What Happens in Paradise Read online

  “Who’s Tilda?” Floyd asks.

  “A friend of your uncle’s,” Irene says.

  Baker can’t describe his relief. He tousles Floyd’s hair. “You want some ice cream, buddy? They had red velvet cake at the Starfish Market.”

  Baker puts Floyd to bed, then decides to turn in himself, mostly because there’s nothing else to do. Cash is still out and Baker has no other friends. If he were at home in Houston right now, he would smoke some weed and crash out in front of the TV—he needs to catch up on Game of Thrones—but he can’t watch that with Irene around.

  His phone rings. This, he thinks, will be Anna, just getting home from work at nine o’clock at night. He steels himself. It would be just like Anna to have glanced at his text distractedly and responded with K, but then, after running the whole thing past Louisa, suddenly have a list of objections.

  Baker should have texted Louisa.

  But his display says Ayers.

  “Ayers?” he says.

  “Hey.” Her voice sounds funny—sad, trembling, like she’s been crying. “Are you busy?”

  “Not at all,” he says. “I just put Floyd to bed so I can talk. What’s up?”

  There’s a pause. “Can you get out? Is Cash there? Or your mom? To watch Floyd?”

  “Uh…yeah. Cash is out but my mom is here.” Baker stands up and checks himself in the mirror. He hasn’t shaved—or showered, for that matter, unless swimming in the pool counts as a shower—since the day he went to Gifft Hill, Monday. He does have a nice tan now, but he looks like a Caribbean hobo. “Do you want to meet somewhere?”

  “Can you just come here, to my place?” Ayers asks. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Your place?”

  “Fish Bay,” Ayers says. “It’ll take you fifteen minutes if you leave right now.”

  “Right now?” Baker says. And before he can explain that he needs to shower and change, she’s giving him directions.

  Unlike the rest of the island, Fish Bay is flat. And really dark. Ayers said she lived past the second little bridge on the left, but Baker would have missed her house if he hadn’t caught a flash of green, her truck, out of the corner of his eye.

  She’s standing in the doorway, backlit, hugging herself. He doesn’t need to feel bad about not showering, he sees. She’s still wearing her Treasure Island uniform and her hair is wild and curly.

  “Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

  She moves so that he can step past her, inside.

  Her place is small, cute, bohemian. There’s a tiny kitchen with thick ceramic dishes on open shelves. There’s a papasan chair, a bunch of houseplants, a glass bowl filled with sand dollars, and a gallery wall of photographs from places all over the world—the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids, the Matterhorn. Ayers is in every picture; in many, she’s a kid.

  “Have you been to all these places?” Baker asks.

  “Story for another day,” she says. “Come sit.”

  Baker picks a spot next to Ayers on a worn leather sofa draped with a tapestry. There’s a coffee table with three pillar candles sitting in a dish of pebbles, and lying across the pebbles is a joint.

  Are they going to smoke?

  “Would you like a glass of water?” Ayers asks.

  “Maybe in a minute,” Baker says. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

  Ayers folds her legs underneath her. How is it possible that even when she looks awful, she’s beautiful?

  “This morning—” She laughs. “Which now feels like three days ago.” She picks up the joint and lifts a barbecue lighter off the side table, then seems to think better of it and sets both down. “It’s been a very long day.”

  “Some days are like that,” Baker says. “Start at the beginning.”

  “Last night Mick told me he had to go to St. Thomas to get restaurant supplies today,” Ayers says. “Whatever, I found it a little strange, but I didn’t question it. Too much.” She throws her hands up. “Anyway, then this morning, I saw him on the ferry with Brigid.”

  Baker makes a face like he’s surprised. But he’s not surprised. He knew Mick would screw it up. He actually wishes Cash were here to listen to this. Baker leans in. “You’re kidding.”

  “Not kidding. I saw them sitting together and I was…pissed. Livid. Suspicious.”

  “I bet.”

  “So I sent him a text telling him never to call me again.”

  Baker spreads his palms against the cool, cracked leather of the sofa. This is real? He didn’t fall asleep in bed next to Floyd? Ayers is telling him exactly what he’s been waiting to hear, only much sooner than he had hoped. Her timing couldn’t be better.

  “Then Cash and I had this weird, awful thing happen at work.”

  “Yeah, I heard, sort of.”

  “This girl got really drunk, and I thought she’d tanked while snorkeling. We stopped the boat, I dove off, your brother dove off, this other kid who’s probably going to be in the Olympics dove off, it was a total circus, and in the end the chick was in the head changing out of one inappropriate suit into a second, even more inappropriate suit, and this was all before we even got to Jost. The girl continued to drink and then puked off the side the whole way home.” Ayers sighs. “And I left your brother to handle it because guess who was waiting for me at the dock.”

  “Mick,” Baker says, and he suspects that maybe this story isn’t going to have the ending he wants it to.

  “Mick,” Ayers says. “He just left here a little while ago. Right before I called you. We broke up.”

  “You broke up?” Baker says. He’s afraid to go back to feeling optimistic. “What did he say? Why was he with Brigid?”

  “He said they bumped into each other. Unplanned. A coincidence. She was headed over to St. Thomas to get a tattoo of the petroglyphs.”

  “Okay?” Baker says.

  “I just got a tattoo of the petroglyphs a few weeks ago,” Ayers says. She holds out her ankle so Baker can see the tattoo; it’s a curlicue symbol in dark green. “We’re hardly the only two people in the universe with a petroglyph tattoo. Rosie had one. But still, I was chafed.”

  “Understandably,” Baker says.

  “Mick says they only talked for a couple of minutes, then Mick took Gordon, that’s our dog, his dog, up to stand at the bow and he didn’t see Brigid again.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t want to believe him,” Ayers says. “But I do.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  “So…why did you break up?”

  “Two reasons,” Ayers says. “Both are secrets that I’m keeping from him. One is this…project that I’m working on. I can’t tell him about it, and I can’t tell you about it yet either. Maybe in the future, once I’m finished, but not right now.”

  “Secret project,” Baker says. “I won’t ask.”

  “Please don’t,” Ayers says. She seems to shrink under her Treasure Island T-shirt and when she gazes at him, her eyes appear robbed of their pigment. They are very, very pale blue. “The second reason is…that I have feelings for you.”

  “For me?”

  “For you,” Ayers says. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

  “You haven’t?” Baker says.

  She shakes her head and presses her lips together like she’s embarrassed.

  “So, wait,” Baker says. Is this really happening? Him and Ayers? Does she want him to kiss her? Does she want him to—finally—make proper love to her? Baker can’t find the words to ask, he’s too overwhelmed, but it turns out it doesn’t matter.

  Ayers stands up, takes his hand, and leads him to her bed.

  He wakes up in the middle of the night; 4:20 a.m., his phone says. Ayers is naked in bed next to him. He’s in love. He’s beyond in love.

  But he has to get out of there. He can’t have Floyd waking up and finding his dad gone.

  Baker eases out of bed and uses the bathroom. H
e sees a clothbound book balanced on the edge of the sink. Ayers’s journal? Baker is, of course, tempted to open it and read Ayers’s innermost thoughts, presumably about how she’s stuck with crappy cheater Mick but can’t get Baker Steele out of her mind. However, back when Baker was in college, he read his girlfriend Trinity’s diary and all hell broke loose. That was why they’d split. Trinity had called it a “devastating breach of personal trust.”

  If you learn one thing from me, Baker Steele, she’d said, I hope it’s never to read a woman’s private thoughts without her express permission.

  No matter how tempting, she’d added. And, oh yes, it will be tempting.

  It is tempting—the journal with the red floral cover, demure and innocent with the look of a colonial-era recipe book.

  But Baker leaves it be.

  In the end, Trinity taught him a lot. He must remember to hit her up on Facebook and thank her.

  Back in the bedroom, he runs a finger down the length of Ayers’s spine and she shivers awake and opens one eye. “You leaving?”

  “I have to,” he whispers. “Floyd.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  Baker clears his throat. “And, uh, you remember that I’m leaving tomorrow for Houston? I have that thing on Saturday? But I’m coming right back. So you don’t have to worry.”

  “What day?” Ayers asks. “What day are you coming back?”

  Baker does a quick calculation. The benefit auction is Saturday night. Sunday he’s on cleanup duty. He needs at least two additional days to get the move organized, maybe three; honestly, he could use a week, but now that this has happened, all he can think about is how to get back here as quickly as possible. But then again, he has a life to dismantle—Floyd’s medical records need to be transferred (to where?); Baker needs to forward his mail (to where?) and figure out what to do about his income taxes. There’s stuff. “Wednesday,” he says. “Thursday.”

  “Wednesday or Thursday?” she asks.

  “Thursday,” he says. “Week from today.”

  “I’m working at La Tapa Thursday night,” she says. “Come by after work. We can celebrate your move.”

  He kisses her temple. “You got it,” he says. He puts his clothes on and runs both hands through his hair. “Oh, by the way, the chick who got drunk on your boat was a friend of Tilda’s.”

  Ayers rolls over and squints at him. “Really?”

  “Yeah, that’s what my mother told me Cash said. I guess Cash and Tilda went out last night.”

  “They did?” Ayers says, sitting up.

  “Yeah,” Baker says. “I think so.” He wonders if hearing this bothers Ayers for some reason.

  She smiles. “They’re perfect for each other.” She falls back into her pillows. “When you get back, we can double-date.”

  “Great,” Baker says sardonically—although, actually, it sounds like fun.

  The theme for the Children’s Cottage benefit auction is Monopoly. This was Debbie’s idea. She was in charge of dreaming up something to top Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, which was last year’s theme. Although Baker was skeptical about the appeal of Monopoly—it evoked nothing so much as the rainy afternoons of childhood, trapped in a never-ending game of being sent to jail, paying other people rent, and eventually going bankrupt due to real estate failures—the execution is brilliantly done. Baker has dressed up as Rich Uncle Pennybags, in a vest with a pocket watch, and people are chattering with anticipation as they leave the school parking lot. (FREE PARKING signs abound, which is cute, even though parking is always free at the Children’s Cottage.)

  The event is being held in the school gymnasium (built back in 2000 by one of the owners of the Houston Rockets), but the board of directors, naturally, have created a path that takes attendees through the school so that they can see where their donations will be going. Baker, with Ellen at his side, walks through the reading nook filled with picture books, the numbers room with boxes of manipulatives, the science room where kids study birds’ nests and leaves and different kinds of rocks, the social studies room, festooned with flags of the world, and last, and most popular, the water-table room. They then pass through the courtyard with the outdoor playground into the gym, which has been transformed into a Monopoly board for the evening.

  At the front table, everyone picks up a plastic top hat and mustache on a stick (each stick has a number printed on the back; it doubles as an auction paddle) and proceeds to one of the tables, all of which are named for Monopoly properties and sheathed in tablecloths of the corresponding colors. Baker and his school wives are, naturally, at Boardwalk, with a tablecloth of Columbia blue. The centerpiece is a flour-sack money bag filled with pebbles and holding a bouquet of gold dahlias. The photo booth is decorated to look like the Jail square, so once Baker’s friends choose seats, he suggests they get their pictures taken, then go find glasses of the event’s signature cocktail, the Chance Card, which is a lurid orange. They’re being served by Vicki Styles, who likes to expose her cleavage whenever she can.

  “That was a good choice,” Becky says. “The Chance Cards are being served by the Community Chest.”

  Baker loves his school wives. How will he ever leave them?

  The event swims along. People drink, eat hors d’oeuvres, bid on silent-auction items. Baker really wants to get Floyd tickets to the first Texans game, but then he remembers that he’s not going to be around for it. Wendy wants them all to chip in on a house in Galveston in May—but Baker won’t be here for that either. He needs to tell his friends about his plans, and soon; the only person who knows is Ellen.

  Standing in the strobe-lit school gym surrounded by people he has known for years—and even psycho Mandy in her little black dress with her satin Justin Verlander team jacket on top seems endearing tonight—Baker has a hard time believing that he was in Ayers’s apartment only two days earlier. He has switched worlds. Which one of them is real?

  He could easily make the argument that this world is real. This is Houston, a real place; the Children’s Cottage is a real school. Baker is a part of this community. He is known. He’s Floyd’s dad. No one misses Anna, though they all know that she’s a big deal, if not a particularly hands-on mother. Baker’s friends are real friends, there when he needs them. He’s giving up a lot by leaving—his house, his autonomy. There’s a way in which moving to St. John feels like regressing. He’ll be back living with his mom and brother.

  All of this is on one side of the scale—and Ayers is on the other.

  Dinner is served. It’s boardwalk food, which sounds iffy but ends up being delicious: jumbo hot dogs with a variety of toppings, skinny truffle fries, and Mexican street corn. Then the live auction starts and Baker zones out, thinking he’ll tell Debbie, Becky, and Wendy his plans after the auction but before the dancing. They’ll be upset initially but then one of them will request “We Are Family” from the DJ and they’ll all cluster together to dance and all the married parents will be jealous. Nothing new there.

  Baker perks up only when the auctioneer announces a superspecial item, added at the last minute by an anonymous donor. It’s one week in a villa on St. John with 180-degree views over the Caribbean Sea. Nine bedrooms, dual-level pool, private beach and shuffleboard court, outdoor kitchen, and the use of two 2018 Jeeps. July or August dates only.

  Ellen nudges Baker’s leg under the table. “This is you?”

  He gives the slightest of nods.

  The bidding is robust. It starts at five thousand and skyrockets from there—ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. July or August is the perfect time of year to escape the beastly heat of Houston, and when Baker ran the idea past Irene and Cash, they’d agreed that July or August would be an ideal time to take a break from St. John and fly to Door County (Irene) and Breckenridge (Cash).

  Twenty-five thousand dollars. Thirty thousand.

  “Jeez, Baker,” Ellen murmurs.

  “It’s Nanette’s husband bidding,” Wendy says. “Oil.”

  “Aga
inst Beanie O’Connor’s grandmother,” Becky says. “Oil.”

  Thirty-five thousand. Forty thousand.

  “That’s going to buy a lot of manipulatives,” Debbie whispers.

  Forty-five thousand.

  Fifty thousand. Going once, going twice…sold, for fifty thousand dollars.

  “Are you going back?” Ellen asks. “For good?”

  Baker sighs. He hasn’t even told Ellen about his night with Ayers. He hasn’t told anyone. “I am,” he says.

  “Good for you,” Ellen says.

  The auction is over, the DJ gets warmed up with “Celebrate,” and all of Baker’s friends go to the ladies’ room, leaving him sitting at the table alone.

  First order of business on getting back to St. John: Find some male friends. Other than Cash.

  When the ladies reappear, they envelop Baker in a group hug. Wendy is crying. Baker gives Ellen a quizzical look and she shrugs as if to say, Sorry, not sorry. The thing that Baker has long suspected happens in ladies’ rooms has happened. The truth has come out.

  “I’m going to miss you guys,” Baker says.

  Turns out that when Nanette’s husband, Tony, lost out to Beanie O’Connor’s grandmother in the auction, it lit a fuse. Nanette and Tony have a raging, alcohol-fueled fight in Free Parking (though, thankfully, no one ends up dead like in that book all Baker’s friends read three or four years ago), and Nanette announces that she wants a divorce.

  “The auction was just an excuse,” Debbie says when she comes over the next day to help Baker get organized. “She’s been sleeping with Ian for years.” Ian is Wendy’s ex-husband.

  Yes, true, everyone knows this.

  Nanette sends Baker a text less than an hour later: I hear you have a place for rent?

  He texts back, Just so happens, I do.

  On Sunday, Debbie helps Baker clean out his fridge and cabinets. Becky helps him figure out his tax returns. Wendy comes over with her daughters, Evelyn and Ondine, and they play with Floyd while Baker packs Floyd’s suitcase.