“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.