Page 16 of Golden Girl
“Vivi was hit by a car this morning at the end of her road.” Lorna pauses. “Pigeon, she’s dead.”
Amy opens her mouth. She knows Lorna isn’t kidding and might not even be wrong, but sorry, hold on a second.Vivi is dead? Vivi is dead. Vivi was hit by a car, and she’s dead. Vivi is dead.
Amy sits for a minute in complete stillness. She feels…she feels…her stomach…a horror…yes, she feels a thick, black, tar-like horror filling her insides. She wants to scream. Vivi is dead. JP called…hoursago. Said it was urgent. Because his ex-wife is dead.
The kids. The poor kids.
Lorna is watching her.
“I’m not going to sing out ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead,’ if that’s what you’re thinking,” Amy says. Her eyes fill with tears.
Lorna reaches out a hand. “I know you’re not, honey. This must be…confusing for you?”
“A woman is dead. There’s nothing confusing about that. It’s tragic.”
Lorna squeezes her hand.
“And, yes, confusing.” Amy has to get her phone. She heads into the air-conditioned cool of the salon, but it’s as if the salon has completely changed. Vivi is dead.
Her phone is clogged with texts from JP.
Call me ASAP
Urgent!!!
Amy, call me
Something terrible has happened
They won’t put me through at the salon
There are also sixteen missed calls. Then more texts.
I’m at the house with the kids. Please come.
Don’t come. I’ll meet you at home.
Would you cancel our reservations at the Straight Wharf, please? I’ll be home later. I can’t leave the kids right now.
Text me when you get these messages but don’t come to Vivi’s. I’ll meet you at home.
It’s the last three texts that cut razor-thin lines into Amy’s heart. JP doesn’t want her at Vivi’s. He’s with his kids; the four of them are mourning together. Amy would be an interloper. She’s self-aware enough to realize this.
Amy climbs into her car and closes her eyes. For ten years, Amy has told herself that what happened between JP and Vivi had nothing to do with her, but the stark truth is that Amy could have said no to JP, and by turning him down, she might have propelled him back to his family. She feels a monstrous guilt about her ungenerous thoughts and all the catty and awful comments she made to JP, to Lorna, and, on a few ill-advised occasions, to Vivi’s own kids.
I’m sorry, Vivi,she thinks.I was jealous. Insecure. You cast a long shadow. Your only flaw was that I couldn’t compete. You were pretty and fun-loving and hardworking and magnetic, and I was jealous of you. I ate that jealousy (and a lot of doughnuts) for breakfast each day.
But you should know I admired you, though I was never confident enough to say it.
Amy turns the key in the ignition. She’ll call Straight Wharf in a minute. First, she’s going to Hatch’s for a bottle of wine, or maybe tequila, maybe the Casa Dragones that was Vivi’s favorite. She will go home alone and drink with her demons.
Leo
Leo can’t eat; he may never eat again. When Carson says she has a pill, an Ativan, he asks her for two and she brings them with a glass of his mother’s fresh-brewed iced tea with mint. A little while later, the world slows down and grows softer at the edges.
Leo’s father shows up; he’s normally an even-keeled, glass-half-full kind of guy but now he looks the way that Leo feels—like his heart has been firebombed, his spirit razed. JP starts out with a statement that he must have composed in his head on the ride over. “We’re going to figure this out, you aren’t alone, I’m here for all of you,” JP says.
“I’m not your mother, of course,” he adds, and then he starts to cry so hard that Willa leads him over to the sofa.
