Page 83 of Hers for the Weekend

“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.

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