Impossible, Huck thinks. They must have just started calling this Steele fellow Maia’s “father.”
“So I’m an orphan,” Maia says. “I have no one.”
“You have me,” Ayers says. “You’re always going to have me.”
“And you have me,” Huck says. He gets down on his knees before Maia, which seems fitting because he has done nothing for the past twelve years so much as worship this child. He knows she’s too young to understand the quality of his devotion—and this is probably for the best. She doesn’t need someone to worship her. She needs someone to love her, clothe her, feed her, teach her right from wrong, someone to set limits and provide opportunities, someone to believe in her and be her champion.
And that person will be Huck. He will be her Unconditional. He will be her No Matter What.
BAKER
Anna did Baker a favor before he left. She filled a prescription of Ativan for his mother.
“I bet you she won’t take them,” Anna said. “But it’ll be good to have them just in case.”
It turned out Anna knew Irene better than Baker imagined. She did refuse the pills at first.
But Thursday night, when the sun is dropping like a hot coal into the Caribbean and Irene has refused Baker’s offer of dinner three times, she says, “I think I’d like to try sleeping. Can I see those pills?”
“Do you want the master bedroom, Mom?” Cash asked.
“Heavens, no,” Irene said. “I’ll take one of the guest rooms upstairs.” She offered them both a weak smile. “That’s what I am, a guest. A guest in your father’s house.”
Cash helped Irene get situated upstairs while Baker checked the contents of the kitchen. Paulette had said it was “well-stocked,” and she also said that she could arrange for a private chef if they so desired.
“No private chef,” Baker said. “I don’t think my mother wants any strangers in the house.”
“The landscapers are scheduled every Friday…,” Paulette said.
“Please,” Baker said. “If you would just tell everyone to give us our privacy for a week…”
“Of course,” Paulette said. “Call if you need anything.”
Now, Baker inspects the fridge and cabinets. “Well-stocked” is an understatement. The fridge is filled with steaks, hamburgers, pasta salad, deli meats, fresh vegetables, milk, eggs, and a giant bowl of tropical fruit salad. The bottom shelf holds four flavors of local beer. The cabinets contain enough pasta, cereal, and canned goods—including, curiously, six cans of SpaghettiOs—for a small family to survive a nuclear fallout. The SpaghettiOs remind Baker of Floyd, and he thinks to go out on the deck and call home, but honestly, the only positive thing about this whole surreal trip is that he’s able to leave his own problems behind. Or, rather, his “own problems” become what is happening here. His father is dead. Right? Baker hasn’t been able to feel the reality of Russ’s death, however, because nothing about this makes any sense.
Take, for example, the wine cellar. Russell Steele was a man who liked his Leinenkugel’s, his Bud Light, and his scotch. Baker has no memory of Russ ever drinking wine. Champagne, maybe, at Baker and Anna’s wedding. One sip. The person who liked wine in their family was Irene. She drank chardonnay from California. Her everyday wine was Kendall-Jackson, her favorite splurges Simi and Cakebread. Curiously—or not?—Baker had found one case of both Simi and Cakebread in his father’s wine cellar, almost as if he were expecting Irene to visit.
Cash comes down the stairs just as Baker is cracking open what he believes to be a well-deserved beer, and he reaches into the fridge to grab one for Cash. Cash takes it from him and nods toward the pool.
“She’s asleep,” Cash says. “The pill knocked her right out. Which is a good thing, because I need to talk to you.”
They go out to the swimming pool and sit with their feet in the shallow end. The gurgle of the fountain will drown out their voices in case Irene should appear.
“What is it?” Baker says.
“He had a mistress,” Cash says. “A West Indian woman. I found a picture of the two of them in the master bedroom.”
Baker takes a sip of his beer. It’s good, but not quite good enough to distract him from this crushing news about his father. Is nobody as they seem? Does everyone have nefarious secrets? Okay, obviously something was going on with his father, and it occurred to Baker that the “local woman” in the helicopter was, perhaps, a damning detail. But that was only a maybe. She could have been the pilot’s girlfriend, or a tour guide, or one of Russ’s clients.
“Let me see this picture,” Baker says.
Cash disappears into the house, returning with a framed photograph of Russ and a truly stunning West Indian woman, lying together in a hammock.
There is no misreading the photo.
What strikes Baker is how Russ looks. He’s wearing sunglasses so it’s a bit hard to tell, but the father Baker knows—the goofy midwestern salesman always ready with a quip or pun—has been replaced by a man who looks sophisticated, worldly, and most of all, confident. When Baker and Cash were growing up, Russ had been like nothing so much as a big, eager Saint Bernard who faced each day with the same quest for attention, love, reassurance. He had a list of DIY projects that he liked to tackle on the weekends. He would go in to wake the boys up on a Saturday morning, calling Baker “buddy,” and Cash “pal,” as he did their entire lives, but they wouldn’t stir. Russ would then take a seat at Baker’s desk and wait. When the boys finally woke up, he would jump up with a childlike enthusiasm. Baker understood his father’s eager-to-please, don’t-rock-the-boat attitude to be the result of his childhood. He had moved every eighteen months, and the quest to be found likable and to be included was constant. But Baker won’t lie. Both he and Cash found their father’s obsequiousness off-putting, nearly cringe-worthy. There were a lot of shared eye rolls.
Once Russ got his new job, he had a new luster, certainly; there was suddenly a ton of money. But Russ’s attention was still so intense—possibly even more intense because he was around less frequently—that sometimes Baker and Cash wanted to deflect it. They thought their father was a nice enough guy, but ultimately they preferred the cooler, more reserved presence of their mother.
This man in the photograph with the open-collared tomato-red shirt and the “I’ve-got-the-world-by-the-balls” smile is a stranger.
“Has Mom seen this?” Baker asks.
“No.”
“Good.”
Cash stands up. “I’m returning it to its hiding place.”
“Get two more beers,” Baker says. “Please.”
Baker grills up six cheeseburgers, and he and Cash fall on the food as they used to when they were teenagers—without thinking, without conversation. Then they sit, with their empty plates before them, staring at the twinkling lights of Tortola in the distance. Baker wonders if he should tell Cash about Anna. Cash is, after all, his brother, though they aren’t close; they don’t confide in each other. Baker has long viewed Cash as a little punk—that was definitely true all through growing up—because Russ and Irene coddled him. And he had spent his adult years freewheeling, which always seemed more like freeloading: sleeping on his buddies’ couches out in Breckenridge, teaching skiing for a pittance because the job came with a free season pass, living off the food that his roommates who worked at restaurants brought home.
Baker and his parents had been unimpressed. But then what did Russ go and do? He bought Cash a business! Handed him the keys to two outdoor supply stores! Baker had really kept his distance then, because the demonstration of blatant favoritism was so egregious. Baker had always been able to speak frankly with his father, and he nearly told Russ that sinking two hundred grand into any business Cash was going to run was as good as sending it to a Nigerian prince.
The only time in recent history that Baker had seen Cash in a more favorable light was when he had taken Anna to Breckenridge to ski, back when they were dating. Anna had been uncharacteristically effusive in her praise of Cash. She loved that he got them access to the back-of-the-mountain trails. She loved that he was dating the hostess at the hottest sushi restaurant in town and then scored them a table in the window at eight o’clock on a Saturday night.