Golden Girl(99)
JP sighs. “Off to do damage control.”
“Have fun at lunch,” Vivi says. “I’ll just stay here and watch our son fumble like the absentee parent that I am.”
JP laughs and Vivi would like to kick him in the nuts. But as she watches him walk away, she has to admit, she feels sorry for him. He made a large mistake in leaving her, but he will realize this only with time.
The holidays are dismal. Vivi “has” the kids for Thanksgiving, but she doesn’t have enough space in her cottage to do a proper dinner so they go to Savannah’s and eat with the elder Hamiltons. Savannah has bought everything premade from Whole Foods and transported it from Boston; the only exceptions are the corn pudding, which Vivi brings, and the pies, which come from the Nantucket Bake Shop. Mary Catherine has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She gets confused and starts weeping halfway through dinner about her brother Patrick (he of the blended family, brood of six) who was killed in a car accident on New Year’s Eve 1999. Bob Hamilton is at a loss for what to do about Mary Catherine so he ignores her crying and pretends everything is just fine. He asks Vivi’s kids about school but then he’s too distracted by his wife to listen to their answers.
The kids are antsy and impatient to leave, and Vivi suspects Savannah would just as soon have them gone so she can tend to her mother and stop playing hostess. It pains Vivi to have the day end prematurely—the kids have informed Vivi that JP and Amy are having a romantic dinner for two at the Ships Inn because Lucinda went to Boca to spend Thanksgiving with Penny Rosen—but she can see no alternative, so she packs up four pieces of pie to go.
In the car on the way home, Willa says, “I should have eaten with the Bonhams.”
“Everything is always better at the Bonhams,” Vivi sings out.
“It is, actually,” Willa says.
“The Cowboys are playing at eight,” Leo says. “I want to watch.”
But Vivi has only the basic cable package, which somehow doesn’t include the channel broadcasting the Cowboys game, and Leo starts crying and saying he wants to go to his father’s house, and Carson piles on—why not?—asking why Vivi can’t buy a real house like their dad’s, one where they all have their own rooms so she doesn’t have to sleep in a bed with stinky Willa. Willa tells Carson she doesn’t enjoy it any more than Carson does, and things escalate from there. Everyone is in a state when they pull up in front of the cottage, and once they get inside, Vivi screams, “Pack up, kids! I’m taking you back to your father’s!” This makes her cry because she’s supposed to have them all weekend. She makes a big production of throwing the pie in the trash and this silences the kids. Willa apologizes first, then Leo, then Carson, and they all curl up on Vivi’s bed and watch A Christmas Story, which makes Vivi irate because it isn’t Christmas yet, it’s still Thanksgiving, but also happy because apparently her cable package isn’t a total loss after all.
A full-blown Thanksgiving crisis is averted. But it’s not great being a single mom at the holidays. It’s just not.
JP has the kids for Christmas. He won’t let Vivi see them on Christmas Eve—they’re busy, he says, with church and the party at the Field and Oar Club. Vivi stays home alone, makes a grilled cheese, and wraps presents for the kids (she has intentionally saved her wrapping for tonight, fearing she would end up with nothing else to do). She puts on the Vienna Boys’ Choir, opens a split of Veuve Clicquot, and toasts her tiny, bedraggled Charlie Brown tree. She admits to herself that she went overboard on gifts, just like a stereotypical “absentee parent.”
It feels profoundly unfair that JP had an affair and Vivi is the one who has been cast out.
As she drinks her champagne and stacks the gifts in three piles—the children will be over tomorrow afternoon to open gifts, then it’s back to JP’s by six because they’re having a “big Christmas dinner”—she makes some promises to herself. She will not succumb to self-pity, tempting as that may be. She will not bad-mouth JP or Amy. She will buy a big house and spend whatever it takes to make it even warmer and cozier than the one she left. She will be resilient; she will bounce back. She will be happier than ever before.
Willa
Vivi’s publicist, Flor, calls Willa.
“I shared the video of Brett Caspian singing ‘Golden Girl’ with the producers of Great Morning USA,” she says. “Tanya Price wants him on the show next week. Would you forward me his contact info?”
“Oh!” Willa says. “Great Morning USA? Really? Wow…um, I should probably…check with him first? He’s a private person.”
“Of course,” Flor says. “I hope he agrees. This could be huge for the book.”
“Would he just be singing the song?” Willa asks. “Or would he be talking with Tanya about his relationship with my mom?”
“A little of both, I imagine,” Flor says.
That’s what Willa is afraid of. Golden Girl, which the entire country is buying and loving—the Facebook messages gushing over the novel number in the thousands—will be exposed as containing Vivi’s own secret within it, a secret so guarded, Vivi didn’t even tell her own children, her husband, her best friend.
Willa considers calling Flor and saying that she checked with Brett and he’d rather not appear on the show.