“We were best friends,” Willa says. “I told her everything and she listened. She didn’t always agree but she listened.”
Vivi notices Willa placing a hand on her belly and—aha!—Vivi can, in fact, detect a teensy-tiny heart beating inside of her.
Vivi glides over to the kitchen, where Willa’s husband, Rip, is sitting at the table, staring at his hands. Vivi wonders what Rip is thinking. He’s a pensive guy. Vivi might have remarked once or twice that he could use “more cowbell,” but she has come to realize that Rip’s strengths are underappreciated. Charles Evan Bonham III is a calm, steady presence, the perfect foil for Willa’s manic desire to achieve. However, when Willa announced that she and Rip were getting married—something they’d been promising to do since the seventh grade—Vivi had thought, It will never last. Willa will outgrow him.
A month or so before Willa and Rip’s wedding, Vivi took Willa out to Le Languedoc for a mother-daughter dinner. Because it was a weeknight in the spring, they were the only ones in the upstairs front room, which overlooked Broad Street and had a view of the charming lit windows of Nantucket Bookworks.
The aesthetics of that dinner had been sheer perfection. The dining room was lit only by candles; there was a bouquet of iris on the table; the restaurant smelled of butter, garlic, veal stock, freshly baked bread. They ordered an expensive bottle of champagne and then an even more extravagant bottle of white burgundy. Willa wasn’t usually all that interested in food—she would eat or drink anything you put in front of her without complaint, but she never really seemed to enjoy it. However, that night, she swooned over the escargot en cro?te and the pan-roasted lobster with parmesan polenta, and she allowed herself to get a little tipsy. This gave Vivi a chance to say her piece. Rip was the loveliest of humans, and the Bonhams were as admirable as they were established. Rip seemed content in the family’s insurance business, and Willa would never want for anything materially.
But what about emotionally or intellectually? Vivi wondered. Rip had graduated from Amherst with a liberal arts degree; he was smart, but Vivi wouldn’t call him curious. He’d been groomed to take over the family insurance business, and he would never be willing—or able—to live anywhere but on the island where he was born and raised. Rip had limits.
Vivi leaned across the table and wrapped her fingers around Willa’s forearm. “You may wake up one day and decide you want a bigger world.” Vivi thought about herself in high school riding shotgun in Brett Caspian’s Skylark. What if that had been all she’d ever known? “You may want to move to Istanbul.”
“I’ve been to Istanbul,” Willa said. “During my summer abroad. I got robbed outside the Hagia Sophia, remember? I will never want to move to Istanbul.”
“You may decide to pursue a master’s in history or an MBA, and off you go to Harvard while Rip stays here on Nantucket. You may decide you like Boston—you ride the T, you get takeout Lebanese food, you spend an afternoon at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Then one day in class, a voice offers some brilliant insight, and you turn around to set eyes on some young man. Maybe he’s not even your type. He’s short and dark-skinned, not tall and pale like Rip; he has a mustache and a British accent instead of being clean-shaven and dropping his r’s like Rip, and yet you find yourself drawn to him…”
“I love how you’re writing the novel of how I’ll leave Rip,” Willa said.
“You’re so young, Willie. Twenty-three! Your prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed yet.”
“Mother.”
“It’s the part of the brain responsible for sound decision-making,” Vivi said. “It matures at twenty-five.” This was a factoid Vivi had picked up while researching her novel The Angle of Light. “I just don’t want you to shortchange yourself.” She had split the last of the wine between their glasses. “Have you ever been with anyone else? Sexually?”
“Mother.”
“Because if not…”
“Of course not, Mother. Well, I kissed Ryan Brickley in sixth grade.”
“That doesn’t count,” Vivi said.
“Rip and I are meant to be together.”
“I just worry that you got attached to Rip after Dad and I split, that he became your security blanket, and once you get a little older—”
“I’m not getting divorced,” Willa said.
“Willie…”