Troubles in Paradise (Paradise #3)(30)

A Facebook post from yesterday puts Phil and Sunny at Fairmont the Norfolk in Nairobi. A scroll back through their pictures shows they’ve been on safari in the Maasai Mara.

Bah! Ayers thinks. They never took her on safari! They always said it was too expensive. There are the requisite pictures of giraffes, zebras, lions, elephants. And some of a hot-air balloon ride they took at sunrise. Cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, baboons, hippos. A Maasai warrior posing with Phil and Sunny in their Birkenstocks.

Ayers sighs. Her parents are in Africa. They couldn’t be any farther away. Still, she tries their cell phone. What’s the time difference? She doesn’t care. She calls.

Her mother answers on the first ring. “Freddy!” Sunny says. “Your timing is perfect! The front desk just sent us a bottle of champagne. They think we’re travel bloggers.” She laughs. “I may have misled them a bit—”

Suddenly, Ayers’s father is on the phone. “She misled them a lot,” he says. “Though it works. We’ve gotten free stuff every place we’ve checked in since your mother started referring to her ‘blog.’”

“Great,” Ayers says weakly. Her parents are in high spirits; they’re about to open a bottle of champagne at a five-star hotel after having been on safari. In other circumstances, Ayers might have made a sarcastic comment about the “good old days” when they drank river water that they’d purified with iodine tablets and stayed at a hotel in Borneo where the sheets were crawling with tiny golden ants.

“We’ve been expecting your call for over a week.” Her mother again. In the background, Ayers hears the cork pop—the mere sound makes her stomach lurch—and the Tubes singing “Talk to Ya Later,” Phil and Sunny’s favorite song, straight out of the early eighties. Ayers’s eyes water. Despite the fact that she can’t remember the last time she saw her parents, Ayers knows them well. They’re her family.

But why were they expecting her call? She never calls them; it’s always the other way around. “You have?”

“There’s something you want to tell us, isn’t there, Freddy?” It’s her father again. Freddy is their nickname for Ayers; it’s short for “Ready, Freddy,” which was apparently what Ayers said nonstop when she was little.

“I do…” Ayers says.

“You’re engaged!” Her mother blurts it out; the champagne must have gone to her head already. “Mick sent us a Facebook message asking for our blessing.”

“He did?” Ayers says. She’s taken aback by this news. Mick has met Phil and Sunny three times—the two times they swung through St. John to visit and then at Ayers’s cousin’s destination wedding in San Juan. Phil and Sunny like Mick. Phil and Mick are both craft-beer fanatics and they have a friendly rivalry in the sunset-picture-taking department (#sunset; Ayers doesn’t miss this habit of Mick’s one bit). Mick won Sunny over by dancing with her at Brinley’s wedding and by agreeing to tour Castillo San Cristóbal at seven o’clock the next morning. But even so, asking for her parents’ blessing isn’t something Ayers ever thought Mick would do. It seems too formal and old-fashioned.

It also seems unfair. If Mick was so invested in the engagement, why did he blow it less than two days later? Who does that?

“When we did an overnight in the Maasai village,” Sunny says, “we told the elder that our daughter was getting married, and he insisted on roasting a goat, which is a very big honor.”

Ayers falls facedown across her bed. Mick asked for her parents’ blessing without her knowledge. Her parents celebrated her engagement with Maasai villagers without even hearing if she’d said yes, which feels vaguely dishonest of them, just like intimating they wrote a travel blog. And yet this is typical of her parents. When they travel, living is done in the moment. The strangers they’re with become friends. The particulars of their lives can be stretched and even distorted without any consequence because tomorrow, they’ll be gone.

Ayers lifts her head from the bed. “Why didn’t you call me?” she asks. “You had goat with the Maasai but you didn’t call to say congratulations?”

“It was your news to share,” Phil says. “We’ve been waiting for this call. Frankly, it took so long that we began to wonder if something had happened.”

Ayers hesitates. She feels bad about ruining her parents’ happy champagne drinking. “Something did happen. Maia saw Mick kissing Brigid a couple days after he proposed. I gave the ring back.”

On the other end, there’s silence. Who has the phone now? Did they drop it? Ayers can ever so faintly hear Fee Waybill sing, I’ll just see you around!

“Mom?” Ayers says. “Dad?”

“Sorry, Fred, it’s just we’re…” Phil says. He clears his throat. “The Maasai assured us killing the goat would mean a long and happy union.”

The goat lies, Ayers thinks.

“Darn it,” Sunny says. “I liked Michael.”

“I liked him too, Mom,” Ayers says. “But I’m not going to stay with someone who cheats on me; sorry.” She pauses. “Anyway, I have more news, and I’m sure it will come as an even bigger shock, so sit down.”

“Go ahead, Freddy,” Phil says. “Your mother says she needs her drink.”