Chapter 16 Holly

Chapter 16

Holly

S ome of the Rosensteins and Old Ladies were settled for rest (Seriously, where were they all sleeping? Did Carrigan's have secret extra rooms that only magically opened when you needed them?), while Hannah finally got everyone else in the shuttles to go to lunch at Ernie's. Some of them were grumbling about not being able to eat here, where there was a famous chef, but Holly knew Mrs. Matthews must need the kitchen desperately for wedding prep. Therefore, lunch had become a Wedding Event.

Cole and Hannah, who were jointly in charge of this as the best man and matron of honor, took attendance at Wedding Events very seriously. Holly knew this, because she'd tried to sneak Tara off for a midafternoon quickie and been hauled back. How was she ever going to get enough of Tara, so they could go back to being just friends after this weekend, if she couldn't get any of her?

"We're going to the bar," Hannah said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Hannah was kind of scary, in a hot way. This trip was teaching Holly a lot about her attraction to terrifying women.

"Isn't one of the brides a recovering alcoholic?" Holly asked. "Why are we going to a bar?"

"It's a small town," Noelle explained. "If we don't hang out at the bar, we hang out nowhere. But, trust me, I'll be surrounded by three-quarters of the sober alcoholics in the greater Adirondacks. I'll be fine."

Holly raised an eyebrow. "What happened to the other quarter of them?"

"I don't like them so I didn't invite them," Noelle said, shrugging, and walked off to herd Old Ladies.

Holly was still confused. "What are we going to do at the bar? At two in the afternoon?"

Hannah looked at her like this was a ridiculous question. "Eat lunch."

"We literally just ate lunch," Holly pointed out.

Hannah laughed. "Oh no, that was a light nosh. You haven't spent a lot of time at Jewish family gatherings, have you?"

"I mean, not none. I did grow up in the Quad Cities, which has a long history of tight-knit Jewish community, so I went to a lot of b'nai mitzvahs," she countered. "But I'm also Midwestern, so I understand the concept of the meal before the meal. Still…"

"Go with it," Miriam advised. "We had to come up with something to get them all to Advent, and they won't fit inside Collin's diner."

Ernie's was dark and narrow, lined with wood that had soaked in generations of cigarette smoke. It felt like home.

Sawyer was behind the bar, while a woman Tara introduced as Ernie, the owner, was taking tickets and looking frazzled.

"The girl who's supposed to be on the grill tonight is at home vomiting, so I need to be on grill, but I also need, like, three more waitstaff," she explained, pulling out a pen and pad to take their order.

Holly gazed around their table thoughtfully. "What if I could get you one killer waitress and a line cook who's famous in Australia?" she said, and Levi's eyes lit up.

"Yes! Put me in, Coach!" He rubbed his hands together. "I will fry so many pickles."

Ernie looked skeptical.

"I've been waiting tables for fifteen years," Holly assured her. "I can get all these people served before Levi even has the tickets."

"Oh," Ernie assured her, "I'm not worried about you. I'm not sure I want to let Chef Angst over here near my griddle, lest he decide to start serving deconstructed tapas or something."

Levi gasped in indignation. "I would never besmirch the name of your sainted grandmother Ernestine by soiling your deep fryer with fine dining."

Ernie glared at him.

"Okay, I would," he admitted, "but not right now. You're way too swamped."

She handed Holly her pad and paper. "Can you take this table?"

Holly saluted. "Roger that."

Pointing at Levi, Ernie said, "Don't screw this up."

Levi grinned, and his beauty freaked Holly out.

"Why does his face look like that?" she asked Hannah. "It can't be good for him."

Hannah held her finger up to her lips. "He knows he's beautiful, but he doesn't actually know how beautiful, and we choose not to tell him. He's already insufferable enough."

"I don't think he's that handsome," Noelle said, and they all stared at her. She shrugged. "He has too much hair. And his smirk is asymmetrical."

"Have you met your soon-to-be-wife?" Hannah asked. "Because if anyone on this earth has too much hair…"

"Okay. What are you all eating?" Holly interrupted, and began taking orders.

She was dropping off drink tickets with Sawyer when he caught her hand. "Thank you."

"It's fine. Y'all needed a waitress. I'm a waitress. This saves me from awkwardly making small talk with a bunch of people I barely know."

Sawyer shook his head, the curls on the ends of his mustache turning up as he smiled slightly. "That's not what I meant, although Lord knows it's appreciated. Thank you for making Tara more comfortable this week. It was critical to Cole that she be here. He doesn't ask for much from the people he loves, but he needs them."

While he said this, he released her hand to do a complicated bottle flip, then measured whiskey into a shaker, never taking his eyes off Holly. He'd obviously been bartending long enough that it was ingrained in his muscle memory, and she felt a kinship with him. He would never judge her for her job, and Cole obviously didn't judge him for his. Maybe Cole could work on Tara, get her to see that being involved with a waitress wasn't shameful.

Holly bit her lip. "But who's taking care of Tara, while she takes care of Cole, and the rest of the world?"

Sawyer pointed at her. Oof. Even he, who knew they were faking it, seemed to have been convinced that she would be good for that job, and she didn't know how to tell him she wasn't available. She wanted to be, but she couldn't. He handed her the drinks she'd come for, and she went to deliver them to the table.

Then she stuck her head in the passthrough. "I need fries, Matthews!" she shouted.

"Order up!" He smiled at her, dropping a platter of various fried foods in front of her. "I don't suck at this, remember? Culinary school?"

"I bet culinary school didn't prepare you to cook a perfect plate of poutine," she argued, "or how to run a packed bar kitchen."

He shrugged. "That's why I spent four years cooking around the world. But you shouldn't knock what you haven't tried—have you ever thought about pastry school?"

She glared at him. "Did Tara put you up to this?"

"I don't take orders from Tara," he corrected her.

"Ah, Hannah put you up to it." She nodded. "You should all stop meddling."

She walked off with the plates, some of the high she'd been riding wearing off. Cole might not judge Sawyer for being a bartender, but he was, after all, also the mayor of this little town. Collin and Ernie both owned their businesses. No one in this group was ever going to accept someone who didn't have a real career and didn't want one.

Of course, she reminded herself, she didn't need to be accepted by this group. After this weekend, she would never see these people again.

While she was delivering Fried Everything Platters, Cass Style (a secret menu item where everything was kosher), Ernie stood up on a chair and yelled for everyone's attention.

"All right, you hooligans! Miriam over here is obsessed with pub quiz," she said, and Miriam whooped. "That means, while all of her friends and family are gathered, you're going to fulfill one of her life dreams and let her beat you all at trivia."

"Hey!" Miriam shouted. "They're not going to let me beat them! I'm going to beat them fair and square!" Then she turned to Tara and said, "You're on my team."

Tara smiled a smug smile. "Oh, we're going to kick everyone's ass so hard."

They high-fived each other. And then proceeded to absolutely destroy everyone in the bar at trivia—the winning question was about women's basketball.

Elijah Green, who appeared to take trivia as seriously as Miriam, looked at Tara with an appraising eye. Holly watched them all play, laughing and throwing straw wrappers at each other and arguing playfully over answers. She watched Noelle step in to settle disputes like she was breaking up squabbling siblings, and laugh until she cried when Tara said something hilarious.

Holly hadn't even known Tara could be hilarious, and honestly it was really hot. This version of Tara, that let her shoulders down from around her ears and unclenched her jaw and played, was like a magnet whose pull Holly couldn't resist.

A couple of hours later, when everyone was packing up so they could explore the rest of Advent, Ernie flagged her to stay back. Tara hung back, too.

Ernie handed her a cup of coffee and tried to hand her tips.

"I'm not taking these," Holly said, pushing them back across the table.

"You earned them," Ernie offered. "You hustled your ass off, and we would've been lost without you. You're a hell of a waitress."

Holly acknowledged this with a nod. "I'd better be, after all these years, or it would be time to find a new job."

"Well, if you ever want to spend some time in a small town in the mountains, I'd give you an apron in a minute."

"That's very kind." It would be easy to take Ernie up on that generous offer. She liked it here, and Ernie would be an amazing boss. "I just left a job because I wanted to do more baking, though."

"Not a lot of need for baking in a dive bar," Ernie conceded. "Collin might need a baker. But what you need is to take these tips."

Holly shook her head and sipped her coffee. "I don't take money when I do favors for friends."

"Are we friends?" Ernie asked, a laugh in her voice.

Holly nodded emphatically. "We're going to be."

"Okay, friend, do you want to do me one more favor?"

"Hit me."

Ernie suddenly looked much shyer than Holly would have guessed she could. "Will you find out for me if the hot chef is single?"

Holly was taken aback. "I'm pretty sure Levi is, like, very married."

"Ew! Not that guy!" Now Ernie laughed full-out. "Lawrence. He's so cute."

"I will absolutely put in a good word for you if I meet him," Holly assured her.

They had a moment where Holly felt they were kindred spirits, a friendship immediately formed. Her heart clenched. Maybe Tara was right, and she did need friends.

Tara had been watching all of this with a little smile on her face. Holly leaned over and kissed the edge of it, startling her. It seemed to Holly that outside of the bedroom and shows for public consumption, Tara wasn't that comfortable with being shown affection through touch. She wondered if it was because no one but Cole ever bothered to touch her, or if she genuinely didn't like it. But then, Tara smiled full-on at her, and leaned back in for a real kiss. Her eyes, locked with Holly's, were crinkled with pleasure at the edges.

"You're always doing kind things and hoping no one notices," Tara told her.

"I'm not doing it for kindness's sake," Holly said. "I'm doing it because it needs to be done, and I can. No notice necessary."

Tara looked at her for a long moment, those blue eyes boring into her, as if she wanted to say something else, but she seemed to think better of it. Instead, she picked up Holly's hand and kissed her palm.

"Get a room!" Sawyer said.

"We have one!" Tara laughed. "And I think getting back to it is the exact right idea."

Holly loved this plan. The family and friends were still exploring the town, and dinner was not for hours.

They hauled ass back to Carrigan's and, once there, Holly pulled Tara into their room, tugging at her clothes and running her hands up Tara's stomach.

"Sloane," she whispered, "let's get this off."

Tara grabbed her hands, interlacing their fingers. She held them up above Holly's head before leaning in to kiss her. Nipping on her lower lip, she pulled away.

"I promised Miriam and Noelle that we would actually make it to dinner tonight, which means we are not taking our clothes off."

Holly pouted.

"What we are going to do, is take your shoes off. Because you have been on your feet way too long."

This, Holly couldn't argue with. She sat down on the bed to pull off her boots, and Tara pushed her back against the pillows. Taking Holly's feet in her hands, she pulled off the socks and began massaging her feet.

At first, Holly was appalled. This perfectly put together, never mussed woman with the impeccable hair, eyeliner wings that could cut someone, and unstained white sofa was rubbing her dirty, aching feet. She let her head fall back and moaned.

"Does Miriam know you can do this? Because I'm starting to question her judgment in choosing Noelle."

Tara gasped playfully. "You weren't already questioning it? I'm obviously the superior catch. I mean, except that Noelle is hot, funny, well-read, successful, emotionally mature, and went to Yale."

"You went to Duke law," Holly reminded her. "And you're all those things."

"Maybe not emotionally mature," Tara said wryly. "I'm still trying to both rebel and win my mother's approval at the same time."

Holly acceded to this point with a little nod. "Noelle might be further along her self-knowledge journey, but it's not like Miriam was any great shakes in that area. And she does seem to be smack-dab in the middle of trying to figure out her own mom issues."

"Meanwhile, all of them are trying to figure out their Cass issues, whether it's rebelling, seeking her approval, or some mixture," Tara conceded.

"I don't really understand the whole Cass thing," Holly admitted after a couple minutes of being rendered unable to speak by Tara working the pain out of her calves.

"Just wait. I guarantee that now that everyone's here, dinner will turn into the Cass Carrigan remembrance hour. I only spent, like, twenty-four hours here a year ago, and if there's one thing I know, it's that these people love to talk about Cass. They don't even know they're doing it. I don't think I've ever had a phone conversation with Hannah that didn't invoke her name."

"How often do you talk to your ex's cousin on the phone?" Holly asked. She knew they were friends, but she couldn't gauge how close they were, because once again she was caught between Tara's version and everyone else's.

"A couple times a week?" Tara guessed. "We always talk on Tuesdays when Miriam and Noelle are at trivia, but sometimes we talk other days, too. We're each other's outside-the-bubble friends, and we can be as petty as our hearts desire together."

Holly stared at her in horror. "Why don't you text like normal millennials? Or send voice memos?"

"We do." Tara moved from her feet up to her calves, and Holly shut her eyes, dropping her head back against the headboard. "Plus, they added me to the Carrigan's group text, and they keep adding me back every time I take myself off. But sometimes it's nice to hear someone's voice."

Shuddering, Holly shook her head. "I'll take your word for it." It was truly extraordinary that Tara's belief in her own unlikability had managed to, thus far, survive the love onslaught that was the Carrigan's friend group. "Now. My feet feel wonderful, but do you think you might want to make the rest of me feel wonderful, as well?"

"Hmm," Tara said thoughtfully, "I do charge more for full-body massages."

"Oh? And what could your payment possibly be?" Holly asked, running her hands up Tara's arms as Tara crawled up from the bottom of the bed to hover over her, boxing her in.

Tara smiled wolfishly. "I charge in kisses. And my prices are very steep."

"Gosh, it's a hard call, but I think I'm up for paying it." Holly wrapped her arms and legs around Tara and brought their bodies flush.

Dinner was, in fact, a flood of reminiscences about the Carrigan matriarch. After dancing around the world under the stage name Cass Carrigan, Rivka Rosenstein had decided that, rather than joining her family's bakery business, she wanted to own a Christmas tree farm and Christmas-themed inn, because it would allow her to contain most of her business to a few months of the year and leave the rest open for travel. She'd opened Carrigan's Christmasland in the early sixties and then, in the late seventies, Ben Matthews and Felicia Cohen, teenagers from Advent, had come to work for the summer. They fell in love—with the farm, with each other, and with Cass—and they stayed and raised a family there.

The stories everyone told painted a picture of an eccentric misanthrope, an Auntie Mame type who arrived auspiciously in people's lives to save them from drowning (usually emotionally or financially, but at least once literally). She collected misfits, loners, weirdos, and revolutionaries.

Holly noticed that, while Mr. and Mrs. Matthews and the younger Matthews twins, Joshua and Esther, listened with happy smiles, Levi stood in the corner, his head buried in his wife's shoulder and, judging by his shaking, weeping. Noelle walked up to them and enveloped both him and Hannah in a hug, rocking them gently. Holly wondered if there wasn't more complicated grieving going on, with the last generation of children who had grown up here.

It wasn't any of her business, but it helped her remember that this place, magical though it might seem, was built and run by humans—fallible, difficult humans who loved and hurt and lived and died like everyone else.

Kringle yowled at her feet. Well, fallible humans and a perfect cat. She gathered him in her lap and kissed his head.

"Do you miss her?" she whispered into his gigantic ears. He rubbed his cheek against hers and chirped mournfully.

It was a shame that Kringle couldn't stand up and tell his own Cass stories. Holly would bet his were wilder than anyone's.

She sent a picture of him to her sister, with a chair for scale, and instead of a text back, she got a call. Slipping into a hallway corner, behind a garishly decorated tree, she answered.

"What is this wild place?!" Caitlin asked. "I need to hear everything, especially about Tara."

Holly smiled involuntarily. "She's… pretty amazing. I don't think I've ever met anyone easier to like but harder to get close to."

Her sister barked out a laugh.

"What?"

"You're describing yourself, Holly!" Caitlin told her. "Everyone likes you, but as soon as anyone tries to breach those impenetrable walls, you pull out the knives and throw them as you run. You won't even wear the clothes you really like in case someone guesses who the Real Holly is."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Holly couldn't argue, because that was definitely what she did. "It doesn't matter with this one, though. She just… she hates her life, and I don't think I want to be a part of it."

"Sounds like an excuse to me! Maybe if you really like her, she'll make you actually put in the work."

What the hell? That, she could argue with. "I work my ass off, Caitlin. I have since I was twelve and got my first under-the-table job, remember? So we could get new backpacks for middle school?"

"You do work hard, at your job. And not at all at anything that involves emotional vulnerability," Caitlin said. "Which is kind of ironic for someone who says they don't dream of labor!"

It was a low blow to quote James Baldwin at her.

"Look, I know you don't want to hear this, but most people aren't naturally good at friendship or romantic relationships. Lots of people get mean when they're scared or feel threatened. And they work hard to stop. You can be a different partner this time, but you have to actually try. Or you can be a jerk to this girl, too, and mourn her for ten years like you have with Ivy."

Caitlin wasn't saying anything Holly hadn't begun to ask herself as she spent more and more time with Tara. She kicked the tree in front of her in frustration, and a shiny pink ball fell to the ground and shattered. Shit. She hadn't meant to break their ornaments.

"I'm hanging up now, Cait. I'll call you never!"

"I love you!" Caitlin said as Holly hit end on the call.

She rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes, not ready to go back out into the crowd. It was true that she was scared she hadn't changed. But that wasn't the real issue.

The real issue was she could change into a whole different person, one who was kind, emotionally generous, open, loyal, and she would still never be Marriage Material for Tara. So why try?