“She’s out with her friend Lorna,” JP says. “She put on a vampy dress. I think she was trying to make me jealous, and maybe five years ago, or even last year, I would have been jealous. But now I just hope that when she goes out, she meets someone else.”
“Wow,” Savannah says.
“What about you?” JP asks. “Are you seeing anyone? Coach of an NBA team? CEO of Colgate-Palmolive? Head of surgery at Mass General?”
“No one right now,” Savannah says. “There was the crown prince of a minor European nation, but we called it quits.”
JP laughs and Savannah wheels him toward the hallway. “Go home, JP.” At the front door, there’s another hug, and Vivi thinks, Kiss her! It’s not too late! If you’re breaking up with Amy anyway, just kiss her!
They separate and JP disappears out the door, down the friendship stairs, and into the dark night. Savannah closes the door behind him, then leans against it and smiles.
She likes him! Vivi thinks. Maybe?
“You could have used one of your nudges, you know.” Suddenly, Martha is sitting on the green velvet chaise with an Hermès scarf wrapped around her entire head like she’s a fortune-teller. “It would have worked. They were close.”
“I’m the novelist here,” Vivi says. “Let’s give it another couple of chapters.”
Willa
Summer in Wee Bit starts to take on a rhythm, a routine, and this keeps Willa from falling into a yawning hole of despair. Willa wakes up early every morning and takes her herbal tea to the back deck where she watches the sun turn the sky a pearlescent pink. She doesn’t eat anything; she can’t, her morning sickness hovers around her like a green miasma. She welcomes it. Has she ever been this sick before? She thinks not. She’s constantly on the lookout for ways that this pregnancy is different.
Some days she drives to work, and other days, she bikes the six miles into town. The ride is picturesque, bucolic—over the simple bridge that spans the neck of Madaket Harbor, through the hamlet of Madaket, along the famed twenty-seven curves that lead past the creek and the turtling pond until she’s cruising the final mile to the flagpole at Caton Circle, which marks the top of Main Street. Willa wants to avoid the cobblestones in her condition, so she bikes the long way around—New Lane to West Chester （which is, if anyone is interested in Nantucket’s history, the oldest street on the island） to North Beach to the back door of the Whaling Museum.
Willa’s office is air-conditioned. She does not have to guide the VIP group tours and interact with the public until she’s feeling up to it emotionally, so she sits at her desk and tends to her administrative duties—final approval of all publications, overseeing publicity and marketing, scheduling maintenance and repairs on the NHA’s fourteen properties.
After work, Willa usually takes a walk on the beach. If Rip gets home early, he’ll go with her and they’ll hold hands for a while, then stop, then rejoin hands. Rip likes to pick up shells and horseshoe crab carcasses and dried mermaid purses. He can identify shorebirds—oystercatchers, the endangered piping plover, and, his favorite, the sanderlings.
For dinner, they either get takeout from Millie’s or grill out back—burgers, steaks, chicken, thick slabs of swordfish. Protein; Willa craves it. Has she craved protein this way in the past?
Willa goes to bed early, often before it’s fully dark. The exhaustion hits her like something that falls out of the sky.
This doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. It skips over the seventeen times a day Willa uses the bathroom—sometimes to relieve her bladder, other times just to cry （quietly at work and then with abandon, loud and ugly, when she’s in Wee Bit by herself）。
Her mother is gone.
Sometimes when Willa cries at night in bed, Rip will hold her and whisper into her hair. He says he would do anything to make the pain go away; he would take it from her and endure it himself if he could. But Rip can’t make things better. Nobody can make things better. Willa loved her mother so, so much, and now her mother is dead. Willa is aware that everyone loses a loved one eventually; it’s part of being human. And everyone must bear the pain alone.
Willa won’t say that Pamela showing up with the news that she suspects Zach of having an affair was welcome—but it has certainly served as a distraction. On that first day, when Pamela drove out to Wee Bit to confide in Willa, they ended up sitting at the picnic table out back. Willa said, “What, exactly, makes you think this?”