Amy had leaned into these words because what woman wouldn’t relish hearing this? Amy had never found Dennis particularly attractive, although the size of the bulge in his jeans that night was intriguing. (She’s not vengeful enough to mention this detail to JP.)
“You made out with Dennis,” JP says, his voice flat. “Forget what I said earlier about a new low.”
“We were grieving,” Amy deadpans. She brushes sand off her shins. “We should probably go. I have to pack my stuff.”
“You don’t have to move out today,” JP says.
“Oh, but I do,” Amy says. She can already predict what Lorna will say: Of course you can stay with me, Pigeon. Stay as long as you like.
“It’s such a pretty day,” JP says.
“If you wanted to enjoy the beach, you should have strung me along until the end of the afternoon,” Amy says. “After ten years, what’s a few more hours?”
JP hangs his head, and in spite of herself, Amy feels sorry for him. He has worked every single day of the summer except for the day of his ex-wife’s memorial, which ended with Dennis punching him in the face. “You stay,” she says. “I’ll take the truck home, pack up my things, come back in a few hours to get you, and you can drop me off at Lorna’s.”
He flops back on the blanket. “Thank you. I don’t deserve that.”
He doesn’t deserve that. He deserves sand kicked in his face. He deserves to call an Uber to get home, and if he has no cell signal, too bad, he can walk. Amy puts on her cover-up and strides off the beach, thinking that although the pain is fresh and she’s likely in some kind of emotional shock that will wear off and she will realize that her heart has been exposed bare, she will survive this. She will grow from it. Relationships end all the time, every single day. Amy isn’t special.
She considers texting Dennis and telling him she’s now a free woman, that JP has given her the boot, but she figures he’ll find out soon enough through the Nantucket grapevine. Some people, no doubt, will say that Amy got what was coming to her. However, other people might feel sorry for Amy and decide that they judged her too harshly and should maybe give her a second chance.
And Amy will be so there for it!
Vivi
“Good for Amy,” Vivi says—to no one. Martha isn’t around. Vivi must not need her.
Vivi checks on JP on the beach. This couldn’t have been easy for him, ending a ten-year relationship.
JP has fallen asleep.
That night, Vivi goes back.
It is, once again, her first summer on Nantucket. She has left the Hamilton house on Union Street. After three nights of sleeping in the hostel out in Surfside, she found a room for rent in a house on Fairgrounds Road and she scores a job working the front desk at Fair Isle Dry Cleaning.
The dry-cleaning job pays nicely but it’s hot. There’s no air-conditioning and even though there’s a cross breeze from leaving the side door and front door open, sweat drips down Vivi’s temples, between her breasts, and down her back throughout her shift. (She once goes so far as to blot her forehead with a cotton dress she pulls out of a drop-off bag.) Her long dark hair feels like a furry animal, a raccoon or a mink, that’s gone to sleep on her head. After her first week, she goes to RJ Miller and tells the stylist to cut it all off.
“Give me a pixie cut,” she says. “Like Demi Moore in Ghost.” Then let me meet my Patrick Swayze, she thinks.
JP comes in to pick up clothes for his mother, Lucinda Quinboro. He’s wearing athletic shorts, a Chicken Box T-shirt, and flip-flops. His hair is a mess. He looks like he just woke up. Vivi checks the clock—it’s half past twelve.
Vivi has gone back over the details of their meeting thousands of times in recent years as a way of chastising herself. Why did she not see the warning signs? He had just woken up in the middle of the day, he was picking up dry cleaning for his mother. What about this made Vivi think, I want to marry this guy and have kids?
Well, Vivi isn’t thinking in the long term when she meets JP. She’s thinking: Ninety-nine percent of the people who walk through that door are either housewives or