Willa feels dizzy.
When she heads back to Wee Bit, it’s six thirty, and despite her fantasy of a life where everything is made from scratch, she can’t manage anything more complicated than peanut butter crackers. Millie’s, a Mexican restaurant, is a short bike ride away and Willa is craving their guacamole. This is a good sign, she thinks. She has lost four pounds since her mother died.
As she comes up over the rise, she blinks. There’s a red Range Rover parked alongside the split-rail fence. Pamela’s car.
What is she doing here? Willa wonders.
Pamela and Zach made a bet about how long Willa and Rip would last out in Smith’s Point. “Zach gives it a week,” Pamela said. “I give it two days.”
Is she here to check?
The only downside to marrying Rip Bonham is having Pamela Bonham Bridgeman—she likes to refer to herself by all three names—as a sister-in-law. Willa despises her. Willa has always despised her. Pamela is sixteen years older than Rip. Mrs. Bonham, Tink, suffered three miscarriages, which is the number Willa rests at presently. But Tink was “bound and determined” to give birth to “an heir.” Wasn’t Pamela an heir? Yes, technically, but male primogeniture reigned supreme in the Bonham household. As Willa had learned from studying so many of Nantucket’s family trees, if Tink hadn’t given birth to Rip, the Bonham name would have splintered off into a distaff Bridgeman line.
But Tink had, at last, been successful, and on March 11, 1997, she gave birth to a ten-pound baby boy. Pamela, at the time a sophomore in boarding school, had both doted on and greatly resented Rip, and she has vacillated between love and bitterness ever since. She probably sensed that her own presence in the family wasn’t enough and this left a permanent chip on her shoulder.
She’s prickly, tough, difficult to please.
Pamela has never been a fan of Willa’s and huffs in disbelief with each passing year that Willa and Rip stay together. While Rip was at Amherst College, Pamela encouraged him to date girls from Smith and Holyoke. When Rip proposed to Willa, Pamela launched a campaign to make him reconsider. She said she didn’t want Rip to “limit” himself. Pamela didn’t think Willa was good enough. Willa was the product of a broken home; she had needed three years of orthodonture; she didn’t ski; she wasn’t competitive in games like the Bonhams were; her political views were too far left; she was bookish, bordering on antisocial—the list of objections went on and on.
There had been moments when Willa was certain Rip would submit to his sister and ask for his ring back. He held his sister in the highest regard. Both of them now worked together at the family insurance company under Chas—Pamela was vice president of homeowners’ insurance while Rip handled claims. Pamela was smart, savvy, decisive, and strategic about how to grow the business beyond what her great-great-grandfather could ever have dreamed of. Willa had to hear about her genius incessantly.
But Rip had stuck to his guns, as the saying went. Pamela wore black to the wedding, and Willa accepted Pamela as the burden she must bear for the treasure that was her new husband.
Lots of people had trouble with their in-laws. Willa was hardly alone in this.
Willa reminds herself that Pamela’s life is hardly perfect. There’s a good chance that Pamela’s ill will toward Willa is stoked by jealousy. Pamela’s husband, Zach, the head of air traffic control at Nantucket Memorial, is way more handsome than Pamela is pretty. Their looks are so uneven that it brings up questions, the first one being: How did they get together? （Willa knows the answer—Zach waited tables at the Field and Oar Club in the summer of 1999 and Pamela was so smitten by him that she walked right into the help’s quarters one night and asked him out.） Zach is also cool and funny. He reads for pleasure （including all of Vivi’s books） and he’s a licensed pilot in addition to being the head of ATC. Willa likes Zach tremendously; having him around balances out the unpleasantness of Pamela.
Their son, Peter, looks like Zach—he’s a handsome kid—but he has inherited Pamela’s temperament. He’s a jerk—sorry, but he is. He has always been a jerk. Back when Willa and Rip used to babysit Peter, they were constantly doing damage control. Peter was a biter and a toy-stealer and a sand-thrower, and no amount of reprimands or time-outs ever changed his behavior. In school, he was diagnosed with ADHD, put on Adderall, taken off Adderall, sent to Proctor Academy his sophomore year, kicked out of Proctor for smoking （and selling） weed, then sent back to Nantucket High School. He had to repeat a grade, which put him in the same class as Leo. Leo loathed Peter. “I know he’s sort of family,” Leo said. “But he’s a prick.”