Golden Girl(87)

“Couldn’t you just stay here?” Vivi asks.

JP laughs. “Spoken like someone who has never seen this island in the middle of January.”

Vivi would like to see Nantucket in January—quiet and blanketed in snow or even gray with a howling wind. She doesn’t care. She loves it and that love is starting to feel unconditional. She can easily see working at the dry cleaner’s year-round and maybe finding a nicer rental. There would be lots of time to write. “What about your dad?” Vivi asks. “Are your parents divorced?”

“He was killed in a Chinook crash in Vietnam while my mother was pregnant with me,” JP says. “So I never knew him.”

Vivi envies the insouciance with which JP announces this. He could have been telling her he grew up on the ninth floor of his apartment building. “I’m so sorry.”

“Can’t miss what you never had,” JP says, and this time Vivi detects a hint of bravado. It couldn’t have been easy for him to grow up without a father.

Vivi shocks herself by saying, “My father is dead too.” She knows JP’s next question will be What happened? and she nearly heads him off by telling him what she always tells people when they ask, which is car accident. But instead, she says, “He killed himself in the garage. Carbon monoxide poisoning.” Her voice sounds calm and emotionless, and for the first time in her life, Vivi feels like an adult. Since she left Parma, she has kept the truth about her father private from everyone except Savannah. She feels ashamed because of both how her father died and the fact that he’s dead. In a world where people are meant to have two parents, she feels lopsided, defective.

JP squeezes her hand. “Were you close to your dad?”

“Yes.”

“What about your mom? Are you close to her?”

“No.”

“But she’s still alive?”

“Yes. She lives in my hometown.”

“Where’s that?”

“Parma, Ohio.” Vivi takes a deep breath of the salt air. She’s starting this relationship off on the right foot by talking about that which she normally keeps secret. At Duke, she often just told people she was from Cleveland.

When they turn around to head back, JP takes Vivi’s face in his hands and kisses her. She is worlds away from Parma.



Things get serious quickly. For their second date, JP reserves a table at 21 Federal; it’s an elegant restaurant in one of downtown’s “antique” homes. The place is legendary; the Hamiltons talk about it all the time—the famous people who eat here, the infamous locals who populate the sometimes-rowdy bar scene. The ma?tre d’ greets JP with a bear hug, then leads him and Vivi up the creaky back stairs to a cozy, wood-paneled room with one candlelit table at a window overlooking charming cobblestoned Oak Street.

“You arranged for this?” Vivi says.

“Mattie owes me a favor,” JP says. “I helped him dig his Jeep out at Great Point earlier this summer.”

Vivi closes her eyes. This is a quintessential Nantucket moment. JP moves his chair so it’s next to hers and holds her hand. He orders champagne. They eat the most delicious food Vivi has ever tasted in her life—a roasted portobello mushroom over parmesan “pudding,” a wood-fire-grilled sirloin, a peach and blueberry cobbler that comes in a tiny cast-iron skillet and has a scoop of homemade ginger ice cream melting on top.

When Mattie comes up to check on how everything was, JP says, “Thank you for everything, man. You’ve made me look good in front of my girlfriend.”

“I’m your girlfriend?” Vivi says. “This is only our second date.”

“I’ve never heard him utter the word girlfriend before,” Mattie says.

“Date number three, I’m proposing,” JP says. He looks at Mattie. “Know any good jewelers?”

“What have you done with my friend?” Mattie asks Vivi.



JP keeps swinging by the dry cleaner’s with treats—one day it’s a sandwich from Something Natural, the next day it’s a bouquet from the truck that sells wildflowers on Main Street. He picks her up and drives her out to Madaket to see the sunset. They go to the movies at the Dreamland Theater. On her days off, he takes her to far-flung beaches—Smith’s Point, Quidnet, Coatue.

“I think I’m in love with JP,” Vivi tells Savannah. They’re sitting by Savannah’s pool with margaritas made by Mr. Hamilton.

“Lord help us,” Savannah says. “Listen, I like JP. He’s essentially a good guy and I’ve been impressed with him this summer because he’s treated you beautifully. But he’s soft, Vivi. He gets everything handed to him by his mother. He’s never held a real job and has no plan for the future, no ambition, no drive.”

“I’m not you,” Vivi says. “I don’t need those things.” She doesn’t tell Savannah that she and JP have already talked about spending the winter on Nantucket together. They might get a rental—JP says he’s keeping an ear to the ground—or Vivi might stay where she is and JP might stay in his mother’s house. The house isn’t winterized so it’ll be months of fires in the hearth and space heaters, but it sounds heavenly to Vivi, the two of them bundled up in a big old house that overlooks the harbor.

Vivi doesn’t share this vision with Savannah, but if she had, Savannah would have pointed out that Vivi hadn’t yet cleared the biggest hurdle to the relationship—she hadn’t met Lucinda.