The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11
For eleven days he thought she was ill.
She was short with him twice, which was not unusual, and then apologized, which was. She reorganized the hall cupboard on a Thursday night. On the Saturday he came out of the shower and found her sitting on the edge of the bed with a range card and a pen, writing nothing, and when he asked she said “work” in a voice that closed the subject with a door on it.
He ran the possibilities the way he ran anything. Bad news from home she had not told him. Something at the range. The contract. Her health. He got as far as writing down the number of a doctor before he made himself stop, because he had learned two things about her by then, and the first was that she told you when she was ready and not one hour before, and the second was that pushing her produced silence with the lights off in it.
So he waited eleven days, which was the longest he had waited on anything since the schoolhouse.
She asked him on a Tuesday, over a transmission.
Dave from two doors down had finally lost the argument with his car, and there was a tow truck in the street, and half the block had come out to watch it because that is what a street does. Avîn stood at the end of the driveway with her arms folded and a cup of tea, thoroughly entertained.
“Eight months,” she said. “He has fought that machine for eight months.”
“Yep.”
“And it has beaten him.”
“It has.”
“There is a lesson in that and I have decided not to look for it.” She drank some tea. “Carlos.”
“Mm.”
“We should be married.”
He turned his head.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I want to hear it again.”
“No.” She was still looking at the tow truck. “I said it once and it was very difficult and I am not doing it twice.”
Carlos put his own cup down on the wall.
“Avîn.”
“What.”
“Look at me.”
“No.”
“Look at me.”
She looked at him. Her jaw was set the way it set before a bad crossing.
“I have never asked anybody for anything,” she said. “Not once. Not food, not water, not a rifle, not help carrying a man. Not in thirty years. If I could not take it or carry it or do it myself then I did without it and I did not mention it.” She was gripping the cup with both hands. “So that is the whole of what I have. That was it. That was the asking.”
“Yeah,” Carlos said. “I noticed.”
“Do not make a speech.”
“I’m not making a speech.” He was smiling in a way that was making it hard for her to keep her face straight. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Obviously. Christ, yes.”
“You do not have to say it three times.”
“I’m going to say it a lot more than three times.”
“Then I am going inside,” said Avîn, and went inside, and stood in the kitchen with her back against the counter and her hand over her mouth for about ninety seconds, and then made more tea.
He came in eventually and stood in the doorway.
“You picked a hell of a moment.”
“I did not pick it. It arrived.” She was doing the kettle. “I have been carrying it for eleven days waiting for a moment I liked and I did not like any of them, and then Dave’s car was on a truck and I heard myself say it.” She got a second cup down. “That is how I did every important thing in the field also. You wait for the moment and it never comes and then your hands go before your head does.”
“Eleven days.”
“Do not.”
“I’m just saying, eleven days.”
“I said do not.” She poured. “I wrote it down first. To see how it looked.”
“You wrote it down.”
“On the back of a range card. Then I burned it, because if you had found it I would have had to leave the country.”
Carlos laughed so hard he had to sit down at the table, and she stood there holding two cups being enormously pleased with herself, and after a while she brought him one and sat down across from him and put her feet up on the chair.
“There is a condition,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I write to Karwan first. Before anyone. Before the base, before Boyd, before your Stanton. He gets it first and he gets it in my hand, not a telephone.”
“Deal.”
“Good.” She drank her tea. “He sent me a wife and a job and a widow in a village and I have sent him nothing for a year but that I am well. Now I have something.”
She thought of something else the next morning, at the sink, in the middle of a sentence about the guttering.
“I am keeping my name.”
“Okay.”
“That is not a negotiation. I am telling you what will happen.” She rinsed a cup. “It is my father’s name. It is the only thing of his I have that is not a habit.”
“Avîn.”
“What.”
“I said okay. That was the whole of my answer.”
She looked at him sideways.
“You are not going to argue.”
“About what? It’s your name.”
“Cheryl will have opinions.”
“Cheryl has opinions about everything and a vote on nothing.” He picked up the dish towel. “Also, who is Cheryl?”
“I do not know,” said Avîn. “She is coming to our wedding.”
They were married in October, in a park, because the courthouse had a smell she did not care for and because the woman at the courthouse had said we should really get you on the calendar in a tone that Avîn had by then learned to translate.
Forty-one people came, which she had not expected, and which caused her some difficulty in the two days beforehand.
“Forty-one.”
“That’s a small wedding.”
“It is not a small anything. Forty-one people is a platoon.” She was going down the list with a pen. “Who is Cheryl?”
“Boyd’s wife’s sister.”
“I have never met Cheryl.”
“She’s coming anyway. That’s how it works.”
“Everyone here is either not coming when they said they would or coming when nobody asked them,” said Avîn. “I have stopped trying to find the rule.”
The morning was cold and clear and she was up at four, because of course she was.
Boyd’s wife arrived at eight and found her already dressed, sitting at the kitchen table with tea and a rifle magazine she was not reading, hair wet.
“Oh, honey. No.”
“What.”
“You cannot do your own hair for your own wedding.”
“I have been doing my own hair since I was nine.”
“Sit down.”
Avîn sat down. She reported afterwards that it took ninety minutes, that it was the longest anybody had touched her without a medical reason since she was a child, and that at some point around the fifty-minute mark she had stopped being able to think of a single reason to object to any of it.
Boyd’s wife cried twice. Avîn did not ask why, having concluded some months earlier that American women cried at things the way other people cleared their throats, and that it did not necessarily indicate a problem.
She wore blue, because she had decided the year before in a shop with too much light in it that blue was hers and that the whole business of picking things could be settled once and never revisited. Boyd’s wife did her hair and cried, which Avîn found baffling and did not object to. Reyes came in his dress uniform and stood too straight the entire time. Dave from two doors down came in a jacket, without his car, and was given a very good seat.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.