“What’s your mother’s side of the family like?” Alix asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never met any of her relatives or anyone who knew her before she married my dad. It’s like she was born on the day she got married.” Toby looked at them. “However …”
“What?” They leaned forward.
“One time my mother was quite angry at me and—”
“That’s her usual state from what I’ve seen of her,” Lexie interrupted, her tone showing her disapproval.
Toby continued, “One night after dinner, Mother wanted Dad and me to hurry up to go somewhere. She grabbed our half-full plates and put one on her forearm and one in her hand. It was very efficient. I said, ‘Mother, you do that like an experienced waitress.’ I wouldn’t have thought anything about it except that she immediately dropped the plates and stomped off—and my dad couldn’t stop laughing.”
“Very interesting,” Lexie said. “That sounds like a mystery worth pursuing.”
“Lexie loves mystery novels,” Toby said.
Lexie grimaced. “In this mystery, the only man your mother would approve of for you is Prince Charming.”
“Too late,” Alix said, her face serious. “I already got him.”
Toby laughed and Lexie groaned.
“We want to know about your mother,” Toby said. “What’s it like to live with someone who is as unique as she is?”
“Unique?” Lexie said. “Toby is being polite. Victoria Madsen is an international sensation, beautiful, successful, and those books!”
“You do know the Great Secret of the origin of them, don’t you?” Alix asked.
“That they’re about my family?” Lexie said. “Of course. Everyone on Nantucket knows that.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “I know about my family. I want to know about yours.”
“Well,” Alix said slowly, thinking how to explain her mother in a way that wouldn’t take hours. “She is a mix of practical and flamboyant, vain and selfless, naive and very sophisticated.”
“That sounds either horrible or wonderful,” Lexie said. “But what we want to know is what it was like to be with her on a daily basis.”
Alix thought for a moment. “All right, I’ll tell you a story that might illustrate my life with her, and I only know the details because years later so many people told me what happened. It was my fifth birthday, and Mom and I were living in an apartment on the sixteenth floor of a building way downtown in New York City. It was after her first book had been accepted for publication, but before it came out and hit the best-seller lists. But what was important to me was that my parents had recently separated and I was missing my dad a lot.”
Alix looked away briefly. “Anyway, on the morning of my birthday, I woke up looking into the eyes of a real live pony.”
Lexie smiled. “That’s nice. Your mother took you to a stable while you were asleep.”
“No,” Alix said. “I was in my own bed in our apartment in New York. My mom had brought the pony up in the service elevator. She had so charmed the doorman—I think she even wept a bit at her failed marriage—that he’d looked the other way.”
“I wonder what the neighbors thought,” Toby said.
“You hit it there. My mother couldn’t have cared less that the floor was permanently damaged by the hooves, but when the neighbors complained about the noise, she had to do something.”
“What did she do?” Lexie asked.
“She turned it all into an impromptu party. She chose the ugliest little man there, who was standing silently by his angry wife, and asked him to go buy some booze. And of course my mother had no money so he paid. Then she got some big, good-looking teenage boy to make drinks for everyone who showed up to complain.”
“I don’t think using an underage boy like that was legal,” Toby said.
“My mother doesn’t believe that laws apply to her. When school let out, even more neighbors showed up with their kids and they rode the pony around inside the apartment.”
“What about the mess?” Lexie asked.
“My mother went to two teenage girls who couldn’t take their eyes off the boy at the bar and told them he wanted them to help out.”
“They got the poop scoop detail?” Lexie asked, grinning.