“You’re still here too,” she pointed out, and I saw that this conversation was going the same way that our last one had, directly into the Land of Incomprehension. I reached for the door handle.
“No! I do need to talk to you,” she said, but then she stared through the windshield and got a strange expression, something I’d never seen before on her face. Her eyebrows drew down and her full lips pursed together in an odd way. She brought her thumb to her mouth…was she biting her nail?
“You’ll probably see it anyway,” she said. “Maybe someone already told you.”
“Told me what?” I asked.
“Lance and I are getting a divorce,” she stated.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the longevity of many of the marriages in their friend group. But Vivi and Lance had been together before Grant and I had met, since their freshman year of college. I’d never seen any signs of trouble between them. “You are?”
She nodded, and fully bit her thumb nail. “You probably heard,” she suggested again.
“No, I haven’t been keeping track of you guys anymore. I’m sorry to hear it now,” I told her, because I was. It was too bad when a marriage failed. Even if I didn’t like either one of them, they had mostly seemed to like each other.
“His mom fired me,” she mentioned next.
Lance was employed by his parents’ company, and Vivienne had held some kind of position there, too. She’d had various titles, like “social media liaison” and “chief décor advisor,” but I’d never had a good idea of what she did for them and I didn’t think that she had either gone to an office or worked from home.
“What does this have to do with me?” I asked her. “Why did you come here to share this information?”
“We had a prenup,” she said, which didn’t answer anything. “You know that Lance’s mom is a bitch.”
I knew that she was smart and that she was the one who really ran things in his family.
“So I don’t have a job and I guess I have to get one now.” She turned to look at me and the worry was gone from her face. It had been replaced by horror and dread.
“Have you ever actually worked before?” I asked curiously.
“I guess,” she said vaguely, which meant “no.” “I think I have to get a number,” she continued, and it took a few more questions before I understood that she meant a social security number. I didn’t bother to mention that she probably already had one.
But again, despite my better judgement, I wanted to know more. “Why can’t your parents help you?” I asked. Vivienne had grown up with money, so what was the problem now?
“My dad died last year,” she said, and I remembered it vaguely. I had seen it at about the same time that I landed in my apartment, with no furniture, no boyfriend, and an inbox full of bills. The information had barely registered but now I did feel sorry, and I told her so.
She waved her hand around a little and said, “Yeah, yeah. He left money and real estate and stuff to my mom and to his college, but there was nothing for me. She was supposed to share.” She sighed heavily, and I waited. “Six months after he died, she married another guy she met at a hotel bar and they moved to Anguilla, then last week, she told me that her new husband took off for Brazil. She let him manage their lives like my dad used to and he stole almost everything. She’s poor now.”
“Oh,” I said, finally understanding. “You need my services as a bookkeeper.”
“I’m not talking about reading, Emerson,” she informed me. “I don’t care how many books you keep around.”
I blinked. “Why are you here?”
She slapped the steering wheel in frustration. “Why areyouhere? Why are you going out again?”
“What?” I asked, and she grabbed her purse, a very beautiful bag that I hadn’t seen before, and started to rummage through it. “You know, you can sell that if you need money,” I suggested. “You can sell your clothes and shoes, too.”
Vivienne froze and then slowly turned to look at me. “Are you crazy?” she asked incredulously. “If I sell my clothes, what am I supposed to wear?” But then she nodded and answered her own questions. “Right, you hit your head in the car accident and you don’t think straight anymore. Here, look.” She thrust her phone in my face just as rain drops started to patter down onto the car.
She was displaying a picture of me and Levi on the dance floor at his cousin’s wedding, taken before the photographer had made her exit with the band. I had my head tilted up to look at him and he was smiling down at me, total happiness on his face despite the hunger pangs I was sure he’d felt at that moment. In fact, we both seemed totally happy.
“I didn’t know the photographer used this picture. I didn’t even see her take it,” I mentioned. I had been wrapped up in thoughts of him.
“So, what, you’re totally fine now?” Vivi demanded. “You’re just going to run around and pose with your new boyfriend?”
“How did you find this?” I asked. “I’m not tagged. Were you trolling through random wedding shots?” My fingers hovered over Levi’s face. It would be great if he got to wear that tuxedo again.
She snatched back the phone. “I don’t waste my time looking at second-tier parties!” she informed me, and then explained the complicated investigation she’d done to search for my image. “That’s how I saw this picture, but anyone could!”
