Golden Girl(48)

Vivi mumbles, “Excuse me,” and slips away from the table. The margarita is churning in her stomach. Patrick and Deborah and their six kids are family and Vivi is not. She has to go. Bromley follows Vivi into the house—he has become her devotee this week, always at her heels, and she has to shoo him away so she can close the powder-room door.

Of all the rooms in this remarkable house, the downstairs powder room is the one Vivi loves the most. The walls are plastered from floor to ceiling with framed snapshots of the Hamilton family on Nantucket. There must be over two hundred pictures, and Vivi has spent a long time studying them. Most are from when Savannah was growing up. There are photos taken on the beach, on sailboats, at picnics, on the tennis court, in the pool, at the Fourth of July festivities on Main Street; there’s a picture of Savannah’s old dachshund, Herman Munster, lying across the sofa in the library. There are pictures of a younger Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton hugging, kissing, hoisting cocktails. Vivi has scrutinized each photograph like a detective looking for clues.

Now, she scans the wall for people who might be Patrick and Deborah or Patrick and his first wife.

There’s a knock on the door: Savannah. “Are you okay? Please don’t hate me. This is all my fault.”

It is all Savannah’s fault. Who invites someone to spend the summer at her parents’ house without checking with them first? Savannah knew the family rule about houseguests and yet made no mention of it. She led Vivi to believe that this Nantucket life could, for one summer, be hers. This wouldn’t be so bad if Vivi hadn’t fallen so completely, irrevocably in love with the island and all its wonders.

“I’ll be right out,” Vivi says in a carefree, singsong voice.

She studies the Hamilton family picture that is right above the light switch. It’s of Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton and Savannah when Savannah is seventeen or eighteen, so maybe the summer before Duke, which was the summer that Vivi spent every waking moment with Brett Caspian. The Hamiltons are at a bonfire on the beach; they’re all end-of-summer tan, and Savannah appears to be shoving the last bite of a hot dog into her mouth.

Vivi’s and Savannah’s lives could not have been more different that summer, but since then their lives have converged, and now, four years later, they are best friends. Change happens in an instant—one girl offers another her bottle of Breck shampoo, and a friendship is formed.

Vivi has money in the bank. She can use some of it to rent a room and buy a secondhand bike. She can get a job. She can stay here on her own.

She will stay, she decides. Somehow, some way, she will make this island hers. She will become a Nantucketer. Twenty or thirty years from now, she will be able to tell the story of how she refused to overstay her welcome at the Hamiltons’ and so she forged her own way.

Between us, she imagined saying to friends, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the defining moment of my life. This week has been about more than Vivi from Ohio being exposed to wealth and privilege. It has been about Vivi finding a home.

And someday, she tells herself, she will have a powder room just like this one—with pictures of her and her husband and their children, all of them smiling in gratitude at their own good fortune.



Well! Vivi-in-the-sky thinks. She had forgotten the intensity of her emotion when she’d learned she would have to leave the Hamiltons back in June of 1991. Savannah has never forgiven herself; she has apologized at least a hundred times over the years.

Vivi succeeded. She stayed on Nantucket and created a life and family. How that happened is a memory for a different night.

Vivi wishes she had taken the time to decorate the powder room in Money Pit with family photographs like the Hamiltons’. But who was she kidding? That house had a hundred projects more pressing—like Leo’s shower leaking onto the dining-room table and a family of mice living behind the washer and dryer. Maybe one of the kids would do the project now that Vivi was gone. Maybe Savannah would recall the umpteen times Vivi said she wanted to re-create the powder room of Entre Nous and she would prompt the kids to do it.

Not doing the powder room is a regret, albeit a small one. There are other, far bigger regrets. But Vivi will think about those later.





Leo




After two full weeks of radio silence, Marissa shows up at the house on a Monday, Leo’s only day off from the Boat Basin. He opens the door to find her holding a Bakewell tart with feathered pink and white icing. The fluted crust is golden brown but there’s one imperfection where it looks like the crust crumbled and has been pinched together.

“Did you”—Leo swallows. He’s happy to have the tart to look at instead of Marissa’s face—“make Mary Berry’s Bakewell tart? Did you make that yourself?”

“Not exactly,” Marissa says. “I took a picture of it to the Bake Shop and asked them to make it because I know you’ve always wanted to try it.”

“Oh,” Leo says. “So you paid someone to do it for you.”

“It’s an apology, Leo. I’m sorry about what I said to Cruz on the beach and I’m obviously sorry about your mom. Just let me in, please?”

Leo takes a deep breath and holds open the door.



They pick up right where they left off, hanging out all the time. They used to watch The Great British Baking Show ironically—they would imitate the accents and use words like arduous and intuitive—but now Leo watches it as an escape. The biggest disaster under the tent is dough not rising, or pastry cream curdling, or fruit that is too soft or watery leading to a soggy crust. Leo doesn’t have to think about his mother, dead, or about his former best friend, who is quite possibly the reason his mother is dead. The one time that Marissa and Leo tiptoe close to the topic of Cruz, Marissa whispers, “I hate even thinking this…but it must have been him. Alexis said Officer Falco saw him run a stop sign and then speeding less than five minutes before your mom got hit. He was driving recklessly before he turned onto Kingsley, boo. I’m sure he was so upset that he might just have erased what actually happened from his mind. He might be in complete denial, like a case of temporary insanity.”