Maine Characters, page 6
Although she’s barely seen Oscar since Hank died, she did get the chance to tell him about the arrangement she’d made with her mother. It wasn’t something she mentioned lightly. This was serious cash, money that could be entirely Vivian’s. By investing it in a business with Oscar, she would be quite literally investing in their future as a couple. She needed to know if he was all in, the same way she was. His answer had made her glow. The bar is more than just a business. It’s a path to a new life, he’d said, one they’ve craved for so long. Lucy can’t take that away from them.
Lucy holds up her hands. “I’m not here to judge your life.”
Sure.
“But if we’re talking ‘practicalities,’ ” she continues, “I’m newly separated. My ex is staying in our house. My only other option is staying with my mom, and that’s only through the summer. Neither of us will be able to stay there in the fall, when she’s getting repairs done on her roof.”
Vivian’s head aches from arguing all morning. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you’ll be able to figure something else out.”
Lucy looks hurt. “Dad would say this place is as much mine as it is yours, so…I’m not leaving.”
It takes real effort to avoid scoffing. Lucy calls herself Hank’s daughter the way NYU freshmen claim they’re New Yorkers, as if insisting upon it makes it true. If she were really equal to Vivian in Hank’s eyes, he would’ve done something about it—own up to Celeste, get divorced, split his time evenly, brought his daughters up together, something.
“I’m not, either. I don’t have anywhere else to stay up here,” Vivian says.
“Then don’t sell it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The haughtiness of her own tone is jarring. She sounds eerily like Celeste.
“You know Dad would hate to see the house go.”
“I don’t care what he’d want! I don’t owe him anything. He lied to me my whole life.”
Lucy crosses her arms. “It’s like you’re not even upset that he’s gone.”
Anger flares through Vivian. She throws up her arms. “And you’re not upset that he hid you away up here?”
“He didn’t—”
Vivian strides past Lucy, snatches the urn off the mantel, and carries it down to the lake. She isn’t reckless; she doesn’t run. She isn’t doing anything other than exactly what Hank asked for.
Lucy, dumbstruck on the porch, sputters into action. “Wait! Wait, you can’t do that!”
Vivian ignores her.
“Please!” Lucy thunders down the stairs.
Vivian walks faster toward the end of the dock. Adrenaline pounds in her ears. She stands at the edge, watching the hypnotic motion of waves rising and falling below.
“Stop!” Lucy yelps. “I didn’t even get to wish him a happy Father’s Day, you know that? He didn’t pick up my call, and I bet it’s because he was with you.”
Vivian turns. Her shoulders tense. “That’s not my fault.”
“But it’s not fair, either.”
“Nothing about this is fair!” Vivian explodes.
Her voice echoes over the water, making her wince. How many people are listening to their showdown right now? That flash of self-consciousness snaps her back to reality. This is absurd. Hank wouldn’t want his ashes scattered like this. Regardless of how many secrets he kept and lies he told, he still deserves better than going out amid a screaming match.
With a long exhale, Vivian takes herself down several notches, from soap opera star to sensible person. “Okay. I won’t. Not now.”
Lucy sighs in relief. “Thank you.”
“However,” Vivian says sharply, “I will be selling the house and scattering the ashes at some point.”
A shadow crosses Lucy’s face. “Will you at least let me scatter them with you?”
Vivian’s not cruel enough to shut her out entirely. “Sure.”
“Let’s make it like a funeral. We could have a little ceremony on the boat.”
“Oh, no. His funeral was last month. I’m not doing it again.”
“I didn’t even know it was happening,” Lucy says. “You got closure. I didn’t.”
“You can get the Times up here, can’t you? His obituary was in the paper,” Vivian says acidly.
“Oh, yeah? How many daughters did it say he had?”
“Come on,” Vivian groans.
Lucy’s voice shakes. “I’m his daughter, too.”
Vivian hates to bend—as a Scorpio, she considers grudges her love language—but she does it anyway. She has to remember she’s angry at her dad, not Lucy. Her half-sister didn’t ask to be born into this mess, either, and acting like some entitled, territorial, basic hanger-on isn’t technically a crime.
“Okay, fine. But let’s not call it a funeral. Celebration of life?”
“Deal. Not right here, though. It would be creepy. We don’t really want him washing up by our house.”
It won’t be “our” house for much longer, but Vivian doesn’t protest. “Fine.”
“Can we drive around today and figure out where?”
It’s a real schlep to get the boat in the water, but the sooner they work this out, the sooner it’ll all be over. Reluctantly, Vivian agrees.
* * *
The garage is three times the size of Vivian’s West Village apartment, big enough to house the old truck, the boat on its trailer, the Jet Ski on a smaller trailer, a pair of jumbo trash bins, an array of life jackets, a pile of disintegrating pool noodles, two deflated rafts, and a pair of vintage water skis with plenty of room to spare. Most of it is filthy with offseason grime: dust, dirt, dried insects that died long ago.
Dealing with the boat is a two-person job, and while Vivian makes out okay as Hank’s sous chef in the whole ordeal, she’s never been responsible for the process on her own. She tended to follow his instructions on autopilot, not committing much of it to memory. Hitching the boat to the car is complicated, and if they miss a step—say, forgetting to secure the right straps or locking the latch into place—they’ll be in serious trouble: expensive danger for them, the boat, and the car, not to mention everyone else on the road. She doesn’t want to seem like a useless city girl in front of Lucy.
Thankfully, Lucy takes the lead on backing the truck up to the trailer. She maneuvers the car into place on her first try. Show-off. Hands on hips, Vivian stares at the equipment, willing it to make sense.
“So, this…socket? It definitely has to get winched down onto that knobby thing,” she says, gesturing to two heavy items currently parked three feet apart.
“…Yeah.”
It’s like there’s a neon sign flashing over Vivian that spells out “clueless.”
Lucy flicks through her phone. “Here, watch this. Years ago, Dad had me record him doing this whole thing.”
He did that for Lucy but not Vivian? She takes the phone and hits play. The video shakes slightly along with her hands. There’s a little more hair around his temples and fewer lines crinkling across his forehead than when she saw him last; this was probably filmed five years ago. He’s in swim trunks and a T-shirt, an outfit that never looked quite natural on him. She grew up accustomed to his suits and ties. She watches Hank demonstrating how to flip the lock into place and how to transmit the car’s brake signals to the back end of the trailer.
On screen, he says, “ ’Kay, Luce? You wanna get a close-up of this next part?”
“Yep, recording this for posterity,” she says, like she’s only humoring him, like she doesn’t believe she’ll ever need to replay this.
“For people watching from the future, keep in mind: This is a real demonstration coming to you from 2020, not an outtake from Green Acres.”
It hurts to hear their ease together. When Vivian thinks Lucy isn’t watching, she hastily wipes away a tear.
Lucy
Once they’re all set up, Vivian insists Lucy drive. She’s apparently never driven with the boat attached and is too afraid to start now. Lucy sits ramrod straight and crawls the hilly back roads to the launch at ten miles an hour, hoping Vivian doesn’t notice her nerves. She’s never done it, either.
“It’s so packed,” Vivian says when they arrive.
The line of cars snaking toward the water is practically backed up to the road.
Lucy groans. “Gosh, I can’t believe we forgot. Today’s the boat parade.”
“The what?”
“The parade. For the Fourth.”
“They do that?”
“Every year.”
Vivian peers out at the mass of people gearing up for the festivities. “I didn’t know.”
Lucy inches the car forward. Vivian glares and drums her fingers against the door. The silence between them is suffocating. Lucy tries to think of something to say, but none of her ideas feels right. She doesn’t want to ask about Vivian’s life. She knows enough of the answers, and the one-sidedness of it all is pitiful. Asking about the funeral she missed would be too painful for them both. Instead, she flicks through radio stations. She skips past a Sam Hunt earworm she likes, not wanting to give Vivian the satisfaction of labeling her a country bumpkin.
Eventually, they reach the front of the line. They unhook the boat from the trailer and back it into the water. Vivian jumps in and lowers the engine. Lucy will drive the car back to the house as Vivian zips across the lake.
“You’ll pick me up in five?” Lucy asks.
If she were doing this with Hank, she wouldn’t even need to ask.
Vivian yawns. “Yep.”
Back at the house, Lucy’s almost surprised when she sees their boat cruising toward her. Vivian waves and even offers a tight smile—not with her teeth, but it’s something. Maybe all they needed was a minute to cool off separately.
Once Lucy’s on board, Vivian takes a hard swerve to the left and zooms away from shore. Wind blasts Lucy in the face, making her tear up even from behind her glasses. She wants to tell Vivian to slow down but keeps her mouth shut.
They’ve barely gone two hundred feet when Vivian cuts the engine.
“What’s wrong?” Lucy asks.
“Maybe this is the right spot. Between the house and the island.”
Directly in front of their property, a quarter mile out, there’s a tiny island just big enough to house four scrawny trees and a few shrubs. The water is shallow and rocky around its perimeter, making it accessible only by kayak, or, as Hank liked to do with Lucy once every summer, by swimming there and back. It isn’t grand or impressive or remotely habitable—but by virtue of its location, it’s always felt like theirs.
Lucy dreads conflict, but this decision feels important. She’d hate to let Vivian steamroll her.
“Too close to home.”
“But the island’s, like, ours.”
It isn’t.
“Not here, please?” Lucy tries to summon a firm statement, but it comes out like a shaky question instead. Still, her effort pays off.
“Fine. Do you want to drive?”
She doesn’t mind. “Sure.”
Lucy takes the wheel. The roar of the engine relieves them from the pressure of conversation. The lake is more crowded today than it’ll be all year, swarming with mostly summer people and some locals. A line of boats circles the perimeter. They pass a pontoon draped in an American flag and a skiff with a hand-lettered sign that reads “God Bless America.” Another sign taped to a speedboat proclaims “FIVE generations growing up on Fox Hill Lake!” There are dads everywhere, clutching beers, cranking up classic rock, fishing with their little life-jacketed kids, steering their spouses through the sunshine. One cruises by on a Jet Ski with a full-grown golden retriever in his lap. Lucy has never been less in the mood for a parade in her life.
Actually, she thinks, feeling bittersweet nostalgia washing over her, that’s not true. The summer she was nine years old, there was almost nothing she loved more than marshmallows. She’d eat them for every meal if she could. The morning of July Fourth, she secretly tucked a bag of Kraft Jet-Puffed in her lap beneath the kitchen table. Over breakfast, whenever Hank was immersed in The Economist, she’d cram another one into her mouth.
They had barely boated into the lake when the gentle rocking turned Lucy’s stomach. She threw up over the side. Hank went out to get a box of Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles and a carton of apple juice to settle her stomach. Outside, the sky was a spotless blue and the sun danced across the water, but they spent the rest of the day together watching another Star Wars on the couch. As much as she enjoyed it, she was sad to miss the parade.
The morning of July 5, before Lucy was awake, Hank hung red, white, and blue streamers from the boat’s windshield and loaded up the back seat with the signs Lucy had made with Magic Markers two days prior: “Happy birthday, America!” and “May the Fourth be with you!” (featuring—what else?—a painstakingly drawn illustration of Princess Leia wearing a George Washington wig gathered into space buns).
“You know, the parade’s not over yet, Lucy Goosey,” he said over breakfast.
She scowled. “Yes, it is.”
“You don’t believe me?” His eyes shone with mischief.
She’d been skeptical, but by the time they were out on the lake waving at the other boaters and swimmers, even though they were the only ones honking and cheering, her doubts were long forgotten. Even back then, she knew her dad had another daughter out there somewhere, one he spent nearly all his time with, which made her feel like the last-picked kid in gym class. But that day on the boat, she felt so special.
Lucy and Vivian pass the quaint white house with blue shutters where Dawn’s best friend, Cindy Monahan, used to live. Lucy never sees the Monahans around the lake anymore—they rent out their property for an arm and a leg to a different family every week from Memorial Day to Labor Day. When she was growing up, there weren’t quite so many out-of-towners, but since Airbnb took off, plenty of Massholes have discovered Fox Hill Lake. The more they fall in love with it, the more longtime locals are tempted to sell their properties for outrageously inflated prices. Now “For Sale” signs dot the lake. For the first time ever, the locals are dealing with litter and obnoxiously loud wake boats.
Vivian peers at a row of modest homes on the more affordable end of the lake. They’re smaller and more run-down than their own house, and many of them are only comfortable as seasonal cabins instead of year-round buildings. Some have peeling paint; others have no-frills utility boats tied up to their docks, or no boats at all. Lucy wonders if Vivian’s proud to have one of the nicer spots around, or if it doesn’t even occur to her to be grateful. Hank sent money to Dawn every month and paid for most of Lucy’s college tuition, so she was better off than some of her classmates. Even so, the wealth gap between her and Vivian is significant—less of a gap and more of a canyon.
When other boats pass by they wave; the other passengers return the gesture. It’s the language of the lake. To strangers, maybe they look like real sisters. Off in the distance, loons float by: two parents with their signature striking black heads and white-flecked wings, and between them, two babies covered in downy dark brown fluff. They always travel in groups. Perfect, intact families. This early in the summer, the little ones could easily fit in Lucy’s palm.
Motoring through all of Hank’s most beloved spots takes forever because of the parade. When the crowd thins out, they drive past Wilson Cove on the southern side of the lake and into the Narrows, a peaceful stretch of three small basins with a five-miles-per-hour speed limit. With the engine barely rumbling, one of them will eventually have to break the ice first.
“So, you’re a wine director?” Lucy prompts, using the title she spotted on Vivian’s LinkedIn rather than risk mispronouncing “sommelier.” “What’s that like?”
Vivian cocks her head. “He told you that?”
Lucy admonishes herself for being so obvious. “I googled you once.”
“I run the wine program at Della.” When Lucy doesn’t immediately nod in recognition, she adds, “Which is a Spanish-Mediterranean fusion place in the West Village. So, that means I select which bottles we carry and make recommendations to our guests.”
“Do you ever wait on celebrities?”
In a bored, matter-of-fact tone, Vivian rattles off a list of names Lucy doesn’t recognize, then says, “Leo DiCaprio came with a date recently. I think they were celebrating her twenty-first birthday. They ordered a French rosé.”
“Ew.”
“What do you do?” she asks languidly, as if she doesn’t really care about the answer.
How many hours has Lucy spent studying Vivian online? For close to two decades, she’s lurked on Vivian’s Facebook statuses and Instagram posts, scrolled through tweets and abandoned Pinterest boards, stalked her friends and developed theories about whom she might be dating. She’s kept tabs on every job Vivian’s ever had. Lucy still remembers the twinkly pink background of Vivian’s MySpace.
In twenty-four hours, Vivian hasn’t displayed the slightest inkling of curiosity about Lucy.
“I teach high school English.” She praises her favorite parts, trying to sell it: the unparalleled satisfaction she gets when a lesson clicks for a student who had been struggling; the ones who geek out about books the same way she does. “My kids are juniors and seniors, so they’re starting to think about what’s next. It’s interesting, watching them figure it out.”
Lucy doesn’t have the heart to tell them that deciding who to become is the easiest part. Making it happen is another problem altogether. When she was that age, she wanted to study at a liberal arts college, somewhere with a grassy quad ringed by stately buildings dripping in ivy. She wanted to spend four years immersed in classic novels, influential feminist texts, and new titles by emerging geniuses who would shape the face of twenty-first-century literature. Then she’d go off to Portland, or even New York. She’d write, or work in publishing. What a life that would be: a ticket out of Fox Hill based on sheer passion for books and a dash of intelligence. A dream.
