“Menu?” Pamela said.
“Of course!” Carson said. She pulled a menu out of a slot and a couple of them fell to the floor, which she ignored.
“I didn’t realize you were still working here,” Pamela said. “I thought maybe you’d moved on to bigger and better things.”
Vivi nearly choked on her wine. Who said things like that? Well, Pamela Bonham Bridgeman did.
Carson withdrew a couple of inches. “I used to be a barback. Now I’m…head bartender!”
“Good for you,” Zach said.
“I’ll have a Diet Coke,” Pamela said.
“Coming right up,” Carson said. “Will you two be having dinner?”
Pamela laughed. “I didn’t come here just for a Diet Coke.”
Vivi wanted to pipe up and say, Can you please be nice? We’re all family here.
“Right, of course not,” Carson said. “Let me get your drinks and then I’ll take your order.”
Carson’s hands shook as she poured the bourbon; some spilled over the side of the glass, but she wiped the glass down with a bar towel and handed the glass to Zach, saying, “Oh, you need a menu too.”
Pamela put on her reading glasses. Pamela’s most distinctive feature was her hair. It was an unusual shade of dark red with an iconic stripe of white-blond in the front. She never wore makeup, and her skin still looked pretty good. （It was a pathetic habit of Vivi’s to evaluate the appearance of other women to see if they were faring better or worse than Vivi herself. She had thought that by fifty, she would no longer care how she looked, but she’d been wrong. When did that happen? Sixty-five? Seventy-five? Eighty-five?）
Pamela leaned into her husband. “We’ll share.”
Dennis, perhaps noticing the Bridgemans’ intimacy, bumped shoulders with Vivi and whispered, “She’s doing real good.”
No—well. She’s doing really well, Vivi thought. But she had stopped correcting Dennis’s grammar long ago. It would have been a full-time job.
“Yes!” Vivi said, too brightly. “She is.” She eased away from Dennis and admitted to herself that the relationship was on its last, very weary pair of legs. She flagged down Carson. “Excuse me, most outstanding barkeep, may I please have another glass of wine?”
The second time Vivi visited Carson at the Oystercatcher was three days ago, right after Vivi had gotten two pieces of extraordinary news. She had received her first ever starred McQuaid review for her forthcoming novel, Golden Girl. And, as if that weren’t enough, Tanya Price of Great Morning USA had liked the book so much that she wanted to interview Vivi on national television.
I need a drink! Vivi thought. She was elated that the book was getting this kind of major attention, but she was anxious as well. The book had…baggage.
Vivi overheard the Oystercatcher’s manager, Nikki, say there was a two-hour wait for a table. The bar was three-deep; Vivi hadn’t a prayer of getting a seat. She hung back and watched her daughter. What a difference a few weeks had made. Carson was the leading lady in the night’s production—taking drink orders, shaking up cocktails over her shoulder like she was playing a percussion instrument, setting out platters of oysters and cherrystones on crushed ice, calling back to the kitchen for extra horseradish, high-fiving her customers, ringing the bell every time someone threw a tip in the bucket on the bar. The live music hadn’t yet started, but there was a 1980s playlist going—“Tainted Love” segued into “Don’t You Want Me.” People called out, “Carson, over here!” “Carson!”
Vivi eventually wiggled her way through to the bar, where she was wedged so tightly between two parties, she could practically read their minds. Then the party stuck to Vivi’s backside left, and voilà! A seat opened up. Once Vivi had real estate, and a drink was becoming less of a faraway dream, she relaxed a bit.
The McQuaid review had been glowing. Vivi had legions of loyal readers, but she’d never quite captured the interest of the serious reviewers. The McQuaid reviews of her past books had been decidedly mediocre. They had called her first novel, The Dune Daughters, “three hundred pages of word salad,” and because Vivi wasn’t used to anyone （aside from the ruthless people at the Bread Loaf Conference） criticizing her writing, the review had come as an icy shock. She’d thought it was difficult enough getting a book published, but that was just the beginning. Bringing her book out into the world was like setting her heart on a platter and allowing the public to poke, prod, scrutinize, or—worst of all—ignore it.