Page 52 of Hers for the Weekend

“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.”

---