“Yep, I can remember it like it was yesterday. Your mom and grandpa always sat in the same booth and had the same waitress, and they’d order everything on the menu: French toast and omelets and sides of bacon and sausage. I remember I had the chocolate chip pancakes with a side of hash browns. Her dad asked me about my music. He sang in a barbershop quartet.”
“He did?”
“I never heard him sing. I was just happy he didn’t think my music was a waste of time.”
“Did he seem sad?” Willa asks. “Troubled?”
“No,” Brett says. “He seemed like a regular hardworking guy who loved his daughter. When Vivi went to the restroom, I remember he said, ‘Always be good to her.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ I didn’t find it strange at the time; it just sounded like a dad-thing to say, like he wanted to be sure I wouldn’t leave Vivi at the football game to go out with my friends or pressure her into having sex. But then, a few months later when he killed himself, I thought about him saying that.”
Willa feels herself growing misty. “I’m starving. Do you mind if I make us some lunch?”
Brett laughs; he wipes at the corners of his eyes. “I’d love it, thanks.”
Over the BLTs and potato chips and peaches that are so juicy they drip and make an embarrassing mess, Brett talks about the stuff he and Vivi did in high school. They walked around the Parmatown Mall, they went bowling at Maple Lanes, they went to teen night at the Mining Company, they went to football games and then to Antonio’s for pizza. Vivi used to study on a brown sofa in Wayne Curtis’s garage while Brett practiced with his band. They did a fair amount of “driving around”—to the canal of the Cuyahoga River and along State Hill Road. They used to go to Sheetz to get Cheetos and hand pies and bottles of root beer. When the weather got warmer in the spring, they drove to Lake Erie and sat on the beach at Edgewater Park.
Willa feels like he’s building toward something. By now, they’ve finished their lunch and Willa has cleared their plates and gone to the bathroom twice. It’s twelve thirty and suddenly sand seems to be slipping through the hourglass faster than Willa wants it to. They have to leave for the ferry dock in an hour.
Why had she not insisted Brett spend the night? He hasn’t even set foot on the beach yet, although in jeans and Chucks, he isn’t dressed for it.
“I brought you pictures,” Brett says, reaching for his backpack. “I had copies made so you can keep these.” He pulls a packet of photographs out and flips through them for Willa.
Vivi in a pink Fair Isle sweater and a forest-green down vest sitting in the bleachers at a high-school football game next to Brett, who’s wearing jeans and a jean jacket and flipping off the guy behind the camera.
“This was early in our relationship,” Brett says. “Your mom still has her headband. But then…” He flips to the next picture, where Vivi is wearing tight jeans, a pair of Chucks, and an REO Speedwagon T-shirt. Her eyes are rimmed with black eyeliner and she’s wearing a black lace choker. Brett is still in his jeans jacket. They’re on a bench at a mall; there’s an Orange Julius cup resting between them.
“Then the Christmas formal,” Brett says. The picture is the two of them posing together in front of a silk-screened winter wonderland. Vivi is wearing a black dress with thin straps, and Brett is in a gray pin-striped suit with a purple shirt and purple tie. His hair has been shaved at the sides to leave an impressive mullet.
What strikes Willa about her mother in all three pictures is how young she is, and how unknowable. This is Vivi before she was married, before she had kids, before she set foot on Nantucket or maybe even knew what Nantucket was. This Vivian Howe is real; it’s her mother, but she’s a stranger.
“Then the end of the school year came and we were graduating. Your mom had gotten into Duke with a scholarship. I didn’t have any firm plans but my band was starting to get some paying gigs. We were hired to play a bar mitzvah at the Holiday Inn in Independence.” He stops, nods. “That’s when