Even in Paradise by Elizabeth Nunez

Author:Elizabeth Nunez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2016-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

15

The next day, before I left for Jamaica, I dropped by the Ducksworths’ to say goodbye. Only Corinne was at home; her sisters had taken their father for afternoon tea to his favorite café in town. “They’re going to try to butter him up,” Corinne said. She didn’t think they’d succeed; her father loved his house too much. They wouldn’t be able to persuade him to give it up for some fancy flat just so he could walk to the beach, she said. But she was worried. She’d be leaving for university soon and her father would be alone to fight their slings and arrows.

“Alone?” I asked, puzzled. “Even if you stay in one of the university’s halls of residence, you’d be less than an hour away from your father.”

“Oh, no,” she informed me. “I’m not going to stay in Barbados. I’m going to Jamaica.”

I was surprised by her response. When she told me she was accepted at the University of the West Indies, I had assumed she meant the campus in Barbados.

“It was always Jamaica,” she said. “Daddy still thinks of me as his little girl, but I need my independence. Glynis and Rebecca are wrong to think he loves me best. I was a child when my mother died and Daddy felt protective of me. I guess he thought they didn’t need him as much as I did.”

Is that all it is? A father protecting his youngest child who lost her mother, not that he preferred her to them? That seemed to be what she believed, or what she comforted herself by believing.

“But I’m grown up,” she said. “I’m not a little girl. I’m a woman.”

“Not so fast,” I said jokingly. “You’re still a schoolgirl.”

She swiped my arm and pouted. “It’s good you’re leaving now.”

Why is it good I’m leaving now? A young girl’s playful blabbering, I told myself, and swatted the comment away. I couldn’t let my mind play tricks on me; I had things to do. I had to focus on my future. I had to find somewhere to live and secure a job while I waited to hear from the Ministry of Education in Trinidad if there was a teaching position for me.

Albert stayed a few days longer in Barbados. There was the matter of getting the business started up, he said. We had lunch before I boarded the plane for Jamaica and, still unable to shake off the uneasiness I felt when Corinne questioned Albert’s loyalty to me, I took the chance to ask my best friend why he hadn’t told me about his plans to build retirement condos on Ducksworth’s land. “For that very reason,” he said. “It was Ducksworth’s land. Glynis thought her father would give it to her one day, but she had no idea it would be so soon.”

He told me they were in the speculation phase. He had mentioned the plan to his father and got his tentative agreement to invest. “I’ll still be working with him in his stores,” he said, “but we thought it would be a good idea to start a business here.

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