Wanda

Wanda, Poppy Wright’s mother, is a warm, high-volume presence whose affection often arrives as teasing, practical concern, and enthusiastic hopes for her daughter’s future. She adores Alex Nilsen and imagines that he and Poppy will recognize their love, bring Poppy back to Linfield, and start a family; the novel makes that hope both a running family joke and a measure of how readily Wanda welcomes Alex into their lives.

Family and Background

Wanda and Jimmy are Poppy’s parents. Their names do not follow the P-initial pattern of their children’s names: they had Prince and then Parker, and, as Poppy explains, seem to have continued with the letter once they were on a roll. Parker has no namesake; the name was simply one her parents liked. The detail gives the family’s naming pattern a casual, affectionate origin rather than a deliberate tradition.

Poppy presents her parents as resistant to change, though Wanda’s resistance is rendered with comic tenderness rather than hostility. She has trouble remembering how to use emojis and becomes impatient when Poppy tries to teach her, insisting instead that she can type them out. Her typed smiley face is a small emblem of the way she adapts on her own terms: she wants to communicate affection, even if she does not adopt the technology in the way her daughter expects.

Wanda’s voice is part of a broader Wright family trait: the family is not especially good at modulating its volume. Poppy imagines her mother overwhelming a stranger by exuberantly offering cotton-candy grapes, volunteering to wash some, then discovering that the bowls are occupied by leftovers and settling for the stranger taking a handful. The example is presented as an illustration of how Wanda might come across, not as a separate reported incident. Its comic escalation captures a hospitable impulse that keeps pressing forward even when the practical details go awry.

Affection for Alex and Hopes for Poppy

Wanda’s fondness for Alex is explicit. When Poppy tells her she will see him, Wanda asks her to give him a hug and a kiss. Poppy jokes back about grabbing his butt; Wanda answers that this might work, then admits she is getting tired of waiting for grandchildren. The exchange makes her matchmaking conspicuous, but its teasing register also shows that she treats affection for Alex as already at home in the family.

Her hopes go beyond the joke. Poppy understands that Wanda partly adores Alex because he moved back to Linfield, and that Wanda is waiting for the two of them to realize they are in love, for Poppy to move back as well, and for grandchildren to follow. The sequence is Wanda’s imagined happy ending for her daughter: romance, return, and family life gathered together. It is not presented as Poppy’s own plan, and the difference matters. Wanda’s confidence in that future contrasts with Poppy’s uncertainty about what she wants and where she belongs.

Wanda’s attachment to Alex also forms a counterpoint to Jimmy’s effect on him. Poppy describes her father as doting but intimidating, with a booming voice and blunt questions that can make Alex feel interrogated. By contrast, Wanda’s eagerness to embrace and kiss Alex is openly affectionate. Poppy recalls trying to shield Alex from her family and their crowded, knickknack-filled home when he first came to pick her up for karaoke; that protectiveness reflects her awareness of how daunting the household might feel to him, even as Wanda’s own welcome is affectionate.

Concern, Teasing, and a Daughter’s Independence

Before Poppy and Alex travel to Nashville, Wanda enters Poppy’s room while she is still packing, singing as she approaches and keeping something hidden behind her back. The gesture is playful and suspenseful, but the evidence does not identify what she is carrying. In the ensuing conversation, Poppy tells her she is not having sex with Alex. Wanda responds with composed reassurance that Poppy need not tell her anything, then immediately asks her to be responsible, becomes teary at the thought of her daughter being grown up, and tells her she is proud of her. Her concern is unmistakable, but so is her effort to affirm Poppy’s judgment and self-knowledge.

That exchange sits within Poppy’s broader account of her sexual experience: she has kissed several men and gone further with one, while still moving cautiously. Wanda does not know the full extent of that history in this scene, and Poppy thinks of herself as being more responsible than her mother knows. The gap between what Wanda asks and what Poppy discloses gives the moment its intimacy. Wanda is trying to care for an adult daughter; Poppy is deciding what to keep private while hearing, beneath the awkwardness, that her mother trusts her.

The scene also echoes the family’s recurring blend of bluntness and affection. Wanda’s worry about responsibility sits beside her tears, praise, and excitement at Poppy’s adulthood, rather than replacing them. Her response is not simply permission or prohibition: it is an emotionally overflowing attempt to stay close while acknowledging that Poppy is making her own choices.

Narrative Role

Wanda is characterized through brief but memorable domestic details: the typed smiley, the insistent offer of grapes, the message about Alex, and the concealed object she brings into Poppy’s room. These moments give her a distinct presence without making her a central actor in the romance. She appears as a source of familial warmth and comic pressure, especially because her preferred future for Poppy and Alex is so much more settled than Poppy’s feelings are at this stage.

Her characterization also clarifies what home means to Poppy’s relationships. Wanda’s welcome helps make Alex part of the Wright family’s imagined future, while Poppy’s earlier attempts to protect him from the family home reveal her own sensitivity to the contrast between his reserve and her household’s exuberance. Wanda’s loving insistence on grandchildren is funny, but it also places a future expectation around Poppy. The novel lets both truths coexist: her hope is an expression of affection, and it remains Wanda’s hope, not a decision Poppy has made.