Golden Girl(9)
The Chief sighs. He knows he shouldn’t necessarily believe the kid, but he does. “We’ll need to impound your Jeep until forensics can check it out, son, I’m sorry.” He stands up. “Call your dad, have him come get you. I’m sorry this happened. I know you lost someone important to you in a tragic way. I’ve been there myself.”
The boy is crying so hard now it sounds like he’s choking. “She was like a mother to me,” he says. “I was her favorite child.”
Vivi
She rises, higher and higher. She supposes this is a good thing—up and not down—but she feels like she’s heading to the grocery store without her wallet. Which is to say, she’s not prepared. She has unattended business, big and small, back on the ground, in her life.
Small: Her new All-Clad three-quart sauté pan is still sitting on the walk and she knows that Leo and Carson will never notice it. They’ll step over it, and it will fill with rain and insects; maybe one of the field mice that have been infesting Money Pit since Vivi bought it will drown in it, or an unsuspecting blue jay will dip its beak into the acrid black water, mistaking the pan for a birdbath. It will fill with snow; it will become fused with the slate of the walk before anyone thinks to pick it up, take it inside, and scour it.
Willa will do it when she comes over, Vivi supposes. Or Vivi’s landscaper, Anastasia—a woman whose photo is in the dictionary next to perfectionist—will handle it.
Small: Vivi has an outstanding invoice from Anastasia for twenty-one hundred dollars; that needs to be paid.
Bigger: Who will pay her bills, settle her affairs, make sure the kids are provided for? She doesn’t have a will. Why would she need a will? She’s fifty-one years old and has no medical problems. Vivi’s father died when Vivi was seventeen, in a car in the garage, and Vivi’s mother died five years later, at the age of forty-six, but she was a smoker and obese. Vivi ran every day, she was trim, she hadn’t taken so much as a drag off a cigarette since leaving Ohio—she was the picture of good health. Why would she need a will?
She should have had a will. She should have named an executor, someone to handle things. Vivi’s best friend in the life she’s leaving behind, Savannah Hamilton, is coping with her two aging parents who are in an assisted-living facility in Weymouth; her mother has Alzheimer’s, her father has regular dementia, and Savannah’s overwhelmed. But the kids aren’t quite capable yet, not even Willa, and so Savannah will have to handle it.
Bigger: Vivi’s novel Golden Girl is coming out on July 13. Vivi can recite the (starred!) McQuaid review by heart.
Howe digs deeper than usual in this shimmering tale of one young woman’s quest to escape her past. Alison Revere grows up in a Cleveland suburb yearning to become a writer. Alison’s high-school boyfriend, Stott Macklemore, sings in a garage band and dreams of making it big. After Alison’s father kills himself, the two grow even closer and talk of getting married after they graduate. Stott writes a song for Alison called “Golden Girl” and is courted by a major recording label. Stott heads out to California, and Alison, devastated at losing another person so close to her, is determined to get him back to Cleveland, no matter what she has to do or say. In the second half of the novel, Alison finds herself summering with her college roommate’s family on Nantucket. She moves to the island year-round, meets and marries a local boy, and publishes her first novel, entitled Golden Girl. Alison’s life appears to be…golden…until Stott Macklemore reappears and forces her to reckon with the secrets of her past. Golden Girl is filled with Howe’s signature summery scenes but it’s her larger message about the irrevocable decision Alison made as a troubled teenager that will stay with the reader.
The question Vivi was asked most often at her events and in interviews was Do you base your characters on real people? Do you write about events from your own life? Vivi often felt like her readers wanted the answer to be yes; they yearned for the fiction to be true. Vivi explained that she used details from her real life: Her white pitcher with the bisque scallop shell that she bought at Weeds on Centre Street appears in three of her novels. Vivi wears Jessica Hicks jewelry and so do all of her characters. Vivi’s best friend, Savannah, is known for her witticisms, and Vivi borrowed (stole) them on a regular basis. But this wasn’t the same as writing about people she knew or about her own life.
Until this year. The plot of Golden Girl recounts the dramatic events of Vivi’s senior year in high school—but the only person who would know this was her high-school boyfriend, Brett Caspian, whom Vivi has not seen or spoken to in over thirty years. Before writing Golden Girl, Vivi had scoured the internet for any sign of Brett. He wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok. He wasn’t on LinkedIn. Vivi had checked the white pages, but there were no Caspians listed in the greater Cleveland area. A casual e-mail sent to the only two high-school friends Vivi remained in contact with—Stephanie Simon and Gina Mariani—confirmed that Brett had never been to a class reunion (neither had Vivi because her parents were both dead and the house in Parma sold). Though Vivi wondered what had become of him, she’d reached the conclusion that Brett Caspian didn’t “do” social media; wherever he was, he had no idea she was a novelist and would never, ever realize that Golden Girl was about him. Them. With a few minor changes.