They’re back on the boat, headed home. Cash is bone-tired but energized. What a great day. What a transformative day. He’s a convert: he loves the tropics.
“You’re allowed to drink now, right?” Cash asks Ayers. She nods and he grabs two rum punches from the bar and follows her to a bench on the shady side of the wheelhouse. The shade is a relief. He might be a convert in his heart and mind, but his skin is still that of his Scottish and Norwegian ancestors. He has been reapplying sunscreen every hour, but he’s still pretty sure he’s going to have a wicked sunburn.
He hands Ayers a rum punch and they touch cups. Ayers is wearing silver-rimmed, blue-lens aviators and her feet are resting up on the railing. She looks exhausted.
“To a job well done,” Cash says. He takes a sip of his drink, his twentieth of the day. “You know, it’s not so different from my job as a ski instructor.”
“Aside from being completely different, not so different at all,” she says. Together they look at the tired, sun-scorched, happy people below them on the deck—some snoozing, others forging bonds that will last all the way to the bar at Woody’s, or the rest of the week or a lifetime. Cash has Chris’s and Mike’s numbers and promised to call them if he ever finds himself in Brooklyn, which secretly he hopes he never does.
Ayers sucks down the rum punch and seems to both relax and pep up. “You liked it, right?”
“Loved it,” he says. “Can’t thank you enough.”
“Well, you basically saved my life yesterday by sharing your water. And you gave me your bandana. And you were nice to me when I was sad.”
“Like I said, I understand.”
Ayers leans her head on his shoulder. At the same time that he’s experiencing pure ecstasy at her touch, he realizes she’s crying again.
He hands her his damp cocktail napkin; it’s all he has. “I’m happy to give you my shirt,” he says.
She laughs through her tears. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s all lurking there, right below the surface. But I have to sublimate it. This job requires me to be peppy. I’m not allowed to be a human being, a thirty-one-year-old woman who lost her best friend.” She sniffs and wipes at her reddened nose with the napkin. “At my other job it’s different, because Rosie worked there with me, so we all lost her and every single person on the staff knows how close we were, so even though I have to smile while I’m serving, when I need a break I can hide in the kitchen and cry and do a shot of tequila with the line cooks.”
Cash feels a surge of jealousy about the line cooks. He wants to ask if Ayers has a boyfriend or is married. He could be getting carried away for no reason. But instead, he asks if Ayers has a picture of Rosie.
“A picture of Rosie?” Ayers says.
“Yeah,” Cash says. “I’d like to see what she looks like.” It has occurred to him since their conversation yesterday that Ayers’s friend Rosie might not be the same woman in the photograph with Russ. It would be better, so much better, if Rosie Small weren’t Russ’s lover. They would both still be dead, but maybe just friends or colleagues. It would be so much easier.
Ayers pulls out her phone. “Here,” she says. “She’s my screensaver.” She hands Cash the phone.
On the left is Ayers in a canary-yellow bikini on a beach next to a tree that supports a tire swing. On the right is Rosie, the same woman in the photograph with Cash’s father. She’s wearing a white bikini and beaming at the camera.
“She’s really pretty,” Cash says. “Though not as pretty as you, of course.”
“Oh, please,” Ayers says. She tucks her phone back into the pocket of her shorts. “You know, I want to apologize about being short with you yesterday… when you asked about Rosie’s boyfriend.”
Cash holds his breath. We don’t have to talk about it, he wants to say. When he’d registered for the trip, he’d been glad that Wade was handling the paperwork and not Ayers, because he didn’t want Ayers to see his last name and make the connection.
He needs to tell her who he is, but he doesn’t want her to know who he is. And he certainly can’t tell her now, while she’s at work.
“You don’t have to apologize…”
“He was rich,” Ayers says. “Some rich asshole who showed up every couple of weeks and completely monopolized Rosie’s time, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he had this shroud of secrecy around him. They’d been together for six years and I’d never met him. And I was her best friend. The first few years I accused her of making him up, that’s how bad it was. But he was always giving her things—silver bracelets, money, a new Jeep. He almost never left his property, and they never entertained or invited anyone over.”
“Maybe he was hiding something,” Cash says. “Maybe he was married.”
“Maybe?” Ayers says. “Of course he was married. But the one time I brought it up, Rosie flipped out and wouldn’t speak to me for three days. So that was the last time I mentioned it. She was two people, really: a very strong and independent woman, on the one hand—feisty, fierce, even. But when it came to the Invisible Man, she was a goner. She was so… blinded by him. So… in love, I guess you’d have to say.”
“Well, then,” Cash says. “He couldn’t have been all bad.” He tries a smile. “Right?”
HUCK
On Sunday, Huck cancels both of his charters. He’ll reschedule them for the following week. Today, he just wants to go out on the water by himself, maybe see if there’s any truth to Cleve’s school-of-mahi story. He still has the coordinates written down, saved from New Year’s Eve.
Back when Rosie was alive.
It’s a cruel trick of the world, a person alive and well one minute, thinking harm will never come her way, and then dead the next.
Huck doesn’t get as early a start as he would have liked, because he has to drive Maia over to Joanie’s house. They are planning on starting a bath bomb business. They want to make bath bombs in tropical scents and sell them to tourists.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come fishing?” Huck asks. Her company is the only person’s he would relish, and he worries that Maia is returning to her regular twelve-year-old routine too soon. Tomorrow, Monday, she’s going back to school.
“I’m sure,” she says.
Huck reminds himself that everyone processes loss in his or her own way. After LeeAnn died, Huck had gone through a rough patch—smoking and drinking, and spending one regrettable night with Teresa, the waitress from Jake’s, who everyone knew had a sleeping-around problem. And Rosie had handled LeeAnn’s death by meeting, and then shacking up with, the Invisible Man.
He’s going to let Maia be. If she wants to start a bath bomb business with Joanie, then Huck will be their first customer.
But today he’s going fishing. And he’s going to catch something, damnit.
He loads up The Mississippi with light tackle and his trolling rods, a chest of clean ice, a second chest that holds water, a case of Red Stripe, and two Cuban sandwiches from Baked in the Sun, plus one of their “junk food” cookies—the thing is loaded with toffee, pretzels, and potato chips—because those were Rosie’s favorite. He’s about to untie his line from the dock when he hears his name being called. His proper name.
“Mr. Powers? Sam Powers?”
He looks up to see a woman marching down the dock, waving her arm like she’s trying to hail a cab. She’s slender, with pretty hair—one fat chestnut braid hangs over one shoulder. She’s wearing round sunglasses, so he can’t get a good look at her, but as she grows closer he sees she’s older than he originally thought, and her expression can only be described as All Business. That, combined with the fact that she’s calling him “Mr. Powers” makes him feel like he’s about to be reprimanded by his high school English teacher. What was her name? Miss Lemon. Miss Lemon had once caught Huck writing dirty limericks. Instead of tearing up the page, as he expected her to, she had insisted he go in front of the class and read them aloud.