What Happens in Paradise(46)

I know I should feel insulted but all I feel is relieved. Because if Mama kicks me out, and she very well might, I’ll have money to get a place for me and the baby.

I’m telling her tomorrow.



May 1, 2006

I was so nervous that I got out of bed early after barely sleeping all night. I couldn’t wait another hour, another minute. Once I heard both Mama and Huck in the kitchen, I walked down the hall, comforted by the idea that in thirty seconds, the secret would be out. They could holler; they could scream, call me names, and cast me out, but all of that would pale against the relief of speaking the truth.

When Mama saw me, she was shocked. “Rosie? What are you doing awake? Is everything all right?”

In that second, everything was still all right. Mama was dressed for work in her raspberry scrubs and her white lab coat, her towering bun wrapped in a brightly patterned scarf. She’d had her nails done—she was vain about her nails, and they were the same shade of raspberry—and I noticed her fingers against the white porcelain of her coffee cup. Every morning, Huck makes her coffee, one poached egg, and a piece of lightly buttered wheat toast. Huck was standing at the stove tending to the egg. He was wearing cargo shorts with a lure hanging from the belt loop and a long-sleeved T-shirt advertising the Mississippi. He had a bandanna wrapped around his neck and was ready for a day of fishing. I didn’t dread Huck’s anger; what I dreaded was his disappointment in me. We’d had a rocky start to our relationship. When he started courting Mama seven years ago, I resented him. I thought, He sees a single woman and her wayward daughter and thinks they need to be saved—but we don’t need to be saved. But I quickly grew to love Huck and, yes, to count on him. I remember one time when he’d told me to help myself to twenty bucks from his wallet so I could go into town to meet my friends, I found a folded-up, faded picture of Huck with another woman. The picture was obviously old, from the seventies or eighties. In it, Huck was a young man. He had a full head of strawberry-blond hair and a mustache but no beard; he wore jeans with what looked like a white patent-leather belt and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. The woman was in a crocheted chevron-print dress and had on white patent-leather boots. Her blond hair was feathered and she wore too much black eyeliner.

I took the picture to Huck and said, “Who’s this?” Huck had had a sister who had died of cancer and I thought maybe this was her; he rarely talked about her but I knew her name was Caroline.

“Her?” Huck said. I thought he might be angry that I’d snooped in his wallet for more than just the twenty, but he didn’t seem angry. “That’s my first wife, Kimberly.”

I was shocked by this. I didn’t know Huck had been married before. I felt affronted, maybe even betrayed—for Mama’s sake, but also my own. He and Mama had been married a year or two when I found this picture and the three of us had become a happy family. I didn’t like the idea of sharing Huck with anyone. “I didn’t realize you’d been married before.” I swallowed. “Does my mother know?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. He smiled sadly. “Sorry, Rosie, I should have told you. There just never seemed to be an appropriate time and it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“If it doesn’t matter, why do you keep the picture?” I asked. I handed it back to him, though really I wanted to tear it to shreds.

“Well,” Huck said. He thought about it for a minute. One thing I love most about Huck is that he’s a straight shooter. He doesn’t candy-coat the truth or brush it away because he doesn’t want me to see it. “Kimberly ended up being a disappointment to me. She was an alcoholic, a really, really mean drunk, and that destroyed our marriage. It destroyed just about all of her relationships, actually. But in this picture, we were happy, so I keep it as a reminder that my time with her wasn’t all bad.” He slipped the picture back into the wallet. “In even the bleakest situations, there’s usually some good to be salvaged.”

Facing Mama and Huck to tell them I was pregnant was a bleak situation. Would any good be salvaged from it?

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

Huck turned from the stove.

“What?” Mama said.

“I’m pregnant.”

She set down her coffee cup and stood up. Her face was unreadable. Shock, I suppose. Huck was watching her.

“Oscar?” she said.

“Not Oscar,” I said. “It was a man at the hotel, someone you don’t know. I was stupid. He’s gone now and I don’t know how to reach him.”

There was a moment of such profound silence that I felt like the world had stopped. She was probably deciding whether or not to believe me.

Then, finally, she opened her arms, and I entered them.





Part Three





The Soggy Dollar





Irene




Before she leaves for St. John, Irene has some loose ends to take care of.

A death certificate issued by the Department of Vital Statistics of the British Virgin Islands arrives in the mail in an unmarked envelope. Is it authentic? It seems so, though Irene has no way of knowing for sure.

So, obviously, Paulette received her message. There’s no note, no invoice, no mention of a fee. Irene has assumed that Paulette is the one who pays to maintain the villa—taxes (do they have taxes in the Virgin Islands?), insurance, landscapers, repairs, et cetera—probably out of a fund that Russ or Todd Croft set up…with cash.