Page 30 of Golden Girl
If he’s here at Cru then the reception must be over. Amy wonders if JP has called. She wonders if he missed her, if she did the right thing by staying away. She wants to know if anyone asked where she was. She is hopelessly self-centered, she realizes. Today has nothing to do with her. Today is about Vivi and the people she loved and the people who loved her. Which leaves Amy out.
Poor Dennis. Amy tries to imagine how he must feel. Vivi broke up with him and then died. It’s two completely different kinds of pain, one layered on top of the other.
“How are you doing?” Amy asks.
Dennis shrugs.
“How are the kids?”
“I didn’t talk to the kids. They were up front with Savannah and your boyfriend.”
“Oh, Savannah,” Amy says. “She must be really upset.”
“She is. She gave one hell of a speech at the church.”
Amy wishes she’d been there to hear it; she has always been slightly obsessed with Savannah. Savannah Hamilton has that elusive thing known as class; it’s visible from every angle. It’s her hair, her clothes, her manner of speaking, her graciousness, her taste, her effortlessness in the world. Why has she never married? Amy asked JP this once and he said, “Her standards are too high.” She dated Michael DelRay, a bigwig at JPMorgan, for a while, Amy knew, but broke up with him because he was too mercenary. Savannah is a do-gooder. She took her family money and started a nonprofit that feeds and educates children in places like Niger and Bangladesh. Even if Amy wanted to hate her, she couldn’t.
“So did you get into a fight at thefuneral?” Amy asks.
“The reception.”
“You got into a fistfight at the Field and Oar Club?” Amy is titillated by the mere thought. The club intimidates her. JP always talked about how Vivi used to flout the club rules, so every time Amy sets foot in the place she feels the stifling need tobehave.Amy doesn’t belong there any more than Vivi did. Amy hails from Potter, Alabama. People know Montgomery and Mobile, but no one has ever heard of Potter. It’s as country as catfish.
“I did.”
“Did they throw you out?”
“They did.”
“Who’d you fight with?”
Dennis brings his second beer to his mouth and drains half in one swallow. “Who do you think?”
Amy stares at the puddle of pink wine left in her lipstick-smudged glass. “JP?”
“Yep.”
Amy takes stock of her surroundings. Lorna’s in deep conversation with the sailor; Amy can easily leave her here if she wants to go home and tend to JP. If there’s blood on Dennis’s knuckles, what must JP’s face look like? “Is he badly hurt?”
“He might have a shiner,” Dennis says. “I hit him twice. He didn’t really fight back.”
No, he wouldn’t,Amy thinks. JP doesn’t like confrontation. If he has a problem, he throws money at it.
She should probably go home and tend to his wounds.
But…she doesn’t want to.
“I had a lot of pent-up anger toward the guy,” Dennis says. “Though I feel bad about hitting him now.” He eyes Amy’s glass. “What if I bought you an apology drink for ruining your boyfriend’s face?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Amy says.
The Chief
The national average of hit-and-run homicides that end in convictions is under 50 percent, but that doesn’t make the Chief feel any better. Nor does the fact that his wife, Andrea, spent an hour on Thursday watching the virtual memorial service for Vivian Howe, then spent another hour (or more) on the Vivian Howe Memorial Facebook page reading through the comments from her readers.
“They want the Nantucket Police to figure out who did it,” Andrea says. “They want justice. I felt shady—there I was on the page, posing as a normal, everyday reader, which I am, except that I’m also married to the Nantucket chief of police.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” Ed says.
