Page 32 of Hers for the Weekend

Through the bathroom door, she heard Holly’s voice murmur and then Cole’s shout. Well, it was Cole’s normal volume; it was just several times louder than anyone else’s.

“Everyone is needed at breakfast immediately! It’s Mimi’s birthday and Mrs. Matthews has prepared a surprise! It’s blintzes! Which I think is a weird surprise but apparently Mimi loved them as a child!”

He knocked, then yanked the door open without waiting for an answer. Only because she’d been prepared for him to do this did she not burn herself on her flat iron. “Your hair is straight enough!” he declared. “We must celebrate the perfection that is Miriam Blum! MOVE YOUR CUTE BUTT!”

Tara looked down and realized she was still in her bra and slip. She sighed. “I don’t have clothes on.”

Cole pouted. “But we’ll be late, and I won’t see Miriam’s face when she sees the blintzes! You can’t do that to me!”

“Well, go without me. You don’t need me to go down to breakfast,” Tara said, unplugging and stowing her flat iron and checking her mascara while they talked. She’d spent most of the past two hours on her makeup, but a femme needed her face on, after all.

“I do need you! I have been without you for months! Months! I have not touched your beautiful face since May!”

Tara shook her head, patting a tiny bit more cream blush into the apples of her cheeks. “You know I don’t like it when you touch my face. You have to stop touching people’s faces.”

“That’s not what Sawyer says!” he singsonged.

She watched him in the mirror. He wasn’t going to budge. “You’re standing in front of my dress.”

Reaching back over his head with his immense wingspan, he whipped it at her. She pulled it over her head, and he zipped her up while she put on lipstick. From the room outside, Holly said, “Wow. Y’all are truly one person in two bodies.”

“Unkind,” Tara accused, patting Cole to get him to move out of her way. She sat on the bed to slip on her flats and noticed that Holly had dressed and fixed her hair while Tara had been in the bathroom. Disappointing.

Reaching into her suitcase, Tara produced a ceramic doll nearly the size of Kringle. It had a cap of frizzy blond hair and giant blinking green eyes, and wore a lavender dress with layers of lace in the petticoat. She set the doll on her lap to straighten its dress, and both Cole and Holly recoiled.

“You stole the doll! Wait, you stole from a Daughter of Bilitis?!” Holly sounded both proud and horrified.

“You met a Daughter of Bilitis?” Cole asked. “Wait! Back up! You stole? Without me?! I thought you were on the straight and narrow. Also, importantly, we need to immediately call a priest for an exorcism. Never mind Miriam’s birthday.”

These two. Tara shook her head. “I paid Barb for this doll, fair and square. I don’t steal anymore.”

“We stole a truck last Thanksgiving!” Cole reminded her.

She glared at him. “I don’t steal from nice lesbian ladies who offer us hospitality. And we can’t exorcise whatever ghost is probably in this doll before celebrating Miriam’s birthday, because the ghost is the birthday gift.”

Many birthdays, Tara had dragged Miriam to some society party or law firm dinner in lieu of celebrating, because the holiday season was peak schmoozing time. Even when she’d taken Miriam out for a nice birthday dinner, it had been somewhere she could see and be seen. Because they hadn’t been in love, Tara had told herself it was fine to not do anything romantic, but she’d also been a bad friend.

This year, she was determined to make amends. With a ghost.

“I’m mad that this is a much better birthday present than mine,” Cole told her.

“I’m mad that you didn’t tell me it was Miriam’s birthday,” Holly added.

She shrugged. “We can say it’s from both of us. It was your idea, after all, and that’s a couple thing, right? Joint gifts.”

Holly eyed the doll. Its eyes blinked lazily. She shook her head. “You take all the credit, actually.”

Having grown up in a city haunted beyond imagining, one creepy doll barely registered for Tara.

As they left the room, Holly whispered to her, “I get to unzip you from that dress, right? Also, what’s a blintz?”

Mr. and Mrs. Matthews were waiting for them in the dining room along with the guests and the rest of the Carrigan’s staff. A perfectly matched pair of outdoorsy silver foxes, who must be Tara’s parents’ age, the Matthewses had aged gracefully into their love and bodies instead of turning into gin-soaked, Botoxed, fake-tanned wax statues. They were both a little soft and faded, with wrinkles that spoke of laughter, like a perfectly worn flannel. Tara had been deeply jealous, when she’d met them last Thanksgiving, of every kid who got to grow up with them as parents, real or surrogate. Which, according to Hannah, was every kid they’d ever interacted with. To hear her tell it, Ben Matthews had never met a child he didn’t try to be a dad to.

Tara’s own father, like Miriam’s and Cole’s, had never met a child he didn’t actively try to avoid parenting.

The squeal of delight Miriam let out when she walked into a dining room full of singing people and fresh blintzes was very sweet. Her shriek of pure joy when she saw the doll was very gratifying. Kringle came over to investigate, hissed loudly at the doll, and ran away to hide around Levi’s neck.

Levi laughed. “It’s nice to have some real ghosts in this hotel, not just the ghosts of our pasts.”

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