Page 88 of What Happens in Paradise
Ellen has never steered him wrong, he thinks. “You’re going to marry Mick? Even though he cheated on you? Even though you said yourself that you can’t trust him?”
“Do you have time for a story?” Ayers asks. “This is something I’ve never told anyone—not Mick, not Rosie, not anybody.”
“I have all night,” Baker says.
She takes a breath. “When I was Maia’s age—younger even; ten or eleven—I lived in Kathmandu with my parents.”
“Kathmandu.” Baker remembers all the photographs on Ayers’s wall. Story for another day. “In Nepal?”
“Yes,” Ayers says. “Kathmandu used to be this frenetic, dirty, dusty, poverty-stricken place where emaciated cows roamed the streets along with the cars and the motorbikes. My parents and I lived in a backpacker hostel. My mother, Sunny, tended bar at an expat pub, I can’t remember the name, only that it had a snooker table, and while my mother worked, my father would try to teach me to play, but my arms were too short to hold the cue stick. Anyway, the manager of the pub was this guy named Simon and he was the most handsome man I have ever seen in my life—and he liked my mother. Even at my tender age, I figured out that was why my father kept me in the pub playing snooker rather than exploring the city.” She sighed. “But my father couldn’t keep me there too late, so eventually every night we’d go back to the hostel. One night, something must have happened with Simon because my mother didn’t come home. For three days, we didn’t see her.”
“What did your dad do?” Baker asks.
“He moved us to this place called the Hotel Vajra, which looked like it was pulled out of a fairy tale. The beds had crimson silk spreads and the doors were made of carved teak. At night they lit pillar candles up and down the hallways, and my father and I would go to the rooftop terrace restaurant and eat lamb momos. It was a big change for me, having a hotel room to myself and eating out in a fancy restaurant, and I knew, somehow, that we were doing it only because my mother wasn’t there. I think I even knew that we were doing it to get back at her.” Ayers sighs. “Anyway, one morning as we were headed over to Mike’s, this place that served a real American breakfast, we saw my mother sitting in the front garden, waiting for us. She linked her arms through ours and we all went to Mike’s and ordered big stacks of pancakes.”
“Did she say where she’d been?”
“No,” Ayers says. “Nothing was ever mentioned about it to me. My mother quit the job at the pub and we moved to Vietnam.” She pauses. “Now, as an adult, I can only assume my mother had a fling with Simon and my father waited it out.”
“Are your parents still together?” Baker asks.
“Yes,” Ayers says. “They’re very happy. To my knowledge, nothing like that has ever happened again, on either side. It was like a hiccup.”
“A hiccup,” Baker says. “And that’s how you see Mick’s behavior with Brigid? As a hiccup?”
“Mick took a detour,” Ayers says. “But he found his way back to me. And I truly believe it was a one-and-done. He knows what he lost and he won’t risk it again. I’ve asked him for years to find a better place to live, and on our way to the boat yesterday, he drove me past this house he rented. It’s gorgeous.”
“Where is it?” Baker says. “I’ll buy it right out from under him.”
“Baker,” Ayers says.
“You said you have feelings for me,” Baker says. “You said you couldn’t stop thinking about me.”
“That’s true,” Ayers says. “Even on Monday before Mick proposed, one of the mothers from Gifft Hill was talking about this hot new dad, and I knew it was you and I was…jealous.”
“Think about that,” Baker says.
“I have been thinking about it!” Ayers says. “But Mick and I have been together a long time. He knows me. We have a life here that we built together, month by month, year by year. I can’t just throw that away for something new.”
“You can, though,” Baker says. “Because I’m moving to St. John tomorrow and I’m going to stay. I got a coaching job at Gifft Hill. I’m going to take scuba lessons…” He doesn’t know where this idea comes from, it just pops into his head, but it sounds good. “I’m going to work on getting my real estate license down there. I’m going to build a life, month by month, year by year, and I want you to be in that life. When I first saw you, I felt like I was the one who had been struck by lightning—only instead of dying, I came to life.” Is this corny? He can’t tell. “I made a decision then and there that I was going to marry you. So you can hang up with me now thinking you’re going to marry Mick. But I promise you, I promise you, Ayers, that I can do better than Mick. I will be true and steadfast and devoted and crazily in love with you until the day I die. I will never have any hiccups. Ever.”
Ayers is quiet.
“If a proposal is what you want, then you have one from me. I want to marry you as soon as I’m legally able.”
“You barely know me,” she says, but her voice is softer. He’s getting to her, maybe.
“We can worry about that later.”
Ayers laughs, but her laugh is cut short. “Oh, hey,” she says. “Maia is calling in on my line, and I should take it. It’s late and she never calls me this late. She never calls me at all, she only texts.”
“By all means, take it,” Baker says. “I hope everything is okay.”
“Me too,” Ayers says. “I’ll let you know. Bye.”
Baker stares at the blank screen of his phone. If Floyd weren’t asleep, he would play the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” at top volume. What the hell—he finds his AirPods and cranks the song up.
If I go, there will be trouble.
