She’s getting older, Huck thinks. Her legs are long but still as straight as sticks; she remains a little girl for the time being. Anyone with one good eye can see what’s coming down the road: bras, boyfriends, broken hearts, bad decisions, maybe not quite as bad as the ones her mother has made, he hopes.
Joanie is a good kid with nice parents. Both the mother and father are marine biologists who work for the National Park Service. They are avid hikers, naturalists, vegans. Huck can’t imagine what they’re having for dinner, but whatever it is, Maia will be wishing she stayed home for ribs and chicken.
He nods at his passenger seat. “Let’s go,” he says.
LeeAnn believed that everything happens for a reason, a theory that Huck only half agrees with, because some moments in this life seem random and senseless.
But he is very, very happy that Maia is at Joanie’s house the next morning.
Huck spends his New Year’s Eve eating both the ribs and the chicken and drinking a cold six-pack of Island Hoppin’ IPA, then wandering down the street to have one drink with the neighbors, a local family made up of Benjamins and Singers—they’re having a full-on shindig with a roast pig and homemade moonshine. Huck gets a good tip from Cleve Benjamin: there has been a school of mahi hanging six miles offshore, in the same place for the past three days. Cleve has the coordinates written in his phone; he shares them with Huck.
“There’s enough fish in that spot to fill your freezer chest until next Christmas,” Cleve says.
Huck is grateful for the information and feels lucky to be trusted and liked by his West Indian neighbors. He’s accepted because he was married to LeeAnn—some of these folks grew up with LeeAnn out in Coral Bay, others knew her from church or worked with her at the Myrah Keating Smith Community Health Center, still others are distantly related to her first husband (Rosie’s father), Levi Small, who left the island long ago and has never come back.
Huck wanders home and takes his last long look of the year over Great Cruz Bay; he can hear music wafting up from the Westin below. Then he goes inside and falls asleep.
He intends to sleep in but is awakened at seven by the forecasted thunderstorm, and then he can’t go back to sleep, so he gets out of bed and fixes himself a New Year’s breakfast of hash—made from potatoes, onions, peppers, and some of the leftover barbecued chicken—and throws two fried eggs on top. He reads his book, The Late Show, by Connelly. He stops every few pages to wonder about the wife from yesterday—if she enjoyed the fish or if Dan cooked it for too long and ruined it. Huck then wonders about Adam and the daughter. Did they have fun at Drink? Did Adam get lucky? Or did the girl have too much champagne, as most amateurs do on the final night of the year, and spend her night crying or puking? Huck bets on the latter.
He is having a cigarette on the front porch when the police pull up. He thinks for a second it’s about Adam. But they ask him to go inside and then they tell him: there was a helicopter crash early that morning in the waters north of Virgin Gorda.
Rosie is dead.
BAKER: HOUSTON, TEXAS
Anna makes two New Year’s resolutions: She’s going to spend more time at home with Baker and Floyd, and she’s going to become friends with at least one of the other mothers at Floyd’s Montessori school, the Children’s Cottage. She hands Baker a page from her prescription pad (Dr. Anna Schaffer, MD) with the two goals written down.
1. More time at home
2. Friends
Baker finds he has follow-up questions. Does “more time at home” mean she’ll have sex with him on days other than his birthday and their anniversary? Does “making friends” mean that some of the “at home” time will be spent on “girls’ night out,” or in long phone conversations listening to Delia, mother of Sophie, air her grievances against Mandy, mother of Aidan?
Baker folds the paper in half, kisses it, and puts it in his jeans pocket. It’s appropriate that Anna wrote her resolutions on the prescription pad, because their relationship is sick. These two actions will heal it, he hopes. “Good for you,” he says. “What should we do today?”
A look of panic crosses Anna’s face. She’s a beautiful woman, with flawless olive skin; she has impenetrable brown eyes and long dark hair. She exudes serenity and, beyond that, competence. She’s a natural-born perfectionist, at least when it comes to cardiothoracic surgery. It’s only her personal life that she has trouble navigating.
“Today?” she says. She checks her phone. “I have to go to the hospital.”
“It’s New Year’s Day,” Baker says.
“It’s Tuesday,” she says. “I have rounds.”
“But…,” Baker says, waving the page from her prescription pad in the air.
“Am I supposed to tell Mr. Kavetsky, who just had a triple bypass, that I can’t check on him because I have to… what? Do a gouache project with my husband and four-year-old? Watch Despicable Me 3 yet again?”
“You haven’t even seen it once!” Baker says. His voice is defiant, verging on bratty. He sounds like a four-year-old. But come on! For Anna to represent herself as someone who is routinely subjected to children’s movies is downright unfair. She never watches movies with Floyd; she hasn’t seen Despicable Me 3—or numbers one and two, for that matter. On the rare occasion she does sit down with Baker and Floyd to watch a movie, she falls asleep in the comfy womb of the leather gel recliner, leaving Baker to answer Floyd’s rapid-fire questions about the intricacies of character and plot. Floyd, like his mother, has a finely tuned intellect, but it’s as if after physically giving birth to Floyd, after donating the genius half of his DNA, Anna decided her job was done. First, she turned the care and feeding of Floyd over to a baby nurse for the staggering fee of three hundred fifty dollars a day, and then, when Anna was done “breastfeeding”—she nearly always pumped milk, was a fiend about it, in fact, insisting that it was much more “efficient” than latching Floyd onto her actual body when he was going to switch to the bottle eventually anyway—they hired Maria José, a nanny from El Salvador. Maria José and Anna didn’t see eye to eye (Maria José held Floyd all day long, and in the evenings, when Anna came home from the hospital, Floyd was set down, and he would cry)—and so Maria José was dismissed.
Then Anna hired Svana, from Iceland, who drew Floyd a bath that was too hot and scalded him the color of a lobster, necessitating a trip to urgent care. Good-bye, Svana. At that point, Baker was looking for a job in private equity, but he kept getting to final interviews and not getting hired—he suspected that Houston firms tended to hire Texas boys, especially those who had played high school football—and since Anna’s career provided plenty of money, Baker thought, why didn’t he stay home and care for Floyd? He could day-trade while Floyd napped. Day-trading encapsulated everything he loved about his field—it was a game, a gamble, a risk, a thrill—and he was good at it. He was also good at parenting. The love and joy and wonder he felt when he looked at tiny baby Floyd—a person, another person, he had helped create—was nearly overwhelming. Why would he pay someone else to care for their child when he could do it himself?
Anna had put up the predictable arguments: Staying home with Floyd wouldn’t provide Baker with any intellectual stimulation. You’ll be bored stiff, she said. He would be like the unfulfilled housewives of the 1950s. He would choose something inappropriate to fill his time—internet porn or marijuana, or an affair with one of the mothers he met at the playground. He would get so far behind in his career that he would never catch up. What would Baker do when Floyd was eighteen and headed to college? Even three years hence, when Floyd went to preschool, too much time would have passed for Baker to seamlessly reenter the world of high finance. He would become depressed, smoke more weed than he already did, get addicted to pills.
Baker had assured Anna at the time that she was being melodramatic. But now Floyd is four years old, and while he is a very bright, curious, and well-adjusted kid, it’s true that Baker’s decision to stay home has created issues. First of all, Anna has grown so comfortable with their new roles that she has nearly checked out of family life altogether. Secondly, whereas Baker has not become addicted to internet porn or had an affair, he does smoke a fair amount of dope, and he has developed very close friendships with a group of mothers, all of whom have sons and daughters at the Children’s Cottage. His clique includes Wendy, Becky, Debbie, and Ellen. They are all single mothers—three divorced and one single by choice—which is how they became friends in the first place. They have more or less adopted Baker as their “school husband.” He covers their kids when they have work emergencies, he fixes things around their houses, and he gives them free investment advice. He suspects that the other mothers—the married mothers—are critical of the relationship between Baker and his school wives, but it wasn’t until the Holiday Sing that he realized just how jealous and vile women could be. One of them cornered Anna in the bathroom and told her she was very “evolved” for letting Baker have a “harem.”