was obviously old, from the seventies or eighties. In it, Huck was a young man. He had a full head of strawberry-blond hair and a mustache but no beard; he wore jeans with what looked like a white patent-leather belt and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. The woman was in a crocheted chevron-print dress and had on white patent-leather boots. Her blond hair was feathered and she wore too much black eyeliner.
I took the picture to Huck and said, “Who’s this?” Huck had had a sister who had died of cancer and I thought maybe this was her; he rarely talked about her but I knew her name was Caroline.
“Her?” Huck said. I thought he might be angry that I’d snooped in his wallet for more than just the twenty, but he didn’t seem angry. “That’s my first wife, Kimberly.”
I was shocked by this. I didn’t know Huck had been married before. I felt affronted, maybe even betrayed—for Mama’s sake, but also my own. He and Mama had been married a year or two when I found this picture and the three of us had become a happy family. I didn’t like the idea of sharing Huck with anyone. “I didn’t realize you’d been married before.” I swallowed. “Does my mother know?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. He smiled sadly. “Sorry, Rosie, I should have told you. There just never seemed to be an appropriate time and it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“If it doesn’t matter, why do you keep the picture?” I asked. I handed it back to him, though really I wanted to tear it to shreds.
“Well,” Huck said. He thought about it for a minute. One thing I love most about Huck is that he’s a straight shooter. He doesn’t candy-coat the truth or brush it away because he doesn’t want me to see it. “Kimberly ended up being a disappointment to me. She was an alcoholic, a really, really mean drunk, and that destroyed our marriage. It destroyed just about all of her relationships, actually. But in this picture, we were happy, so I keep it as a reminder that my time with her wasn’t all bad.” He slipped the picture back into the wallet. “In even the bleakest situations, there’s usually some good to be salvaged.”
Facing Mama and Huck to tell them I was pregnant was a bleak situation. Would any good be salvaged from it?
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
Huck turned from the stove.
“What?” Mama said.
“I’m pregnant.”
She set down her coffee cup and stood up. Her face was unreadable. Shock, I suppose. Huck was watching her.
“Oscar?” she said.
“Not Oscar,” I said. “It was a man at the hotel, someone you don’t know. I was stupid. He’s gone now and I don’t know how to reach him.”
There was a moment of such profound silence that I felt like the world had stopped. She was probably deciding whether or not to believe me.
Then, finally, she opened her arms, and I entered them.
Part Three
The Soggy Dollar
Irene
Before she leaves for St. John, Irene has some loose ends to take care of.
A death certificate issued by the Department of Vital Statistics of the British Virgin Islands arrives in the mail in an unmarked envelope. Is it authentic? It seems so, though Irene has no way of knowing for sure.
So, obviously, Paulette received her message. There’s no note, no invoice, no mention of a fee. Irene has assumed that Paulette is the one who pays to maintain the villa—taxes (do they have taxes in the Virgin Islands?), insurance, landscapers, repairs, et cetera—probably out of a fund that Russ or Todd Croft set up…with cash.
She takes the death certificate to Ed Sorley’s office and drops it off with the receptionist, then leaves before Ed appears with questions.
She withdraws eight thousand dollars from the account at Federal Republic, using the drive-through window. The cash and the postcards from M.L. go right into Irene’s suitcase.
At Lydia’s insistence, Irene puts an obituary in the Press-Citizen, and she phones her close friends and neighbors to invite them to the house for a memorial reception. She tells them that Russ was killed in a helicopter crash; lightning was the cause. He was down in the Virgin Islands for work. He’s been cremated and the ashes scattered. This is a small gathering so his friends can pay their respects.
“No food and no flowers,” Irene told them. “I’m taking some time away, leaving Monday. If you feel you must do something to honor his passing, you can donate to the Rotary Club scholarship fund.