“Are you okay, Vivi?” she asks. She gives Vivi a concerned look in the mirror.
“Overcome,” Vivi says. “I’m just so happy.”
It’s time for the first dances. Willa and Rip dance to Ed Sheeran’s “Castle on the Hill,” and then the bandleader invites “the parents of the bride and groom” to join the happy couple. Vivi knew this was coming but she still finds she’s unprepared. She has been giving Dennis the cold shoulder since getting back from the ladies’ room and she has no idea where he is now. She supposes she’ll have to go find him; Tink and Chas Bonham are already rising from their seats.
Before Vivi can turn around to search the room for Dennis, JP approaches her with his arm outstretched.
Plot twist! Vivi thinks. She had assumed JP would dance with Amy and that she would dance with Dennis. But this is better. This is…correct. She and JP are Willa’s parents.
Vivi takes JP’s hand, and once the two of them are on the floor, the band segues into “Stay Together,” by Al Green—which is oh so ironic—and Vivi and JP fall into the familiar rhythm of their married dancing past.
“Thank you, Vivi,” JP says. “This wedding is top-notch, everyone has been commenting, and I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Or at all, Vivi thinks. But she just says, “You’re welcome. I’m happy for Willie and Rip.”
“Do you remember when we picked them up from the Boys and Girls Club after they went to the Valentine’s Day dance together?”
“They were holding hands,” Vivi says. “I thought you were going to drop-kick Rip out to the street.”
“Before he got out of the car that night, he kissed her,” JP says. “Their first kiss, and we were sitting right up front.”
“Do you remember what she said on the way home?” Vivi asks.
“She said she wanted to marry him,” JP says. He takes a breath. “And here we are—what, twelve years later? At their wedding.”
“We’ve been through a lot in those twelve years,” Vivi says.
“You wrote six more books,” JP says. “And I blew through two businesses before the Cone.”
Yes, first the yacht-concierge business failed, then the wineshop—exactly as Vivi had warned him they would. Who had suggested an ice cream shop? Vivi. There were so many times Vivi felt she was the only engine moving the family forward. She dealt with the girls fighting, she took Leo off-island to lacrosse camp and fielded the call when he was homesick, she attended the parent-teacher conferences and read all the books the kids had been assigned for English class. When the family hamster, Mr. Busy, died, JP had been on a wine-buying trip, sipping cabernets in Napa. And then you fell in love with your employee and you broke up our family, Vivi thinks. But she won’t mention any of this because she prefers life on the high road.
Al Green croons, Loving you whether, whether, times are good or bad, happy or sad…
Better memories swirl around Vivi then. JP sitting on the side of the bathtub holding out the ring box. JP in scrubs and a shower cap while Willa was being born. And then Carson. And then Leo. JP standing on a ladder outside the house in Surfside, stringing up the Christmas lights. JP and Vivi fretting when Leo spiked a 104 degree fever from a double ear infection. JP and Vivi sitting at the bar at 21 Federal the night that Savannah insisted on having all three kids to the house on Union Street for a sleepover （she only made that mistake once） and then getting so drunk that they stumbled over to the Rose and Crown to sing karaoke. JP and Vivi watching the Patriots and high-fiving every time Danny Woodhead scored a touchdown. Sailing on Arabesque, watching fireworks from Lucinda’s front yard, grilling on the beach at Fortieth Pole, attending God knows how many cocktail parties where they would spiral away from each other to socialize then spiral back to check in until one of them whispered, “Beat feet,” their code for Let’s get out of here. They would always stop at Stubby’s on the way home for fried chicken sliders and waffle fries; whatever dress Vivi was wearing would inevitably get stuffed into the dry-cleaning bag stained with ketchup.
Speaking of the dry cleaner’s, Vivi thinks of the first moment she ever laid eyes on this man and how excited she’d felt. Finally, a cute guy her own age, there at the dry cleaner’s! Jackie Paper.
JP notices Vivi gazing up at him and he holds her a little tighter and bends down to whisper in her ear. “Vivi,” he says. “I’m sorry.”