“No,” Huck said. “You’re not.”
“Hey, man,” Oscar said. “You heard the lady.”
“She’s not a lady,” Huck said. “She’s fifteen years old.”
This caught the attention of the other gentlemen at the table. They started lowing and whoa-ing. Oscar knew how old Rosie was—maybe he thought she was sixteen or seventeen. However, the others likely thought Rosie was nineteen or twenty, maybe even older. She was wearing iridescent-blue eyeshadow and a halter top the size of a handkerchief.
Huck squared his shoulders. “I’m not leaving without her.” He hadn’t been sure how intimidating he seemed, but he had been to Vietnam before any of these guys were born and he would remind them of that if he needed to. “I’m going to have a cigarette while you say your good-byes.”
Oscar had eased Rosie off his lap and then held her face and talked to her gently while she cried. But it was clear Oscar wasn’t going to put up a fight, and Huck felt proud of himself, thinking how relieved LeeAnn would be when both Huck and Rosie pulled in the driveway. As long as he found the girl some other clothes.
Huck was ready for Rosie’s anger. She climbed into Huck’s pickup and slammed the door so hard it nearly fell off. That hadn’t surprised him. When they pulled up to Route 322, the sounds of the reggae band still wafting in through Huck’s open window, Rosie said, “I hate you.” That hadn’t surprised him, either.
“I don’t know who you think you are. Maybe you think you’re some kind of god because you’re white. But no white man tells me what to do.”
Huck said, “There’s a popular phrase that goes, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’ I came at the request of your mother. She had to work, and so she sent me. Frankly, I think you got off easy.”
“I still hate you,” Rosie said.
Huck doesn’t think Irene needs or wants to hear all this, so he just says, “I married LeeAnn when Rosie was a teenager. She was a rebellious child. She dated a West Indian fella, older, from St. Thomas named Oscar. That went on for too long, but it ended when Oscar went to jail.”
“Lovely,” Irene says.
“Tell me about it,” Huck says. “He got drunk and stabbed one of his friends. Though not fatally.”
“Did Rosie go to college?” Irene asks.
“She did, at UVI in St. Thomas. It’s funny, some kids who grow up here can’t wait to get away, and some can’t bear to leave. Rosie was the latter. She loved it here. She and her momma used to fight like half-starved hens over a handful of feed, but there was a deep emotional attachment. So she stayed. For a long time, she waited tables at Caneel Bay. That’s where she met the Pirate.”
“The pirate?” Irene says.
“It was… let’s see… thirteen years ago, Valentine’s weekend. Some guy, rich, white, showed up on a yacht for the weekend and swept Rosie off her feet.”
“What was his name?” Irene asks.
“Never learned it. He came and went. It was just a weekend fling. Rosie called him the Pirate, though, because he stole her heart.”
“So she had a history of this?” Irene says.
“If by ‘this’ you mean poor choices in men, then yes,” Huck says. “I actually suspected the Pirate was a made-up story. I thought Rosie was back with Oscar—this would have been after he was released from jail. But when the baby was born, she was very light-skinned. No doubt the father was white.”
Irene backs away a fraction of an inch. “Baby?”
“Maia,” Huck says. “Rosie’s daughter. My granddaughter. She’s twelve.”
“Oh,” Irene says. “I didn’t put… I didn’t realize…” She tears up, then starts to soundlessly cry. Huck pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket, which is actually just one of the bandanas he likes to tie around his neck when he’s fishing, and hands it to Irene. She shakes it out over the railing like a woman bidding her loved ones good-bye on an ocean liner, then dabs at her eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize Rosie left behind a child.”
“That’s the real tragedy here,” Huck says. “Me, I’m old. I’ve known loss. But Maia…”
“She’s twelve, you say? And never knew her father? So Rosie was all she had?”
“Rosie and me,” Huck says. “Now there’s just me. But people will step up. Maia won’t get lost. I won’t let her get lost. I don’t care if I have to keep myself alive until I’m a hundred years old.”
“When did Russ come into the picture?” Irene asks.
“I couldn’t be sure…”
“But if you had to guess,” Irene says. “The deed says he bought this house three years ago. Had their relationship… been going on for three years?”
Here is where things get thorny, Huck thinks. Here is where he profoundly regrets his decision to let this woman ever set foot on his boat. They have been acting like they’re on the same side. In some sense, they are. They’re the bereaved. The survivors.
But Huck is Rosie’s family and Irene is Russ’s family. Irene wants this whole mess to be Rosie’s fault and Huck wants it to be Russ’s fault. Irene is making it sound like three years would be nearly inconceivable—but Huck knows that their relationship went on longer than three years. Rosie met the Invisible Man right after Rosie died—five years ago.
“I’m really not sure, Irene,” Huck says. “What I know about their relationship I could write on my thumbnail and still have room for the U.S. Constitution. Rosie told me next to nothing. And like I said, I never had the pleasure of meeting…”
“My husband.”
“Mr. Steele.” Huck clears his throat. “Your husband.”
Irene steps back to the table, fills her glass with more wine, and regards Huck over the rim, as if trying to gauge whether or not he’s telling the truth.
He is. He knows it sounds unusual. It was unusual. And part of what’s at work in Huck is guilt. He should have nipped the relationship—or at least the secrecy about it—in the bud. But like he said, Rosie met the guy right after LeeAnn died, when Huck was in bad shape. LeeAnn had been sick, sure—her death hadn’t come as a total shock. And yet Huck had been left feeling like his entire right side had been amputated.
He’d been glad that Rosie had found someone to distract her from her grief. By the time he realized how pathological the relationship was, it was too late. Rosie was in love. All the way.
“I should have done more,” he says. “I should have tried to stop it. I should have hired a private investigator.”
Irene sets her wineglass gently down and lets her hands drop to her sides. “You showed up here,” she says. “That’s more than a lot of men would do.”
True, he thinks. But he says nothing.
Irene reaches out… and takes his hand. “Will you come upstairs with me?”
He’s speechless.
“There’s something I need your help with,” she says.
Huck follows Irene up the stairs, his mind racing. Is she making advances? Is the “something” that she wants help with getting out of that black dress? This is all moving a little fast for Huck. But he won’t say no. She’s a grieving widow and he has lost his daughter. Now that he has allowed himself to travel back in time, he realizes that Rosie became his daughter the second he yanked her out of the regatta. Or maybe it was when he paid twenty bucks for a regatta t-shirt to put on over the hankie she was wearing. Or maybe it was when she told him she hated him.
Irene needs physical contact and Huck needs it too, doesn’t he? And she’s a good-looking woman.
They walk down a long white hallway with a vaulted ceiling ribbed with exposed beams. There are rooms off to both sides, bedrooms. Huck peers into each one. They’re similar; it feels like a fancy hotel. At the very end of the hall is a closed door. Irene turns the knob. Locked.
“When we got here on Thursday, the house had been cleaned out,” Irene says. “Every personal item removed. Russ’s clothes, gone. All the papers from his office, gone. Someone came and took it all away, probably his business partner, Todd Croft. Ever heard that name?”