Hers for the weekend, p.25
Hers for the Weekend, page 25
“If I stayed, I would have to earn my keep. I can’t stay here and do nothing,” Tara argued, breaking a cookie on the table into crumbs.
“You’re not ‘doing nothing,’” Hannah asserted. “You’re self-actualizing.”
“I try to avoid self-actualizing at all costs,” Tara deadpanned, although she wasn’t kidding. “Why won’t you let me help?”
Hannah glared at her. “I’m already letting you pay to stay here, against my wishes.”
Tara glared back. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument. “I’m paying you because I have a lot of money and you’re a new business. But you keep saying I’m part of the Carrigan’s team, so let me help.”
Hannah threw up her hands. “You’re not here to help us. You’re here for us to help you.”
That thought made Tara want to vomit. “People don’t help me. I help people.”
The whole table stared at her for a long beat.
“If I’m not helping, why would people keep me around?” Tara whispered, the words tumbling out of her mouth.
Cole gathered her in his arms. “I hate that your family made you feel like you had to earn love. But we’re your family, and we love you because we fucking want to. Because we can. You never have to prove you’re good enough for us.”
“That’s true,” Noelle said. “We hang out with Levi and he’s the worst person we know.”
Goddamn it, she was sobbing again. It was so embarrassing.
“Why is Tara crying?” Miriam asked as she walked up, sounding appalled.
Taking several shuddering gasps, Tara got enough air in her lungs to say, “I’m self-actualizing.”
“Oh no.” Miriam shoved Cole out of the way. “I know how much you hate that.” She crouched down next to Tara’s chair and said, “C’mere.”
Taking Tara’s hand, Miriam dragged her out the back of the inn and toward the carriage house where she and Noelle lived.
Everyone trailed behind her.
“What are we doing, Mir?”
Miriam didn’t answer, a tiny elf intent on mischief. She stopped in front of the windows to the carriage house, which were painted with the name of her business.
“What does it say?” She gestured at the windows.
Tara looked at Miriam, and then the window. “It says Blum Again Vintage and Curios.”
“No no no. What does it say under that?” Miriam huffed.
Oh.
“‘What you never knew you always needed.’”
Nodding and shaking her mass of dark curls frantically, Miriam said, “Yes. That’s what you find here. So what did you never know you always needed?”
“Are you going to say romantic love?” Tara asked. “Please don’t.”
“That’s what I never knew I always needed. I don’t think it’s what you needed, though. It just helped you get what you needed.”
All right, she was curious. “And what, my dear, is it that I always needed?”
“To stop being afraid of your power, Tara! You burn down one country club, and you put away the wild child forever, but she’s still in there! You think she’s a terrible person because you’ve been railing on her for so long. But she’s you! You have to embrace who you truly are. Messy, wild, radical Tara Sloane. That’s the only way you’ll ever figure out what you most want.”
“You want me to heal my inner child,” Tara said flatly.
Miriam nodded. “More like your inner punk-ass teenager. And I have a perfect way for us to heal her.”
Ushering Tara into the workshop and store space, Miriam kept chatting, but Tara wasn’t listening. All around her were Miriam Blum upcycled art pieces, and Mimi Roz paintings. All the funky, strange, thought-provoking art that Tara hadn’t wanted in her home. Probably because she hadn’t wanted her thoughts provoked, and she was afraid letting in any chaos would open the floodgates.
“Ah, here we go!” Miriam exclaimed from the back. She emerged holding something unwieldy and emitting a mildly unpleasant smell. Looking more closely, Tara recognized that it must have, once upon a time, been a carved wooden pineapple. “I got this in a shipment but it’s rotting, and I can’t use it.”
Tara eyed it suspiciously. “And you want me to, what, go Office Space on it? Let out my inner feral kid?”
“Oh no, love.” Miriam grinned maniacally. “We’re going to burn it.”
Nope. Oh no. No way in hell.
“I can see your brain working, but we’re doing it! We’re going to build a very safe bonfire, with Noelle’s assistance because she’s weird about fire near her trees—”
“I would call that prudent,” Tara interrupted.
“Sure, sure.” Miriam brushed this off. “We’re going to build a bonfire, and you’re going to write everything you’re letting go of on this ugly, rotting decorative symbol of Carolinian colonial oppression, and then we’re going to burn it.”
Tara wanted nothing more, on this earth, than to not participate in this, but she knew once Miriam got her mind around something, she wouldn’t let it go. And maybe her inner wild child was whispering, just a little, that it would be fun. “Fine. Give me a Sharpie.”
Miriam pulled out a giant box with every color of marker ever made.
What the hell was she going to write? It felt overwhelming.
She couldn’t write my whole personality and burn it. She needed specifics.
The door to the carriage house burst open, and Noelle and Hannah pushed through arm in arm. “What’s happening in here?” Noelle asked, giggling. “We’re missing you both! The anti-Valentine’s party needs you!”
Miriam explained her idea, complete with gestures and waving of Sharpies. When she finished, Tara was still staring at the half-rotted pineapple, unsure what to put on it.
“Help?” She looked up at Hannah, beseeching.
“Aw.” Hannah gave her a quick, fierce hug. “Let’s look at some things that aren’t working for your happiness.”
“Okay… maybe the marriage of convenience thing,” Tara admitted. “Let’s start with that. It’s definitely not working.” That was an easy one. Every situation she’d gotten herself into, the idea that she needed a society wife had blown up in her face.
That earned her a high five. She wrote on the wood:
Marrying for anything other than love
“It turns out,” she admitted, “I was never doing it to further my career, it just felt safer.”
Miriam snorted a laugh. “I know.” Then, she volunteered, “Aunt Cricket?”
“I think I gotta go bigger,” Tara acknowledged, both to her friends and herself. On the wood, she added:
Talking to my family
“Go big or go home, I guess,” Noelle said, sounding impressed.
Tara nodded. “And I can’t go home. At least not right now.”
She needed one more thing. Marriage and her family, those were external challenges. She could change her relationships with them, but in the end what she most needed was to change her relationship with herself.
Trying to earn my right to exist
There. That was it.
Outside, they stood around a beautiful, very well-managed bonfire that Noelle was nervously tending.
Everyone who had been inside for the anti-Valentine’s party spilled out and gathered around. Ernie was overseeing (kosher) marshmallow roasting, and Levi was making too-fancy s’mores. Cole and Sawyer were canoodling. Elijah was watching his kids, while Jason made sure none of the teenage drama students he’d brought lit themselves or the woods on fire. Tara shouldn’t be surprised that somehow this private emotional catharsis had become a whole Carrigan’s crew event.
It was the kind of thing that used to annoy her about Carrigan’s, but she admitted to herself (if not to anyone else) that she loved it now.
Hannah spoke because she had the biggest voice. “Friends, we are here today because it’s time for our beloved favorite, Tara Sloane Chadwick, the phoenix of Charleston, to once again consign her old self to the flames and be reborn! Tara!”
She turned to Tara and held out the weird wooden pineapple. “Are you ready?”
“I am.” Tara solemnly took the object. She ran her hands over the words she’d written, saying goodbye to an outdated identity that had served her well, grieving the years she’d been telling herself not to be who she was.
For a moment, she thought about lobbing the thing overhand into the fire, but she was afraid Noelle would kill her. Instead, she walked up to the fire and carefully placed the wooden object in. She looked deeply into the flames, watching until the pineapple collapsed in on itself.
Turning around, she walked into Cole’s arms. Where had he come from? He kissed her hair, and she was fairly sure she felt some tears drop onto her head.
“Are you proud of me?” she whispered.
“Baby girl,” he whispered back, “you’re my hero.”
Looking around at everyone she loved, she said, “You know, I should probably at least stay until the baby comes.”
Chapter 28
Holly
All the Delaneys met Holly at the airport in matching Christmas sweaters.
Her dad’s hair, burnished copper with age, stood a head taller than most of the crowd, and Dustin’s, equally tall, was almost radioactive in its orange. Holly snickered to herself that his hair had never chilled out, no matter how much he’d prayed as a kid. Hers was exactly the same shade, but unlike Dustin, she owned it.
Mostly. Except for when people talked about it incessantly and touched it.
Caitlin had inherited their mom’s black hair, and both mom and daughter had tears in their blue eyes.
While she was struggling with her duffel (the strap of which was held on with duct tape), her dad grabbed the handle and handed her a sweater that matched the family’s. It occurred to her that, to have ordered one for her, her mom must have been holding out hope she’d come home.
On the car ride home, she was stuffed between Caitlin and Dustin into the back seat of the Saturn her parents had owned for twenty years. She and Dustin immediately got into a pinching contest, trying to see who could hurt each other the most without making any noise to alert their parents.
The trailer her parents lived in could probably be seen from space, it was so lit up with decorations. Her mom fussed that the neighbor three lots down had driven one town over to the Walmart with the better inflatable Santas, but her dad assured them all they’d win next year.
Win what? It wasn’t clear.
Under the tree were presents with Holly’s name, and a stocking for her hung on the mantel of the faux fireplace. It didn’t have the polished kitschyness of Carrigan’s, but after a week with millionaires, being home was a breath of fresh, seasonal-Glade-PlugIn-scented air. She felt her shoulders relax as she followed her dad back to the room she’d grown up sharing with Caitlin, only to tense again when her mom came after them and sat on Caitlin’s old bed.
She said, “So, we can’t help but notice you needed an emergency plane ticket to come home, and Tara’s not with you.”
“Yeah, Hol, where’s your rich girlfriend?” Dustin asked, leaning against the door frame. Behind him, Caitlin grabbed him by the collar and hauled him out of her way. She came through the door, then shut and locked it behind her.
He banged on it. “I can still hear you, you know! These walls are paper thin!”
Looking at them, Holly was too tired to keep lying. These people, who loved her so much they hung up her stocking even though she never came home for Christmas.
She took a deep breath, steeling herself. “She’s not my girlfriend. We were pretending, because Tara needed a date to the wedding, and I needed to convince you to stop trying to play matchmaker.”
“You lied to us?” her dad whispered, sounding heartbroken.
“I knew something was fishy!” Caitlin exclaimed.
“I can’t believe you!” Dustin yelled through the door. “Miss Self-Righteous made up a girlfriend!”
Her mom, who had been sitting silently wringing her hands, said, “Why didn’t you just tell me you didn’t want to get back together with Ivy?”
“She did,” Holly’s dad, Caitlin, and Dustin all said in unison.
Wow, even Dustin was taking her side on that one. The same thought must have occurred to her mother, because she looked toward the locked door in surprise.
“I’m sorry, you guys. I shouldn’t have lied to you. I just…”
She couldn’t figure out what to say that would be a reasonable excuse.
Caitlin filled in for her. “Was afraid of getting steamrolled by Mom?”
Holly smiled a little, for the first time all day. Caitlin might give her shit, but she also understood Holly like no one else.
“Hey!” their mom objected. “I only steamroll because I love you all.”
Turning to Holly, Caitlin said, “I thought you liked her.”
“I do like her.” Holly sniffled. “I like her so much. But she wants to change me, and she won’t change.”
Through tears, the whole story (minus the sex pact) poured out. By the time she finished, everyone except Dustin was somehow piled onto her bed, and she was buried in a pile of hugs.
“You should apologize,” her dad said simply.
Holly shook her head. “She needs more time. If she wants to talk to me, she’ll reach out.”
“What I don’t understand,” her mom said thoughtfully, resting her chin on Holly’s head, “is where you got this idea that you’re inevitably going to be unkind to anyone you settle down with.”
“Because she’s really mean!” Dustin yelled.
Her mom threw a balled sock at the door.
“Because I was really mean to Ivy,” Holly corrected.
Caitlin scoffed. “You were a baby. You’re ten years older now. Your frontal lobe is done baking.”
“Cait, lots of people in their thirties are mean as snakes,” Holly reminded her.
“Sure, but those people don’t spend a decade arranging their whole lives so they won’t be mean anymore,” her sister argued. “Don’t you think it’s worth trying to see if you’ve grown?”
From outside the door, Dustin said, “It sounds like she was already a total bitch to Tara. Why would Tara want to give her another chance?”
Holly hung her head. “Dustin’s right.” Those were the worst words she could ever utter, and saying them made her feel like she’d actually, genuinely hit rock bottom.
Her dad waved this away. “Dustin’s never right. You should talk to her.”
“If she calls me first,” Holly said.
All the eyes in the room looked at her with disapproval.
As Valentine’s came, she started to feel comfortable in a way that made her itchy. And she realized it wasn’t the fault of her parents, or Davenport, or even Dustin. It was something inside her that was built for constant change. She’d thought she’d accepted that about herself long ago, but she’d kept trying to find someone or something to blame for it. No blame was needed, though, because it wasn’t a flaw.
What she did need to work on was keeping friendships as her life changed. Because she’d been using her restlessness as an excuse to not get close to people, and she couldn’t keep doing it.
She also realized that the idea of spending years getting comfortable with Tara didn’t make her feel itchy at all, which was a truly depressing realization to have at this point in the situation. Or just in time for Valentine’s Day. Especially when Tara hadn’t called. And she was still too chicken to call Tara.
Her mom, God bless her, had decorated the trailer in red and pink heart bunting and hung a seasonal wreath on the door. When she was younger, she’d thought it was pathetic that her parents lived in a double-wide, but now she was proud of them. They’d looked at their options and done the best they could by their kids. They’d bought the trailer, the nicest one they could with their income, and rented a lot in a safe, quiet neighborhood park. Everyone there had known each other for decades; everyone watched out for each other.
When the kids she’d grown up running around with heard she was back, they’d brought their kids around to meet her. It was nice, and it felt like home—more than Charleston ever had. No one looked askance at the black ink covering her legs, or let their gaze linger on the holes where her dimple piercings used to be.
In fact, she went back to the kid who’d pierced them in high school, who had his own shop now, and got them put back in. Tara had said Holly wasn’t afraid to be herself, but she’d been putting on a show for too long. She’d told herself that the act was to make herself safer at work, to get her more tips, to keep part of her to herself. And any of those would have been good reasons, if they were true. But, like the face Miriam put on for the Bloomers or the Perfect Debutante facade Tara wore for her parents, it was there to stop anyone from being close to her, to keep anyone at all from the real her. Including maybe herself.
She was ready to take her walls down and learn how to be close to people, but she still needed to do it somewhere that wasn’t Iowa, and that wasn’t going to change.
At first, when she left her parents and retrieved her car and all her shit, she thought about going to stay with Barb and offering to cook for her. But that would always be a temporary gig, and Tara’s words were ringing in her ears. She was still waitressing because she was afraid to take a chance on what she wanted, in case she failed. Like she was refusing to take a chance on love because she’d failed at marriage, once, when she was twenty-two.
She was holed up in a motel outside Madison at the end of February, because she’d run out of gas while driving aimlessly around the Midwest, when she realized she needed to talk to someone who would tell her the absolute, unvarnished, ugly truth about herself.
So she called her ex-wife.
The heavy, cigarette smoke–laden curtains that maybe used to be baby-puke green gave the room an oppressive gloom, so Holly went out to sit in the pale midmorning sunlight on a crumbling lounge chair by the pool. Maybe she would buy and renovate a vintage motel, she thought idly while the phone rang, like Stevie Budd. Hannah would probably help her with a business plan, if the Carrigan’s crew ever talked to her again.
