I was suddenly aware of somebody standing at my elbow. ‘I see you’re enjoying our local fare,’ Jaime drawled. A younger clone of his father, Jaime’s face was spoiled by a plump, pouty mouth, but he was still a dangerously handsome man, if you preferred guys with gold chains tangled up in their chest hair.
I piled spicy conch salad on a cracker without comment.
‘My sister tells me you’ll be visiting Hawksbill soon,’ the young man quickly added.
‘That’s right.’ Gabriele must have sent out an all-points bulletin. Maybe they were tag-teaming me.
Jaime staggered to one side, set his empty wine glass down on a corner of the buffet table and snagged a cold Kalik from a passing waiter.
‘It must be nice having a successful family business,’ I said as I watched Jaime wave off the glass being offered and drink his beer straight from the bottle.
Jaime wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘It’s just one of the projects my father has developed all over South America and Mexico. This is our first here in the Caribbean.’
Technically, the Bahamas are in the Southwest North Atlantic, not the Caribbean, but I didn’t feel like correcting him. The British Virgins, St Kitts, the Grenadines, the ABCs – Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao. They were in the Caribbean.
Jaime downed a crab ball and chased it with another swig of beer from the long-necked bottle. I was glad he wasn’t my son. I’d slap him one upside the head and teach the brat some table manners.
I didn’t know where Alice, his child bride, had been hiding out, but she tottered up to us then, rolled her baby-blues and whined attractively, ‘Jaime, I’m tired. I want to go home.’
‘Not now, Alice,’ her husband snapped.
She tugged on the sleeve of his polo shirt. ‘Jaime, please…’
He jerked his arm way. ‘Not now!’
Alice folded thin arms across her chest, and pouted. ‘But, I…’ she began.
‘Shut up, I said!’ His voice was so loud that conversation stopped all around us.
My heart went out to the child, standing quietly, head tilted to one side, shifting her weight nervously from one foot to the other. After a few moments, still eyeing the sad excuse for a husband who was making an elaborate show of ignoring her, Alice reached out a cautious hand and selected four miniature pies from the dessert tray. As Jaime droned on importantly about a development in Port-au-Prince that his father was going to let him manage, Alice studied each morsel critically, turning it this way and that, before depositing it on her plate.
Alice finally made her selection – a tiny key lime pie – and slid it into her mouth. Her eyes closed in ecstasy.
‘… in the Pétionville area of Port-au-Prince, where there are more tourists,’ Jaime concluded. He paused, as if expecting applause.
Dessert plate in one hand, wine glass in the other, I simply stared, dumbfounded, when Jaime bent his head close to his wife’s ear and snorted, ‘Oink, oink.’
Alice tried to swallow, choked, tears came to her eyes, whether from choking on the pie or on the insult, it was hard to tell, but I could guess. I was about to say something when there was a voice behind me, velvet, but firm. ‘Jaime. I see you’re monopolizing Mrs Ives.’
Rudy Mueller. My knight in shining armor, or rather Alice’s.
‘Not at all,’ I lied. ‘Besides, Alice and I were about to go check out some jewelry, weren’t we, Alice?’
Alice’s eyes darted from the uneaten desserts on her plate to me and back again. In my opinion, the skinny waif was in need of some emergency ravioli, so I said, ‘Bring your plate with you, Alice.’ I grasped her elbow and drew her away from the men.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered when we were out of earshot of her in-laws. ‘I hate it when I get caught in between.’
I pointed to one of the pielets on her plate. ‘Eat.’
Alice obliged. While she chewed, I said, ‘Alice is a pretty name. I once had a great-aunt named Aliceanna. If I had more than the one daughter, I would have named her Alice.’
‘My full name’s Alice Madonna Robinson.’ The girl’s cheeks reddened. ‘Mueller, now, I mean.’
‘How old are you, Alice?’
‘Seventeen.’
Alice looked fourteen, fifteen, max. I wondered if she was telling me the truth and if children were allowed to marry children in whatever South American country she and Jaime Mueller had been in when they decided to tie the knot.
‘How long have you been married?’
‘A couple of months. I met Jaime on a high-school graduation trip to Bonaire. After we fell in love…’ She shrugged. ‘I just never went home.’
‘Where’s home, Alice?’
‘Chicago.’
‘Your parents?’
‘Oh, they’re still there.’
‘Have they…’ I began.
Alice shrugged. ‘They don’t really care. To tell you the truth, Mrs Ives, I wasn’t a very good daughter. Always getting into trouble. I think they were happy to get me out of the house.’
‘I doubt that,’ I told the girl, remembering how devastated we had been when Emily ran off after graduation from Bryn Mawr with the college dropout she later married. But at least Emily had graduated! The little-girl-lost standing next to me, her thin, fly-away hair floating palely above her bare shoulders, and the kind of porcelain skin that pinked up, rather than tanned, had barely made it out of high school.
‘Are you happy, Alice?’
She smiled sadly. ‘Mostly.’ She seemed to consider her words carefully. ‘Jaime’s all right, Mrs Ives. It’s just when he’s been drinking…’
Boy oh boy oh boy. A recipe for disaster, I knew. My father was an alcoholic – is, I should say, but in recovery – but dad had been the sad sack, cry in your beer kind of drunk. Not Jaime, though. From what I’d just witnessed, booze turned Jaime into a loud-mouthed jerk. Apparently Jaime’s father thought so, too, because he’d maneuvered his son into a corner by the bottled-water table, and if I read the body language correctly, Master Jaime was getting a good chewing out along with his bottle of Deer.
‘Come with me,’ I said to Alice. ‘I’m thinking of buying a necklace and I could use your advice.’
I led the girl to a stall manned by a local woman who sold jewelry crafted out of natural materials – sea glass, coconut, tagua and other exotic seeds. I picked up a necklace made of graduated rings of polished coconut strung on twine and held it up under my chin.
Laughing, Alice shook her head no.
I picked up a smaller version, this one featuring bright-orange tagua slices and dyed bombona seeds. She cocked her head, studying the effect. ‘That’s better,’ she said, ‘but still no.’
While I was fingering another necklace, Alice spotted a pair of earrings made out of bits of colored sea glass – white, Milk of Magnesia blue, and Coke-bottle green – strung on delicate, sterling-silver rods. She held them up to her ears, checking out her reflection in a mirror that the designer was holding up for her. ‘They’re so beautiful!’
I had to agree. ‘Go ahead. Get them.’
Alice hooked the earrings back on to the display rack. She shook her head, cheeks flushing. ‘I’ll have to ask Jaime. I forgot my purse.’
I didn’t believe that for a minute. Unless I was way off base, Jaime kept his wife on a short leash. If she owned a single credit card, or had more than ten dollars to spend at one time, I’d have been greatly surprised. But I didn’t want to embarrass her by saying so.
‘How much?’ I asked the shopkeeper.
‘Twelve dollar fifty cent.’
I dug into my purse for twenty dollars Bahamian and handed the bill over. While the shopkeeper was sorting through her cash box looking for change, I lifted the card of earrings off the rack and held it out to Alice. ‘Here. These are for you.’
Alice pressed a hand to her chest and stepped back, flinching, like a startled deer. ‘Oh, Mrs Ives, I couldn’t!’