serve them lemonade garnished with fresh mint, but they had to drink it at the picnic table on the deck because the house was too small for them all to hang out inside. The cottage is called Wee Bit. It has a teensy-tiny sitting room, one wall of which is a galley kitchen, a bedroom that is big enough to hold one bed and one nightstand, and a powder room with a sink and toilet. There’s a deck with a picnic table and a gas grill that Rip’s grandfather splurged on sometime in the mid-1990s, and three stairs down, there’s a flagstone patio in front of an outdoor shower. Beyond the deck and the shower are dunes with a path that cuts over and onto the beach.
After Rip’s grandparents went into assisted living, Wee Bit sat unused. Nobody in the Bonham family wanted to stay there. They were a tall family; Chas and Rip couldn’t even stand to their full height unless they were right in the center of the room where the ceiling peaked. Both of Rip’s grandparents passed away over that winter and Rip officially inherited the cottage. It was infested with mice and everything was mildewed. The floor in the sitting room was rotted; the bathroom was unspeakable. Willa thought that they could—maybe—use the cottage as a staging area if they ever wanted to throw a beach party, but Rip was set on living there.
Without telling Willa, Rip had hired Vivi’s contractor, Marky Mark, to replace the floors, repaint, tile the powder room, and update the appliances in the kitchen (three-quarter fridge, miniature stovetop and oven, microwave) and he’d bought a new bed, a queen instead of a king so there was marginally more room to move around. He also bought an AC unit. Marky Mark rebuilt the enclosure around the outdoor shower. Rip picked out a new love seat, seagrass rugs, a round wooden coffee table. When he took Willa to look at it, saying only that he’d “spruced it up,” she had been blown away. It was so much better. It was adorable, like something from the HGTV show Tiny Paradise.
It was still way too small to live in.
After Willa’s second miscarriage, she started to change her mind about that, and after her third, she was counting the days until they could move out of the house on Quaker and into Wee Bit. The house on Quaker was enormous, the rooms yawning and empty, waiting to be filled with children. The house was tapping its foot like an impatient friend—What’s taking you so long? What’s wrong with you?
They move out to Wee Bit exactly one week after Vivi’s memorial service. Willa is even happier to escape the house now because all she sees is the ghost of her mother dropping by with banana bread or a bunch of chives from her herb garden or a book that she wants Willa to read so they can discuss it. Her mother never called or even texted before she popped by, which was fine most of the time. Once, back in February, Vivi let herself into the house while Willa and Rip were in the bedroom having sex. They’d heard her calling out, they’d heard her climbing the stairs, and Rip had nearly lost his erection but Willa begged him to finish because she was ovulating and he had paddle tennis that night and by the time he got home, she would be asleep.
Rip said, “She’s going to come into the bedroom, Will, and the door isn’t locked.”
Willa had shouted, “Go away, Mom, please! We’re busy!”
“Getting busy?” Vivi said. “Sorry, guys! Have fun!”
They could hear her retreat and Rip came, then fell on top of Willa, saying, “That was the ultimate test of my manhood.” And a couple of weeks later, Willa discovered she was pregnant. They called it the Bad Timing Baby until Willa started bleeding at eight weeks.
Vivi stopped by so often because, Willa realized tearfully, the two of them had become friends. They’d emerged out of the dark, confusing tunnel-maze of mother-daughter relationships to discover that they liked each other and had fun hanging out. Vivi hadn’t enjoyed a friendship with her own mother at all; they remained in the maze until Nancy Howe died, during Vivi’s first winter on Nantucket.
Vivi admitted to Willa recently that she had been worried when she gave birth to a girl because her own relationship with her mother had been so unpleasant.