Page 12 of What Happens in Paradise
“Serve them up yourself,” Huck says. “And make your own toast. I have to get ready.”
Maia stares at him. “Is this about yesterday?”
Huck stops in his tracks. He’s facing the refrigerator, where he’s about to grab Maia’s lunch box—packed with a peanut butter and jelly as per her request because all of a sudden sandwiches made from freshly caught fish aren’t good enough. “Yesterday?”
“Taking my friends to town,” Maia says. “You’ve been in a weird mood since then.”
She’s intuitive, he’ll give her that. He can’t very well tell her the truth—that what has put him in a “weird mood” is the hundred and twenty-five grand he found in her mother’s room—but neither does he want her to think that he minds driving her and her friends around. If she believes that, she’ll start asking someone else for rides, and he’ll lose his window into her world.
“That’s not it,” Huck says. “I enjoyed taking you to town.”
“Oh,” Maia says. “What is it, then? Is it Irene?”
At this, Huck does turn around. “Irene?”
“You miss her, right? That’s why you’re grumpy?”
Huck opens his mouth but for the life of him, he can’t think of how to respond. The night following Irene’s departure, he made the mistake of drinking a couple of shots of Flor de Caña and saying some things to Maia that he should have kept private. What exactly did he say? Maybe something as innocuous as I’ve never seen a woman fish like that before. Maybe something more revealing. But did he say he had feelings for Irene? No. Did he ever say he’d miss her? No.
Huck nearly snaps, I’m not grumpy! But he is, and it’s not Maia’s fault.
“Sorry, Nut,” he says. “I’m just tired, I’m missing your mom—and your grandma too, for good measure—and I’m dreading this bachelor party.”
Maia opens her arms to give Huck a hug, which he gratefully accepts. He loves this child to distraction, she’s all he has left, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let whatever mess Rosie was involved in affect her.
“Eat your breakfast,” he says.
Adam is late getting to the boat, which normally ticks Huck off, but today, he’s grateful. He has to think. What does he do about the money? He’s a human being, so part of him fantasizes about keeping it and slipping five hundred here and three hundred there into Maia’s college fund. He’s not rich, he might not even qualify as “comfortable,” but his house is paid off and so is the boat. He has money saved for a new truck once his old one finally dies and he has a fund for boat repairs. The money, if he kept it, would be a cushion. A really soft cushion.
He can’t keep it. He has to report it. But to whom? He’ll call Agent Vasco, he decides. He’ll call her today, after the charter.
But maybe he’ll call Irene first.
A dinghy putters up to the Mississippi. It’s Keegan, the first mate from What a Catch!, a friendly-rival fishing boat, dropping off Adam.
“Sorry, Cap,” Adam says, climbing aboard.
“He was up late talking to Marissa,” Keegan says.
Huck pretends not to hear this last comment, as though ignoring it might make the situation go away. Marissa is the daughter of Dan and Mrs. Dan, the Albany couple from Huck’s charter on New Year’s Eve. Marissa is the girl who did not cast a line, the one who barely took her eyes off her phone’s screen the entire time they were out on the water. Adam asked the girl out for New Year’s Eve, an act of desperation if Huck had ever seen one. But the date must have been a humdinger because after that, they’d been inseparable until Marissa left a few days ago.
The day before yesterday, Huck said to Adam, “Why pick a girl who doesn’t like to fish?”
Adam scoffed. “You know how hard it is to meet a chick who actually enjoys fishing?”
Huck nearly spoke up about Irene—the woman seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the front of his mind and on the tip of his tongue—but instead he said, “Maia likes to fish.”
Adam said, “Maia is twelve. She’ll grow out of it.”
Keegan putters away in the dinghy. Adam removes his visor, runs a hand through his hair, and gazes in the direction of St. Thomas, where they both see an airplane taking off, probably going back to the States.
“Head in the game,” Huck says. “Check the lines.”
“I have to talk to you, Cap,” Adam says.
Huck shakes his head. “Afterward, please. We have a bachelor party today, and you know how I feel about bachelor parties.”
Huck hates bachelor parties. Nine times out of ten, if someone calls looking to book the Mississippi for one, Huck will tell the person his boat is unavailable for the foreseeable future. With bachelor parties, something bad always happens. Huck keeps one case of Red Stripe on ice at all times—and one case only. Bachelor parties often bring an additional thirty-pack of Bud Light (undrinkable, in Huck’s opinion) as well as rum or tequila or sometimes punch in a plastic gallon jug. Huck gives extra alcohol the side-eye, but he has never flat-out forbidden it—that would be a fatal move for his TripAdvisor ratings—although he thinks to himself that what these kids really want is a booze cruise, not a fishing trip. He nearly always ends up with one participant completely jack-wagon drunk, puking off the back. He’s had guys fall off the boat, and he’s had fistfights. Huck never gets involved in the fistfights; he just turns the boat around and drops the group at the National Park Service dock without a word, regardless of whether they’ve caught any fish.
