Does he think about us? I wonder. Or does he have a vault in his brain where he locks us, and all the feelings he has for us, away?

May 30, 2016

The villa needs some sprucing up, and Russ asked me to make the decorating decisions.

“I have no taste,” he said. “At home, Irene handles these things.” As soon as he said this, he knew it was a mistake.

The at home bothered me more than Irene. His home is in Iowa. This is…well, I’m not even sure what to call it. His second place, I guess. I live in second place.

I told Russ I want no part of any decorating decisions. It’s his villa, not mine. In truth, I don’t want to pick things and then have him compare my taste to Irene’s. Russ asks Paulette Vickers to handle the decorating. It’s Paulette and Douglas from Welcome to Paradise Real Estate who built the villa in the first place, and just as they were about to lose it to the bank, Todd Croft and Russ swung in on a vine; Russ bought the villa and Ascension the hillside. They asked Paulette and Douglas to stay on as property managers. I know them both but I’m not worried about Huck finding out because Paulette is a distant cousin of my father, Levi Small, and the Smalls did not speak to Mama, and they do not speak to Huck.

I was concerned about what would happen once the other houses were built and sold and suddenly we had neighbors watching my car coming and going from the best villa.

When I shared this concern with Russ, he said, “We won’t have any neighbors.”

“We won’t?”

He clammed up then, which is something he’s been doing more and more frequently, every time I ask him about his work. He’d told me early on that Irene didn’t have the first idea what his work entailed. She couldn’t care less, he said. All she cared about was the money.

“She wouldn’t care if I were a paid assassin,” he said.

To differentiate myself from Irene, I tried to understand what Russ does for work. He is executive vice president of customer relations for Ascension, which means, essentially, that he does exactly what he’d done in college when Todd Croft was selling beer in the dorms—he lends him his trustworthy face, his cheerful good-guy demeanor, and his sterling personal reputation. Ascension invests in “high-risk, high-yield” investment opportunities for very wealthy clients, many of them foreign.

“Why won’t we have neighbors?” I asked. We were down on the private beach—I had decided to leave Maia with Huck so we could have some alone time—sitting together on one of the brand-new chaise longues that Pauline had bought. We were drinking champagne, the Krug. “Russ?”

I was leaning back against Russ, tucked between his legs, and he murmured into my hair, “We sold those lots to fictional entities. Shell companies that we set up…”