Page 68 of Troubles in Paradise
Swan looks…miffed. “Ayers?”
Baker says, “Ayers, hey!” He takes a step away from Swan.
“Sorry I didn’t text or anything,” Ayers says to Baker. “But I just got out of work and I was wondering if you wanted to come see my new place?”
Swan emits an audible breath and Ayers thinks,I know. This is brazen. You will rewind and replay this moment for your school-mom friends dozens of times until they’re all sick ofhearing it, and maybe none of you will ever speak to me again. Maybe you’ll boycott La Tapa and post anonymous nasty comments on theTreasure IslandTripadvisor page, but I don’t care. Baker is the father of my baby and although I’ve treated him carelessly, I’m not giving him up without a fight.
Then she thinks,The good news is, Skip is still available.
“Yeah,” Baker says. “My mom can watch Floyd, and Swan was just leaving.” He takes Ayers’s hand and squeezes it. “I’d love to come with you.”
Irene
Baker sees Maia at school while he’s picking up Floyd and invites her over for dinner.
“I hope that’s okay?” he says when he tells Irene. “I’ll go get her and drive her home.”
“Of course,” Irene says. She still isn’t ready for a détente with Huck—nope, not at all. Rosie’s relationship with Russ happened while Rosie wasliving under Huck’s roof.He said he’d never met Russ—Irene believes this—but could he not guess the man Rosie was involved with was married? Obviously, the Invisible Man was married. That was why he was invisible!
Huck should have asked more questions. He should have followed Rosie to the villa. He should haveput an end to it.
Are these unreasonable expectations? Maybe. But the bald fact remains: Huck stood by and did nothing. For years.
He’s the only one left for Irene to blame. She can’t summon the same ire or resentment toward Maia. Maia is a child. Russ’s daughter. The boys’ sister.
“Maia is always welcome,” Irene says, and she sees relief cross Baker’s face.
Maia arrives bearing two large square packages—one light, which she carries, and one heavy, which Baker carries.
“These came for you,” Maia explains. “To Gramps’s post box.”
While Maia and Floyd take a predinner swim in the pool, Irene slices the packages open. One of them holds her Christmas ornaments, still carefully wrapped up in tissue. Irene sighs, recalling herindustriousnesson New Year’s Day before her dinner with Lydia at the Pullman Diner, before the phone call when she learned Russ was dead.
On New Year’s Day, she had been a different person—irritated and hurt that her husband was traveling for work over the holiday but determined to make the best of it and be productive. She’d wanted to wake up on January 2 and have all traces of Christmas gone. Back then, nothing had annoyed Irene more than lazy neighbors who left their outside lights up until Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, their wreaths up until Valentine’s Day. She had carefully removed and wrapped all the ornaments because she was a methodical person who believed God was in the details. She would be grateful for the effort the following Christmas when she opened the box and everything was just so.
She’d never imagined she’d be opening the box that spring in the Virgin Islands.
The most precious ornaments aren’t her collection of intricate and clever Christopher Radkos or the vintage ornaments she picked up at estate sales across the country but rather the ornaments the boys made in elementary school. A cardboard disk covered in green foil decorated with beads and dried macaroni,CASHwritten in glitter on one side. A puffy painted Santa face with cotton glued on for a beard. Irene is happy to have these back, even though they belonged to that other lifetime.
The other box holds photo albums and the framed family photographs that Irene had had on display around the house on Church Street. The photo that greets Irene is the last picture taken of her and Russ together. They’re side by side on the front porch swing at her aunt’s house in Door County, Wisconsin. They’re smiling at Cash, who took the picture. Russ’s arm runs along the back of the swing behind Irene, and Irene’s hand rests on Russ’s thigh, lightly but proprietarily. Why wouldn’t it? He was her husband of thirty-five years. She would characterize Russ’s expression as content. Irene then flashes back to the photograph she found of him and Rosie lying in the hammock. He had looked ecstatic, as though he had no idea how he’d gotten so lucky. A girlfriend whose beauty was as rarefied as the Mona Lisa’s.
Irene had wanted to smash the photograph of Russ and Rosie but she feels an even greater violence toward this picture of her and Russ. The audacity of him to smile at the camera as though nothing is amiss. As though he doesn’t have a mistress and a child waiting for him down in the Caribbean!
Irene steadies her breathing and checks out the window. Baker is drinking a beer, his legs dangling in the water. Maia is carrying Floyd around the pool on her shoulders. He’s shrieking with joy. He adores her.
Irene digs a little deeper in the box and finds the navy leather photo album and the red vinyl photo album. These hold pictures of the boys growing up. She can see the snapshots without looking at them: Baker on the pitcher’s mound in his green and yellow uniform, all spindly arms and legs; Cash on the ski slopes, goggles resting on top of his helmet, braces glinting in the glare off the snow; both boys in khakis and navy blazers escorting Milly out of church on Easter.
Beneath these is a photograph of Baker and Anna on their wedding day. Anna is stunning in her sleek ivory silk, but she’s not smiling.
Irene closes up the box and puts it in the closet. When she’s had a chance to properly go through it, she’ll show some of the pictures of Baker and Cash to Maia. But for now, it’s important that Maia not see any of the photos. What would she think if she saw the picture of Russ and Irene on the swing? Irene shudders. She would never put a child through what she has just experienced—being starkly confronted with evidence that she was being lied to.
At dinner, Maia says, “So what was in the boxes?”
“Christmas ornaments,” Irene says. “And other knickknacks from my house in Iowa.”
Maia takes a knife to her fried chicken. “I had to give up being a vegan,” she says. “It was too hard.”
“How’s the bath-bomb business?” Irene asks.
