Chapter 15 Tara

Chapter 15

Tara

T his day was remarkably unstructured for one Hannah had planned. It seemed that even her supernatural powers of organization couldn't stand against the chaos force of the assembled Rosensteins and Old Ladies.

Everyone was milling around, chatting in the great room, noshing in the dining room, lounging on the porch. It was making Tara twitchy. She needed to do something useful, or at least with an itinerary. She thought she might be needed to babysit Ziva, but Ziva was happy as a clam (or whatever the kosher equivalent was), playing host to all the Rosensteins she'd been semi-estranged from for years.

Sitting next to Holly on a couch in the corner of the great room, Tara didn't even realize she was anxious until Holly put a hand on her bouncing knee and stopped its movement.

"I'll bet it would help Hannah out if you roped some of these people into an activity of some kind," Holly whispered, her breath tickling Tara's ear and raising goose bumps on her arm.

Tara loved that Holly knew her well enough to understand why she couldn't sit still. She laced their fingers together. "What would we do? We can't exactly go hiking, or boating, or out for a picnic in this weather."

Holly acknowledged this with a dip of her head. "There are downfalls to a white Christmas."

"Yeah, it's cold as shit, and wet, and the snow gets everywhere ." Tara shook her body in disgust. "I'll take a low-country Christmas any day."

Holly laid her head on Tara's shoulder. "I wish we could have stayed in bed all day instead of being sociable, but your friends need you, and I know you never let anyone down when they need you. So, what can we do with a whole bunch of people before it's even time for lunch?"

"Hey! Coco!" Tara called, and Cole's head snapped up from across the room.

"Wait, weren't you complaining about everyone else here calling each other ridiculous nicknames?" Holly asked, pulling away and laughing. "Coco?!"

Tara ignored this, turning to Cole as he and Sawyer walked up. "If anyone in this godforsaken hotel knows where there's a karaoke machine, it's you."

Cole's eyes lit with the kind of glee that he usually reserved for doxxing white nationalists and exposing them to their employers after they marched with swastika flags in the streets.

"Karaoke?! Oh, my love, my light! Better half of my heart! You are a genius of epic proportions," he cried, clapping. "To the barn!"

Tara looked around at the crowd. "How are we going to wrangle them all?"

"Oh, I'm on it," Holly said, slipping out of her Docs and standing up on the couch. "Excuse me!" Her voice carried over the room, pitched to get the attention of the most recalcitrant drunk midnight diner customer. "As much as you're all obviously enjoying Mrs. Matthews's superb coffee and the variety of pastries graciously provided by the Rosensteins—you all really know how to make babka—"

A cheer rose from the crowd.

Holly continued, "—as much as you're enjoying yourselves, this old inn is about to burst at the seams. Some of us need to get out of the way so the people who live here can finish wedding preparations."

Tara heard Hannah grumble, "The wedding preparations have been done for weeks. Please. This is me."

"So, we're going to do a classic midmorning activity. Karaoke! Follow the giant blond man!"

At this, Cole waved his arms, the crowd cheered again, and at least half of them peeled off to head to the barn after him.

Hannah shot Tara two thumbs-up, although Tara wasn't sure how she knew it had been Tara's plan to begin with.

She hated karaoke. It was chaotic, and people who were bad at singing did it anyway, picking songs they thought they knew the words to but didn't actually, and everything was noise and flashing lights and people screaming over the music. She liked bars, when she could go to dance, but sitting still in sensory overload and listening to people butcher Queen songs? No.

But here she was, at the front of the barn, where a microphone stand had materialized along with the promised karaoke machine. Gavi was setting up the projector in the back, and suddenly something that looked like an old Windows screensaver was on the wall behind her.

"Can you sing?" Cole asked Holly.

Holly shook her head. "I'm real bad."

"Great. You need to start," he told her. "Tara sings very well, and it tends to kill the mood if the first person is great. It intimidates people."

Tara nodded. "I do intimidate people." It was also true that she could sing, but she rarely let herself do so in front of people.

Holly had a moment of looking like a deer in the headlights, but then nodded. "Nicholas, I need you to cue up the Violent Femmes."

As she started singing the opening lines of "Blister in the Sun," the crowd whooped and started jumping. By the time she got to the chorus, the whole barn was singing along. It wasn't good, but it was cute.

Tara was in real trouble if she thought a woman singing off-key was cute.

The midday winter sun streamed in through the open barn doors, and dust mites danced in the air as the floor bounced. It was surreal, and a little beautiful, in spite of the chaos.

When Holly was done, Tara grabbed the mic. "Y'all, I need people to sign up for slots here, or Cole is going to take over, and he knows every word to every Meat Loaf song. I would do anything for the love of him, but I won't listen to that."

Cole gasped, clutching his chest. "I will have you know," he said, taking the microphone from her, "that I am planning an ode to a great bisexual icon and hero of our generation, Billie Joe Armstrong."

That was smart. Cole also sung very well, which you might notice in a hair band ballad, but wouldn't if he was screaming a Green Day song. She relinquished the stage to him, and he began "When I Come Around."

She would have gone with "Welcome to Paradise," but it worked the way it was intended. People thought of nostalgic songs they could mostly remember and signed up.

As she listened to a Rosenstein cousin launch into "Don't Stop Believin'," she watched Holly. Her red waves had been stuffed under a Pikachu hat and she had black liquid liner ringing her eyes. She was wearing ripped-up jeans over fishnets with her big platform black Docs. Tara wasn't sure what about seeing Holly this way, completely in her element, wearing no masks, she found so damn adorable.

A tiny voice in the back of her mind whispered that if she and Holly ever dated, Holly would have to put that self back into storage, at least for family and work functions. The voice asked, Is that fair? Is that what you want? Tara ignored it. Obviously, she would support Holly dressing any way she wanted, and Tara would never ask her to mask when it was just them, but everyone had to mask sometimes.

No one really ever got to only be who they wanted; that was life. Plus, they weren't going to ever date. Even if a part of Tara was starting to wish maybe, in some world, they could.

While Elijah and Jason Green were in the middle of a rendition of "I'll Cover You" from Rent that had most of the audience close to tears (Jason must be one hell of a theater teacher), her phone buzzed with a text.

Hannah: You're a lifesaver! let's get everyone back inside.

It was time for her to shut this down, which meant she was going to have to sing.

Through a series of eyebrow movements and telepathic communications, Cole got her center stage and cued up her music. He winked at her when she saw what was on the screen. She could sing, sure, but could she sing Idina Menzel? They were going to find out. And, if she fell flat, she would be in good company.

"This has been so much fun, but Hannah tells me we're moving on to the next part of the schedule, and what Hannah says, goes." The crowd tittered at this. "So, to close us out, let's go… into the unknown."

When her nieces had watched Frozen for the first time, they'd said, "Auntie Tara is Queen Elsa!" and though she'd known they meant it as a compliment, it hadn't felt that way. A woman who refuses to use her power because she's scared of it, who is happier to freeze than love? That might be how Tara appeared on the outside, but she knew, inside, she was a whole different person.

The cold had always bothered her.

Right now, though, this song… Every word felt like it was being ripped out of the depths of her soul—an unnerving thing for an almost-forty-year-old to feel about a Disney princess, but many unnerving things had happened to her this week, and it hadn't killed her yet.

She poured her heart out through Elsa's words, hitting every note (apparently having a midlife crisis made you better at singing?) and finishing, breathless, to find the whole barn frozen (pun intended) and speechless.

"Wow," Holly whispered, "you really can sing."

"To lunch!" Cole hollered, and then wrapped an arm all the way around her body and basically carried her inside with him, which was good, because she found her knees a little weak.

He deposited her in a chair and handed her a sandwich. Apparently, though Hannah was coordinating people into vehicles to go eat lunch at Ernie's, she was also feeding them pre-lunch to keep them occupied. The sandwich in Tara's hand was pimento cheese, and as she chewed, she wondered how anyone in the northern wilds had learned how to make it well. Must be Miriam's influence.

"This egg salad is amazing," Holly said, her mouth half full, and then more quietly added, "That was the sexiest thing I've ever seen."

Tara almost spit pimento cheese out of her nose. "That was embarrassing. It was way too many feelings to be having, way too publicly, with way too many strangers."

Holly raised an eyebrow. Tara could raise just one eyebrow, because she'd spent hours staring in the mirror as a child willing herself to, but she had to concentrate to do it, and she had an irrational jealousy of people who made it look effortless. "You keep a very tight leash on the sheer power of your charisma, Tara. When you let your hair down… it's mesmerizing."

Tara shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She didn't know how to deal with being watched with as much intensity as Holly was looking at her right now, how to handle being actually seen.

"I don't have enough hair to let down," she said, sounding prim to her own ears, "and the last time I was unleashed, a country club burned to the ground."

Holly bent her knees so that she was sitting with her feet underneath Tara's thigh, and pushed the curtain of Tara's hair behind her ear. "You can hide your face, but I'll still see you, Sloane," she said. "There are a lot of ways to unleash yourself without burning everything down, and I trust you to find them, even if you don't trust yourself."

Her breathing sped up, and her body froze. She clamped her lips shut to stop herself from saying something Southern and cutting to distance herself from the moment. Looking over Holly's shoulder to avoid her eyes, she focused on a little Charlie Brown tree (Why did they insist on bringing all the live trees into the inn? Wouldn't a nice pink plastic tree have fit the aesthetic better and been more hygienic?) that someone had shoved into a corner and decorated entirely in Funko Pops from Flight of the Fordham , the space opera show that Levi and Noelle were obsessed with.

Just then, Jayla Green walked up to them, a Belle costume pulled over her hoodie and jeans, coordinating yellow plastic heart elastics bobbing on her Afro puffs. "You didn't tell me you were Queen Elsa," she accused.

Tara looked at her, their eyes almost level from her seat on the short couch. "You didn't tell me you were Princess Belle," she rejoined, holding out her hand for a shake. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Your Highness."

Elijah, who had been across the room trying to keep Jeremiah from eating his weight in rugelach, winked at her. Oh, good. She'd gotten that one right. She was okay with her nieces, but she also understood the strict parameters of their upbringing. Tara had never been allowed to be much of a child, so she always felt a little at odds and ends when asked to interact with children who were allowed to be themselves.

Jayla was nodding solemnly over their clasped hands. "Your Majesty," she said. "I'm so thrilled you could join us for this royal wedding."

"Oh, is it royal?" Tara asked. "I didn't know."

"Obviously, Miriam is Aurora." The little girl told her, as if this were a known fact to everyone. Tara searched her memory, and realized Aurora was Sleeping Beauty. "She told me that before she came here, she was asleep for a long time, and Noelle was the prince who woke her up."

From behind her, her brother said, "That's silly, girls can't be princes."

Without turning to look at him, Jayla sighed the exhausted sigh of siblings everywhere tired of their brothers. Tara liked this kid so much. "People say you can't have two dads, Jeremiah, but look at us. Girls can be princes if they want to."

Jeremiah scrunched up his face like he wanted to argue with this logic but could not.

Jayla turned to Holly. "Are you Queen Elsa's prince?"

A sparkling laugh tumbled out of Holly. "I'd like to be," she said, "but Queen Elsa doesn't need a prince, does she? She has her family, and they all save each other."

Jeremiah, who was obviously tired of being left out of this conversation, said (through his missing front teeth), "I think Elsa falls in love with the nice girl she meets in the magical forest."

"Well," Holly said, "we are in a magical forest. Maybe I'm the nice girl Tara falls in love with in between saving the world."

"That makes sense," Jayla concurred. "After all, Carrigan's is a fairy-tale castle, and Aunt Hannah is Rapunzel, even though she cut her hair. The forest must be magic." The twins seemed appeased by this and went back to their father.

"Those two almost make me want kids," Holly observed, watching them go. "Not quite, but almost."

In case she tried to go back to the conversation they'd been having, Tara decided they needed another distraction. She stood up, carefully brushing crumbs off her clothes. There weren't any, because she'd learned from the time she could feed herself that a lady didn't get food on her, but it was ingrained in her to check.

"I'm going to find Hannah to see if she and Gavi need help getting these people wrangled." She bent down, intending to drop a kiss on Holly's cheek, but Holly moved her head so their lips met.

"Come back to me soon?" Holly asked, reaching up and running her hand down Tara's sleeve, then squeezing her fingers before letting go. It was the same thing she'd done the first night they got here, which was the only thing that reminded Tara that she was acting for the benefit of their friends, no matter how sincere her eyes looked.