“Again, Mr. Steele, I’m not…”
“Paulette,” Cash says. “Please. Please.” His voice breaks, and he fears he’s going to cry. He wants to go back to New Year’s Eve, or even to New Year’s Day, to the mortifying and yet inevitable conversation with Glenn the accountant. He wants his father to be alive. Cash will confess his failure with the stores and he won’t go to Breckenridge to waste away the rest of his young adulthood. He’ll enroll at the University of Colorado, Denver. He’ll get a degree. He’ll make something of himself. But he wants his father back. His desperation creates a sour taste in his mouth and he inhales a breath—the honey scent of frangipani combined with Paulette’s secondhand smoke.
Paulette looks at Cash. She must sense his pain, because her brown eyes well with tears. “Rosie,” she says. “Rosie Small. She was the daughter of LeeAnn Powers, who was married to Captain Huck. LeeAnn died five years ago.” Paulette taps her ashes into the bougainvillea below. “There’s going to be a memorial service tomorrow at the Episcopalian church, with a reception following at Chester’s Getaway. If you go to either the service or the reception, you’ll find people who can tell you more. But I’d advise you to be discreet. And to go with an open mind and an open heart. Lots and lots of people on this island loved Rosie Small. And almost no one on this island knew your father. Like I said, he preferred to remain invisible.”
Cash turns around to face the house. “And we can stay here a few days?”
“As long as you want,” Paulette says. “It’s yours now.”
“Okay, thank you, Paulette,” Cash says. “Really, thank you.”
“God bless you boys,” Paulette says. “And God bless your mother.”
HUCK
Joanie’s parents, Jeff and Julie—they are a self-proclaimed “J” family—pull into the driveway at six o’clock on the dot. Huck somehow managed to get everyone out of the house except for Ayers. She is sitting at the counter, wringing her hands and staring at a bottle of eighteen-year-old Flor de Ca?a rum like she’s drowning and it’s a life raft. Huck nearly suggests they both do a shot to fortify their nerves, but then he thinks better of it.
As his grandfather used to say: hard things are hard. Huck has done plenty of hard things in his life. He was drafted into the Vietnam War right out of high school. He had been born and raised on Islamorada in the Florida Keys, so he thought the U.S. Navy would be a natural fit, and he was happy because in the navy, you didn’t get shot at. But choice was for those who enlisted, not for those who got drafted, and the powers that be placed Huck in the Marine Corps. His first year in Vietnam was spent facedown in the mud, in the jungle, in the rice paddies, fearing for his life every second of every day, developing an addiction to nicotine that he still can’t shake.
Later, years after he got home, he had to put his then-wife, Kimberly, into rehab for drinking and serve her with divorce papers.
He buried his sister, Caroline, who died of brain cancer at forty-one, and his mother, who died of heartbreak over Caroline, and eventually his beloved father, the original captain, Captain Paul Powers, who had run a fishing charter out of Islamorada for fifty years and whose passengers had included Jack Nicklaus and Frank Sinatra. He had taught Huck everything he knew about fishing and about being a man.
It was after his father died that Huck moved to the Virgin Islands, where life was easy for a long time. He bought his boat, started his business, and met and married LeeAnn Small, an island treasure. Huck would name burying LeeAnn as the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, but only because he had loved the woman so damn much.
This would be harder.
Maia comes bounding into the house, her skin burnished from a full day outside, even though Jeff and Julie are fastidious about sunscreen and bug spray. The smile on her face is proof that he was right: she had a happy day. Maybe the last happy day for the rest of her childhood.
He doesn’t want to tell her.
Maia sees Ayers and goes right to her for a hug. Huck catches Ayers’s expression over Maia’s shoulder; her eyes are shining. He doesn’t have but a few seconds left before Ayers breaks down.
They should have done the rum shot. He’s shaking.
“Maia,” he says. “Please sit.”
She pulls away from Ayers and looks at him wide-eyed. “Are you mad?” she asks. “You said I could go.”
“I’m not mad,” Huck says. “But would you please sit down? Ayers and I have to tell you something.”
“What?” Maia says. She is standing, defiant now in her posture.
Ayers reaches out to take Maia’s hand.
“There was a helicopter crash north of Virgin Gorda,” Huck says. “Maia, your mother is dead.”
There is a blankness on Maia’s face and this, Huck thinks, is the soul-destroying moment: Maia taking in the words and making sense of them.
Then, Maia starts to scream. The sound is raw, primitive; it’s the sound of an animal. Ayers pulls Maia close and tears stream down Huck’s face and he thinks, Hard things are hard, and Please, God, do not give him anything harder than this.
The screaming morphs into crying, great ragged sobs, seemingly bigger than the girl herself. Huck goes for tissues, a glass of ice water, a pillow in case she wants to punch something. He and Ayers had made a pact that they would not shush Maia or tell her everything was going to be okay. They were not going to lie to the girl. They were going to let her take in what she could, and then they were going to answer her questions as honestly as possible.
The crying ends eventually. Ayers leads Maia to the sofa, and Huck plants himself in the chair, within arm’s reach. He had been over at Schneider hospital with LeeAnn when Rosie gave birth to Maia. He had been the third person to hold her, red and wriggling and utterly captivating. If Huck were very honest, he would admit to feeling a quick stab of disappointment that the baby hadn’t been a boy. Huck had imagined a grandson to take fishing. But Maia stole Huck’s heart that first moment in his arms, and he decided that she would make a better mate anyway. The men in LeeAnn’s family were either weak or absent. It was the women who were strong.
Maia blows her nose, gets a clear breath. Her face, which had been so radiant when she walked in, is now mottled, and, if Huck isn’t imagining it, her dainty features have instantly aged. She suddenly looks seventeen, or twenty-five.
“Helicopter,” Maia says. “So she was with my father. Is he dead, too?”
“Father?” Ayers says.
“Honey,” Huck says. “She was with her… her friend. The one who comes to visit.” The man’s name is Russell Steele. Rosie told Huck the guy’s name when he first came on the scene, a few months after LeeAnn died, but Rosie kept the relationship private. The fellow showed up one or two weeks a month, November through May; he had some big villa on the north shore. Huck had a pretty good idea which road it was, though he’d never been invited to the house and he’d never met the guy. Maia, he knew, went to the house sometimes when the man was on-island, though there were plenty of occasions when Rosie had asked Huck to cover so that she and her mystery lover could have some privacy.
Huck won’t lie: the arrangement had troubled him. He had expected at least an introduction. He had expected, if not a weekly barbecue, then an invitation for a beer. But Rosie had been both stubborn and contrite when it came to the Invisible Man. She was very sorry—and Huck could see on her face that the emotion was genuine—but she wanted to keep her relationship private. The island was small, she had been born and raised there, everyone had always been right up in her business, and she just wanted one thing that would not be discussed and dissected by the community at large.