Vivian
Vivian is flooded with dumbstruck fury. She doesn’t like watching Lucy weeping over “Dad”—Vivian’s dad!—before shuffling inside to rummage for lemon-ginger tea bags like she owns the place. She resents when Lucy takes the chipped yellow mug with the New York City skyline, the one Vivian always uses. It’s so old, the Twin Towers still balance on the southern tip of Manhattan.
Vivian had been at work for barely fifteen minutes when she got the news. It was 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon, earlier than she normally worked and busier than usual because of Father’s Day. She’d been relieved to have a hectic workload, which would keep her too occupied to stew over what had happened that morning. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket as she printed off the final version of Della’s new summer wine list—there’s the Portuguese albarino she can’t get enough of, and a buttery white Burgundy that’s guaranteed to sell well. It was only Celeste, her mother, so she ignored the call. She’d just seen her parents an hour ago at their own family brunch. Chaos aside, holiday shifts are easy money: People are happy to throw around tips. That day, the dining room was a sea of dads and grandpas; some were in ties and blazers while others tried to look cool in high-end sneakers. Colorful tissue paper poked out of shiny gift bags. A table that appeared to seat a man’s first and second wife had racked up the weekend’s highest alcohol bill thus far.
Her phone went off again as a waiter summoned her to a table interested in prosecco. When she left to grab the bottle, she texted Celeste, At work .
But then it rang again. This scared her. They rarely spoke on the phone—they typically didn’t have much to say to each other. She ducked into a corner of the kitchen to answer the call.
“ What is so urgent?” she hissed. Behind her, pots clanged, plates clattered.
She heard her mother suck in a breath. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”
Her shaking voice was all the information Vivian needed. “Tell me what?”
A sob caught in Celeste’s throat. Vivian had never heard her mother cry like this before.
“It’s your father. I just got a call. He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Dead. He collapsed on the subway.”
“No,” Vivian whispered, welling up.
This couldn’t be happening. He was fifty-four. Healthy. He’d been right there in front of her that very morning. If she had known those would be her last words to him, she wouldn’t have been such a massive bitch. What had she done?
She slid down the wall and curled over her knees, but she didn’t cry. Through hiccupping sobs and incomprehensible wails, Celeste relayed everything she knew—which wasn’t much. Vivian took it all stoically. One of them had to keep it together, and anyway, this was all her fault. The kitchen was eerily silent when she stood up. She could sense four pairs of ears straining toward her.
“Well, happy Father’s Day, everybody.” Her voice cracked. “My dad just died.”
If she’d said anything more sincere, she would’ve lost it. The kitchen staff clambered to comfort her. Through the crush of bodies, she saw her boss, Oscar, do a double take as he walked by.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, entering the kitchen cautiously.
A cook filled him in. Vivian shot Oscar a warning look, hoping he wouldn’t come any closer. The last thing she needed right then was the burden of pretending she’s only his employee.
She assumed he’d find a way to be with her that night, but no. Instead, he told her to take off as much time as she needed. At first, she protested. She’d barely taken a vacation day since she was a stagiaire at Le Bernardin, ferrying the wine director’s coffee and paperwork. The only exception was time with her dad; they’d spent all of August together at the lake when she was young, though as an adult, she’d whittled it down to one tight week. If there was ever a time to rest from work, however, it would be now. She reluctantly agreed.
Every single part of the funeral sucked. Vivian white-knuckled through the service, wishing Oscar could join her in the synagogue’s front row rather than lingering in the back.
Celeste delivered a knockout eulogy, reminding any mourners who could have possibly forgotten that yes , she’s a bestselling novelist (or, rather, used to be), and yes , she can write a deeply moving speech with forty-eight hours’ notice, even while swimming through unimaginable grief. (Two weeks earlier, she’d published her twenty-fifth book, Bored Housewives in Bora-Bora, about three suburban moms who indulge in saucy flings on a girls’ trip.) She trotted out polished anecdotes that portrayed their relationship in a flattering light.
The rabbi had asked Vivian to speak, too, but she turned him down. You can’t call a dead guy an asshole. She didn’t want to strain for fuzzy childhood memories to paint a pretty picture for the crowd. Instead, she silently dug her nails into her thigh as they spoke and clocked the requisite compliments, all lies: He wasn’t a loving husband and father. He hadn’t been warm—at least not to his family. He was no mensch.
When they sat shiva, Celeste’s writer friends crowded around her in the living room while Vivian picked at a stale bagel in the kitchen. Their Upper West Side classic six was packed with (supposedly) their closest loved ones, but she’d never felt more alone. It seemed that the more distant the relative, the longer they spent offering condolences and making painful small talk with her. “Are you seeing anyone?” seemed to be everyone’s favorite question. Still, she preferred that to one-on-one time with her mother.
After most of the guests trickled out, Vivian and Celeste were left with a lingering neighbor, seemingly oblivious to the caterers packing up around them.
“You didn’t want to speak at the funeral?” she asked Vivian, sitting a little too close on the couch.
“She should’ve,” Celeste interjected.
Vivian’s grip tightened on her wineglass. “I’m not the public speaker, she is.”
“It’s not a TED Talk,” Celeste said. “You would’ve been fine.”
“Mm. Well. Too late now.”
“I can’t believe he’s really gone,” the neighbor said. “At least you have each other.”
Celeste glued on a tight smile. “At least there’s that.”
Grieving together felt staged, like each hug or sympathetic comment was scripted in one of Celeste’s books. There was a time when Vivian had craved a stronger relationship with her, but that’s long gone. She’s old enough to know that certain things will never change.
Fifteen interminable minutes later, the caterers left, and the neighbor excused herself to walk her dog, apologizing that she couldn’t stay any longer. After Celeste closed the door, she tipped her forehead against it, shuddered a sigh, and began to cry. Vivian should’ve hugged her, comforted her, anything. But she didn’t know what to say.
Vivian gets up to uncork some wine, just to have something to do besides sitting around, fantasizing about life in hell, which—for all its drawbacks!—probably doesn’t involve watching her dead dad’s secret daughter grieve at her kitchen table. He didn’t want to confess his affair to Vivian? Fine, whatever, she made her peace with that long ago. But apparently, he had no problem trusting Lucy with knowledge of his double life, and that is too bizarre to process. It had never occurred to her that she might not have the upper hand.
She’d brought a few bottles from the city, knowing her best option around here would likely be cloying Barefoot Pinot Grigio. Tonight she selects a Marlborough sauvignon blanc with an acidic punch of passionfruit and lime. She opens it with one practiced twist of a wine key.
“You want some?” she asks.
Lucy clutches her tea closer. “No, thank you.”
It didn’t slip Vivian’s attention that Lucy had known exactly which cabinets held the tea bags and sugar.
Vivian grabs an awful plastic goblet and, with a shaking hand, sloshes out a hefty pour. That’s not exactly how she learned to do it in her Court of Master Sommeliers program when she was twenty-two: pour with the label facing outward, serve in a counterclockwise circle, cradle the bottle at a forty-five-degree angle in between guests. She’d offered a million times to source nicer glasses for the lake house, but Hank didn’t want to have anything fragile when they mostly drink aboard a boat.
She retakes her seat at the head of the table, nerves sizzling like she just barely survived an electric shock. Lucy sits with her back against the stone chimney under a ledge filled with sentimental trinkets: a black-and-white framed photo of their long-dead grandparents; four carved wooden loons posed as if swimming in a line, a tribute to the loons that live on Fox Hill Lake. Hank liked to tell the chimney’s origin story: His parents had it built with smooth gray rocks pulled from these very shores.
The confrontation outside was too intense for Vivian to really take Lucy in, but inside, she comes into clearer focus. Frankly, it seems like a stretch that they’d be related. She doesn’t have the Levy olive complexion, dark hair, strong nose, or thick eyebrows, and she wears a silver claddagh ring. She looks like a goy. Her dropped R s are straight out of Good Will Hunting.
“What happened to him?” Lucy asks.
At least Vivian knows something Lucy doesn’t.
“Heart attack. It was on Father’s Day, if you can believe it.”
“That’s so horrible,” she croaks.
“I had brunch with him that day. We…”
Vivian suddenly can’t think straight; her memories are too loud. She sees the disgusted way his jaw dropped, his indignant seething as he took in her accusations. She’d felt like a monster.
“We’d gotten into a fight right before it happened, actually. Apparently, the people on the subway tried to help, they called 9-1-1 right away, but…”
Lucy winces. “A heart attack is a quick—” She trails off with a shudder, as if uttering “death” is unbearable. “It’s fast, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
He had been pronounced dead upon arrival at Mount Sinai West. Vivian had been somewhat comforted by that. He was far from a perfect parent, but he didn’t deserve to suffer.
Misery wafts off Lucy like an overpowering perfume. She slides her fists into her hair and stares down at the table hard.
“I should’ve known something was wrong when he didn’t call me back.”
Vivian grimaces. “You talked? Like, regularly?”
It’s hard to picture, Hank choosing to engage with his secret daughter when he already had so little time for the family he lived with.
“Of course, he was my dad,” Lucy says, like it’s obvious.
There’s a smidge of something else in her voice—defensiveness? Or pride?
“Sure.”
“He really was! Here, look.”
Lucy searches for something on her phone, then triumphantly spins it around so Vivian can see a photo of them together down at the firepit. It’s dated to last summer.
Nauseated, Vivian asks, “Was he sending you money?”
It’s a nasty question, but Vivian can’t bring herself to apologize. She can’t interrogate Hank about this anymore; this conversation is her next best option.
“Of course,” Lucy says, taken aback. “Some.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to be comfortable,” Lucy says uneasily.
That could mean anything. Vivian has no idea what comfort means in a place like Fox Hill. Growing up, she was hardly considered rich by her classmates’ standards. She had friends whose parents thought summering in the Hamptons was tacky, so they bought small, tasteful private islands in the Mediterranean instead. She’d once gone to a bat mitzvah held in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria where an actual pop star performed. Each goody bag contained a Cartier bracelet.
Then another thought occurs to her. “Wait, there aren’t any more of you, are there?”
“Like siblings? Oh my gosh, no, it’s just me and my mom.”
Small blessings.
With a hint of pride, Lucy adds, “People say we’re like the Gilmore Girls .”
Vivian couldn’t relate less.
“He really didn’t tell you anything about me?” Lucy asks.
“Not a single thing.” Technically, Vivian isn’t lying.
“Oh.” She shrinks back in her chair with a ragged inhale as her eyes water again.
“Why, did he talk about me?” Vivian asks.
“Barely.” It’s enough to sting. “He told me your name and said we were around the same age, but that was pretty much it. I think he kept us separate because he didn’t want to hurt you and your mom.”
“So, cheating on your wife and stashing a secret family five states away is fine as long as we don’t find out? Cool.”
Lucy recoils. “He wasn’t cheating! It wasn’t like that.”
Vivian isn’t sure what to believe. The idea of her dad deceiving his wife for decades is bleak, but if Hank really was faithful to Celeste, then maybe Vivian had treated him more harshly than he deserved. She tries to straighten out the timeline.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-one. My birthday was in April.”
Which means Lucy’s older, but barely—they’re six months apart. She had to have been conceived right before Hank and Celeste’s wedding.
“I’ll be thirty-one in October.”
“I know,” Lucy says reluctantly.
Vivian rolls her eyes. Of course Lucy knows.
“So he did cheat.”
“I guess once, technically,” Lucy says, wincing. “But he and my mom were never that serious.”
“Great,” she says coolly. “And your mom is…who, exactly?”
“Her name is Dawn—Dawn Webster. You know Miss Pancakes? She runs it now. They met in 1989, right on the lake, actually. They had a few summer flings and broke up before I was born.”
Vivian racks her brain. Has she heard of Dawn? Hank had mentioned a few girlfriends he dated before meeting Celeste, but none of them had ever seemed particularly significant to him.
“They kept seeing each other, though, right? I mean, they must have if you spent time with him.”
“No, not really. They just talked logistics—school, doctors’ appointments, handing me off—and that’s it. I spent every July here with him.”
Obviously Vivian had long been suspicious of Hank’s annual lengthy business trips.
“He usually visited a few other times a year, but summer was the best,” Lucy says.
Her voice wobbles as she slumps over the table with her face in her hands. That’s what kills Vivian—not Lucy’s tears or the way she practically recited his Social Security number. It’s this, the way Lucy is genuinely moved by the memory, like they had something special. She makes Vivian feel like an outsider in her own kitchen.
Vivian wants to rewind to that Father’s Day brunch or, better yet, to sixteen years ago, before she saw Hank for who he really was. But she can’t. All she can do is accomplish what she came here for.
“So, here’s the deal,” Vivian announces. “I’m here for two reasons. Number one, he wanted his ashes scattered in the lake.”
He had said as much a few times over the years, usually on quiet boat rides or while admiring the view from the deck with a beer in hand. Vivian had ignored his wishes before—majoring in art history instead of business, shaving down their father-daughter time at the lake to a single week—without a drop of guilt, but this is different. Final. She isn’t heartless.
Lucy’s nose wrinkles. “Really? He never told me that.”
“I brought the ashes in from the car. They’re on the mantel over the fireplace.”
Celeste had chosen a simple charcoal-gray urn. It was only temporary, after all.
“Mm.”
“And number two, I’m selling the house.”
Lucy’s knuckles go white around her mug. “What? But it’s home .”
Vivian doesn’t have the patience to argue over this. Although the cabin was Hank’s personal slice of paradise, Celeste didn’t care for it and rarely visited, and the lake’s peaceful beauty is wasted on Vivian. Sure, it’s a nice place to swim and sunbathe, but she doesn’t have time for that, and she can’t relax in the middle of nowhere. She’s always antsy about potentially missing something—or someone—back home.
That’s especially true now. Though she’d rather be in New York, death doesn’t give a shit about her desires. Vivian has more flexibility than her mother does right now. There’s no good time for your middle-aged husband to die, but for Celeste, June was particularly inconvenient.
Her book tour kicked off that month, plunging her into a parade of fans and signings and selfies (though the crowds have never been as big as they were for Naked in New York nearly twenty years ago—she’s hell-bent on reaching that level of success again). Her publisher had offered to postpone the string of events, but she insisted the distraction would do her good. Before she left, she told Vivian that if she could handle selling the lake house, she could keep the profits. Celeste had enough work on her plate with his estate. For Vivian, the timing was impeccable. Not that Celeste knows it, but she needs a lot of money, and she needs it soon.