Willa has no idea what Brett Caspian looks like and yet she picks him out right away. He descends the ramp of the Hy-Line carrying a backpack and a guitar case. He’s wearing a light denim shirt and darker jeans, a brown belt with a heavy silver buckle, and black high-top Chuck Taylors. If Carson were here, she would make a Justin Timberlake joke about the denim-on-denim look. Willa agrees it’s awful; Brett stands out among the day-trippers in their snappy polo shirts and bright sundresses. But there’s also a romantic aura about him. He drove all the way to Hyannis from Tennessee to visit the daughter of the girl he once loved.
Willa catches his eye and waves, and he comes striding over. He has longish dark hair peppered with gray and his face crinkles up when he smiles. Willa can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses but she knows instinctively that he’s the type that Vivi always found handsome. He is every bit the aging rebel—part James Dean, part Steven Tyler. This stands in stark contrast to the preppy, square-jawed look of Willa’s father, JP.
“I would have known you anywhere,” Brett says. “You’re Vivi’s spitting image.”
Willa’s eyes well with tears. There are no words he could have said that would have endeared him to her more. It was commonly acknowledged in the family that Carson looked like JP and Willa and Leo looked like Vivi. However, Vivi’s two most striking features were her pixie cut and her red lipstick. Willa wears her hair long, parted down the middle, and she doesn’t wear any makeup, which Carson says is a result of her dating the same person her whole life.
“Thank you,” Willa says. “You brought your guitar?”
“Thought I might sing for you,” he says.
Willa feels embarrassed—whether for herself or for him, she can’t tell. “I’m parked in the lot,” she says, and she leads the man from her mother’s past to her car.
She’s nervous. She wants to jump right in and say, Tell me everything. Tell me about my mom. But she needs to get Brett out to the house on Smith’s Point. They can sit on the back deck. Willa has the fixings for BLTs.
Her car bounces up the cobblestones and Willa slips into tour-guide mode. She points out the most impressive homes as they approach the top of Main Street. “These are the Three Bricks,” she says, pointing to the trio of nearly identical mansions on the right. “Built by whaling merchant Joseph Starbuck for his three sons. Starbuck famously told his two daughters that their husbands would provide for them…which they did.” Willa points next to the white mansions on the left, evocative of Greek temples, one with Ionic columns, one with Corinthian. “The sisters and their very successful husbands moved in across the street. All five homes were a shock, and an affront, to the Nantucket Quaker community. Starbuck built the mansions to keep up with Jared Coffin, who was building a grand red-brick home on Broad Street, and the husbands, Hadwen and Barney, built the Greek revivals to keep up with their father-in-law.” Brett nods along, but Willa can see she has gone too deep into history mode.
Brett says, “So when did your mom move here?”
“After college,” Willa says. “She came to visit her roommate’s family and she liked it so much, she stayed.”
“So that was…in ’91?”
“Around then, I think.”
“And she ended up graduating from Duke? She stayed all four years?”
“Yes.”
Brett laughs. “I didn’t even know what Duke was until your mom applied there. We were from small-town Ohio.”
“My mom never talked about high school or growing up or her parents or Ohio.”
Brett leans his head back against the seat. “Well,” he says. “No surprise there.”
Willa gives Brett the rundown on their family as they wind their way along the twenty-seven curves of the Madaket Road. Vivi married JP Quinboro, who was a summer resident. Then they decided to stay year-round. Willa’s paternal grandmother, Lucinda Quinboro, is still a summer resident.
“She lives in a big house that fronts the harbor,” Willa says. “You passed it on the ferry.”
“So your grandmother is rich,” Brett says. “Is your dad rich?”
His use of the word rich throws Willa off. Does anyone use that term anymore? “My grandmother’s property is worth a lot,” Willa says, though Lucinda is the kind of person who despises ostentation and never carries one red cent on her person. Does she even have a credit card? Willa has never actually seen her grandmother pay for anything; she just signs for things—she has an account at the dry cleaner’s and at the Field and Oar Club and at the farm and at the bookstore. “My father…” Willa wants to be careful when discussing the family finances, obviously. It has occurred to Willa that maybe Brett’s interest in Vivi’s life on Nantucket is financial rather than nostalgic—nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills—though Willa dearly hopes not. She has told herself that if any woman is worth driving through seven states for, it’s Vivi.