Элин Хильдебранд - What Happens in Paradise

But maybe he’ll call Irene first.

A dinghy putters up to the Mississippi . It’s Keegan, the first mate from What a Catch!, a friendly-rival fishing boat, dropping off Adam.

“Sorry, Cap,” Adam says, climbing aboard.

“He was up late talking to Marissa,” Keegan says.

Huck pretends not to hear this last comment, as though ignoring it might make the situation go away. Marissa is the daughter of Dan and Mrs. Dan, the Albany couple from Huck’s charter on New Year’s Eve. Marissa is the girl who did not cast a line, the one who barely took her eyes off her phone’s screen the entire time they were out on the water. Adam asked the girl out for New Year’s Eve, an act of desperation if Huck had ever seen one. But the date must have been a humdinger because after that, they’d been inseparable until Marissa left a few days ago.

The day before yesterday, Huck said to Adam, “Why pick a girl who doesn’t like to fish?”

Adam scoffed. “You know how hard it is to meet a chick who actually enjoys fishing?”

Huck nearly spoke up about Irene—the woman seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the front of his mind and on the tip of his tongue—but instead he said, “Maia likes to fish.”

Adam said, “Maia is twelve. She’ll grow out of it.”

Keegan putters away in the dinghy. Adam removes his visor, runs a hand through his hair, and gazes in the direction of St. Thomas, where they both see an airplane taking off, probably going back to the States.

“Head in the game,” Huck says. “Check the lines.”

“I have to talk to you, Cap,” Adam says.

Huck shakes his head. “Afterward, please. We have a bachelor party today, and you know how I feel about bachelor parties.”

Huck hates bachelor parties. Nine times out of ten, if someone calls looking to book the Mississippi for one, Huck will tell the person his boat is unavailable for the foreseeable future. With bachelor parties, something bad always happens. Huck keeps one case of Red Stripe on ice at all times—and one case only. Bachelor parties often bring an additional thirty-pack of Bud Light (undrinkable, in Huck’s opinion) as well as rum or tequila or sometimes punch in a plastic gallon jug. Huck gives extra alcohol the side-eye, but he has never flat-out forbidden it—that would be a fatal move for his TripAdvisor ratings—although he thinks to himself that what these kids really want is a booze cruise, not a fishing trip. He nearly always ends up with one participant completely jack-wagon drunk, puking off the back. He’s had guys fall off the boat, and he’s had fistfights. Huck never gets involved in the fistfights; he just turns the boat around and drops the group at the National Park Service dock without a word, regardless of whether they’ve caught any fish.

Huck agreed to book this bachelor party because he has been all but ignoring his business since Rosie died and he needs to get back into some kind of groove.

He pulls up to the National Park Service dock at ten minutes to nine but the only people waiting are four gentlemen, Huck’s age or maybe older. They’re in proper fishing shirts and visors and they have bags from the North Shore Deli, home of a roasted pork and broccoli rabe sandwich that Huck dreams about. He wonders if these guys are waiting for What a Catch! and feels a stab of envy.

Huck gives them a wave as he ties up and considers just poaching this foursome and letting Keegan and Captain Chris from What a Catch! handle the bachelor-party guys—who, Huck guesses, will show up late and hung over after a raucous night at the Dog House Pub.

One of the gentlemen, full head of snowy white hair, steps forward. “Captain Huck?” he says. “I’m Kyle Maguire.”

Kyle Maguire? That’s the name of Huck’s guy. These four geezers are the bachelor party! Huck laughs with relief. He’d been expecting Millennials with their hashtags and their GoPros and their swim trunks printed with watermelon margaritas.

“Welcome aboard!” Huck says.

It’s the charter of Huck’s dreams. The four geezers—Kyle Maguire, his brother Harry, and Grover and Ahmed, childhood friends from Worcester, Massachusetts—are in their sixties, like Huck, and Huck can tell right away that they are good guys. They grin with just the right amount of eager enthusiasm as they kick off their shoes without being asked, shake Huck’s hand, and climb aboard the boat.

Kyle, the groom-to-be, tells Huck he’s a hospital administrator at Mass General and that he has a home on Nantucket, where he goes fishing two or three times a summer. “Up there, it’s striped bass, bluefish, maybe bonito and false albacore if you’re lucky.”

Harry is a lawyer, Ahmed a retired ophthalmologist, and Grover a professor of business at the Kellogg School at Northwestern. Grover asks Huck about his USMC hat and Huck talks about his tour in Vietnam. Turns out, Grover was over there around the same time.

“Are you gentlemen okay with going offshore?” Huck asks.

“Let’s do it!” Kyle says.

Huck decides to take the boat out to the spot that he and Irene fished, what the hell, why not give it a try. The day is sunny and the water is flat; the men relax with beers, Ahmed chats with Adam, and Huck plays music—the Doors, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones. They reach the coordinates where they found the school of mahi before and start trolling.

C’mon, fish! Huck thinks. Maybe the luck he had with Irene will repeat itself.

Kyle gets a bite first. He reels it in as Huck stands alongside in case he needs any help. It’s a barracuda; they all gather around to admire it, then Huck throws it back. After that, it’s quiet for a while, which is when some people on these trips grow antsy. Often, that’s when Huck has to tell them, “That’s why it’s called fishing , not catching .” Huck nearly describes to these four men the day that he and Irene had out here—seventeen mahi!—but he holds his tongue because it doesn’t seem like history will repeat itself.

“So you’re getting married,” Huck says. “Is this your first time?”

“No,” Kyle says. “Been married twice before. First time to my college sweetheart. I have two boys from that marriage, but we split after five years. Then I met Jennifer and we were married for twenty-two years. She died in 2014.”

This story eerily parallels Huck’s own. He’d married his first wife, Kimberly, when he got home from Vietnam, and they divorced six years later, after her second unsuccessful stint in rehab. Then he met LeeAnn and they’d spent twenty blissful years together before she died in 2014.

“So who’s the new gal?” Huck asks. He knows that Maia would likely object to his use of the word gal, finding it old-fashioned or, possibly, offensive.

“Her name is Sheila,” Kyle says. He gives Huck a sheepish grin. “We met on the internet. Match dot com.”

“Really?” Huck says. Rosie used to encourage Huck to try one of those dating services, but to him it was utterly pointless. Who was going to want to move to St. John? A week’s visit, sure, two weeks maybe, but that didn’t make a life together. And no way was Huck moving back to the States. He didn’t care if Christie Brinkley came calling.

“Yep,” Kyle says. “She’s a civil engineer. She builds bridges in the Bay Area, the kind of bridges that can withstand earthquakes. Her husband died of Lou Gehrig’s disease two years ago. She has one son, grown up, who lives near me outside of Boston, so Sheila is moving east from Oakland and we’re tying the knot.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how long have you been dating?”

“Nine months,” Kyle says. He waves his beer can in the direction of his friends. “They all thought I was rushing into things when I bought the ring after only six months. I can’t describe it. We just clicked. I flew out there one weekend, she came to see me on Nantucket a couple weeks later, then we went to Chicago, where she met Grover and he approved, then we did a week in Napa. At Thanksgiving she came to Boston and I introduced her to my kids. They loved her right away. I proposed when I dropped her off at the airport.”