex-husband's family, obviously. Wayan's own family are rice farmers way out in the countryside and poor. If she goes and lives with them, it's the end of her business as a healer in town because her patients won't be able to reach her and you can pretty much forget about Tutti ever getting enough education to go someday to Animal Doctor College.

Other factors have emerged over time. Those two shy girls I noticed on the first day, hiding in the back of the kitchen? It turns out that these are a pair of orphans Wayan has adopted. They are both named Ketut (just to further confuse this book) and we call them Big Ketut and Little Ketut. Wayan found the Ketuts starving and begging in the marketplace a few months ago. They were abandoned there by a Dickensian character of a woman--possibly a relative--who acts as a sort of begging child pimp, deposi............