Great Big Beautiful Life(19)

I shrug. “It’s just not her thing. I get it.”

He studies me for a moment, so intensely that he—and frankly, I—jump when our server returns to plop our plates in front of us.

“Hot, so be careful,” she says, and then she’s gone again.

I clear my throat. “So,” I say, meeting Hayden’s gaze once more. “Are you excited for your first interview with Margaret?”

He shakes his head.

“You’re not?” I say.

“No,” he says. “I mean, don’t ask that.”

“Why not?” I press.

“Because I’m not going to talk about it with you,” he says.

I roll my eyes, slide my feet back down to the floor, scooting forward again. My knees wind up caged in by his, but I don’t retreat. “What do you possibly think I could steal from your answer to that question?”

He stabs his fork into his eggs and leans in too, his thighs pressing gently against mine in the process. He drops his voice to match my tone. “Alice.”

I feel a flutter of anticipation under my collarbone. “Hayden,” I say.

“I’m not going to answer that either,” he says.

Then he takes a huge bite.

This round, I think, is a draw.





7




“I still can’t really believe we’re doing this,” I say on Saturday morning.

“Sitting in a living room, drinking mint tea?” Margaret teases, eyeing me through the steam lifting off the mug in her hands. “Alice, dear, I think you should aim higher.”

She sits in the rattan chair across from the sofa where I’m perched, all the windows flung open and the smell of sun-warmed greenery drifting in toward us every time the wind blows, broken up by the occasional burst of brackishness from the marsh behind her property.

“Are you kidding?” I say. “This is my Everest. After this, I’ll be ruined for celebrity profiles. I’ll have to retire early or, like, get really into fixing up old cars or something. I honestly didn’t think you’d agree to this.”

“Then why’d you go to all the work of tracking me down?” she asks.

I shrug. “I had to try, at least.”

She gently sets her mug on the glass-topped table between us, a curious gleam in her blue eyes. “Do you remember what you said? In that last voicemail you left me, before I finally called you back?”

I shake my head. I’d called so many dozens of artists selling work on small islands in Georgia before a post on the Not-So-Dead Celebrities message board pointed me to Little Crescent, and plenty more even once I’d homed in on the right island. They’d all denied being Margaret Ives, which I figured couldn’t exactly rule them out. But she was the first to hang up as soon as the question was out of my mouth.

I hadn’t called her back for a week. I’d been too afraid she’d block me right away. When I finally did, she sent my call to voicemail, and I left a short message, explaining who I was and why I wanted to talk to her.

I made myself wait three more days, and then I took one last swing: another voicemail, this one more an impassioned pitch than a question, because at that point, I was already sixty percent convinced I’d found the right person. She’d called me back nine days later and I’d almost thrown my phone out the window of the cab I was in, trying to answer it as fast as possible.

“Honestly, it’s a blur,” I say.

She says, “You told me you cried when you heard that Cosmo had died.”

My face burns. “Did I really? God, I’m sorry. That was inappropriate.”

She cracks a smile. “Inappropriate? I didn’t think so. Curious? Exceptionally, seeing as how my husband had to have passed away at least thirty years before you were even born.”

I set my mug aside. “Yeah, but I only found out right around my seventh birthday. My dad was a big music guy. He always used to listen to Cosmo Sinclair when we were making dinner. Hearts on Fire was my favorite.”

“A great album,” Margaret says proudly.

“When I turned seven, my parents let me have a birthday party. But my sister and I were homeschooled back then and didn’t have many friends. So when my mom asked me who I wanted to invite, I said, ‘Cosmo Sinclair.’ And my parents, they just gave each other this look. Like, Oh no. They never lied to me. That was their policy. So when they made that face, it usually meant they were about to tell me bad news. So that’s how I found out. And I was so sad about it.”

“Sad that you’d never meet him?” Margaret says.

“Sad for Peggy,” I say. “That was my favorite song on the album. ‘Peggy All the Time.’ And I don’t know, I just knew it had to be true. That you couldn’t write a love song like that if you hadn’t found a once-in-a-lifetime love. And I didn’t want her to have lost the person who gave her that.”

Her gaze falls to her lap.

I wonder if I should stop, if I’m pushing too early on something too sore. But she’s the one who brought it up, and if I’m going to be a witness to her story, I want her to know that I understand.

I clear my throat. “My parents were both journalists. And all they really read was nonfiction. Serious stuff, about politics and climate change and sociology. Stuff I had no interest in. But there was this one book my dad bought at a garage sale. An unauthorized biography.”