Zach ambushed her? Was he cruel enough to bring his wife to the bar where Carson was working without warning her?
Vivi has depicted some scandalous affairs in her novels, but never anything quite this sordid.
“Eh,” Martha says. “Some of them were pretty sordid. Let’s not forget Clay and Meghan in Main Street Gossip.”
“But he’s”—Vivi calculates. She thinks Zach is a year older than Pamela, so he’s about forty-two. And Carson is twenty-one—“twice her age.”
“It happens.”
“I’m the novelist,” Vivi says. “I know it happens. But no, sorry, this I can’t abide.” How long has this been going on? Who else knows? Does Willa know? (Definitely not.) Vivi thinks back. Did Carson and Zach have a close relationship in the past? Not that she’d noticed. Was this thing going on when Willa got married? At the wedding, Vivi had been too consumed with herself, JP, Amy, Dennis, and Lucinda to worry about Carson. “I’m glad you advised me to save my nudges. Because I’m putting an end to this.”
“You can’t,” Martha says. “They’ve fallen in love. Breaking that up requires more than just a nudge.”
“So now you’re telling me my nudges won’t work?”
“They’ll work,” Martha says. “What I’m telling you is a nudge is a nudge. It’s exactly what a parent tries to do in real life. But you don’t have the power to stop love or change it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“I’m sorry, Vivian.” And with that, Martha disappears through the green door.
Vivi is allowed to use the hours when her world is asleep to travel back in her memories. Every single moment of her life—days, weeks, months, even entire years that she has long forgotten—can be revisited in crystal-clear detail, as though she’s living it again. She isn’t bound by chronology. She’s like a contestant on a game show—she spins the wheel and sees where it lands.
My first summer on Nantucket. Sure, why not.
It’s 1991; she has just graduated from Duke, she has no job and no prospects, but she did win the creative-writing award at graduation, which came with a five-thousand-dollar prize. Five thousand dollars is a fortune. It’s enough that she can ignore her mother’s pleas to come home to Parma (“You can get a job at the mall, take a typing class…”) and go with Savannah to Nantucket for the summer.
“It’ll be so great,” Savannah said when they were back in Durham packing up their dorm room. “I have a part-time job in a needlepoint store on Main Street and when I’m not working, we can hang out on Madequecham Beach. We can go to the Chicken Box and the Muse at night.”
“I’ll have to get a job too,” Vivi said.
“You’ll be writing,” Savannah said. “You’re bringing your word processor, right?”
“Right,” Vivi said, but her voice faltered because she wasn’t sure she considered “writing” a job—a job was supposed to produce income. Maybe she could write in the mornings, then wait tables or work retail. She wanted to use the five thousand dollars as a nest egg, not as pocket money to blow through during her fun Nantucket summer.
Her fun Nantucket summer! On the ferry, Vivi and Savannah sit on the top deck with the sun in their faces and the wind blowing their hair back like they’re a couple of J. Crew models. The island comes into view—sailboats in the harbor, the town skyline, such as it is, consisting of two church steeples. When the girls disembark, Savannah waves at her mother, Mary Catherine, who is driving an ancient Jeep Wagoneer with wood-panel sides. Mrs. Hamilton helps them load their luggage into the back while Savannah’s yellow Lab, Bromley, chases his tail in excitement.
“I swear, Vivian, you brought so much luggage, I’d think you were planning on spending the summer!” Mary Catherine says.
Vivi’s mouth opens. Savannah squeezes Vivi’s wrist in a way that Vivi knows means Don’t respond and says, “You sit up front, Vivi, so you can see. I’ll sit in the back with Bromley.”
On the way to the house, Vivi cranes her neck trying to take it all in: the bike shops, the pizza place, the Nantucket Whaling Museum, a young woman in a yellow sundress crossing the street with an armload of flowers. When Mary Catherine said Vivi brought enough luggage to make her think she was spending the summer, what did that mean? Isn’t she spending the summer? Vivi tries not to panic, although she has nowhere to go except back to Ohio, where she’ll end up working at one of