Page 85 of Hers for the Weekend

“I’m sorry, you guys. I shouldn’t have lied to you. I just…”

She couldn’t figure out what to say that would be a reasonable excuse.

Caitlin filled in for her. “Was afraid of getting steamrolled by Mom?”

Holly smiled a little, for the first time all day. Caitlin might give her shit, but she also understood Holly like no one else.

“Hey!” their mom objected. “I only steamroll because I love you all.”

Turning to Holly, Caitlin said, “I thought you liked her.”

“I do like her.” Holly sniffled. “I like her so much. But she wants to change me, and she won’t change.”

Through tears, the whole story (minus the sex pact) poured out. By the time she finished, everyone except Dustin was somehow piled onto her bed, and she was buried in a pile of hugs.

“You should apologize,” her dad said simply.

Holly shook her head. “She needs more time. If she wants to talk to me, she’ll reach out.”

“What I don’t understand,” her mom said thoughtfully, resting her chin on Holly’s head, “is where you got this idea that you’re inevitably going to be unkind to anyone you settle down with.”

“Because she’s really mean!” Dustin yelled.

Her mom threw a balled sock at the door.

“Because I was really mean to Ivy,” Holly corrected.

Caitlin scoffed. “You were a baby. You’re ten years older now. Your frontal lobe is done baking.”

“Cait, lots of people in their thirties are mean as snakes,” Holly reminded her.

“Sure, but those people don’t spend a decade arranging their whole lives so they won’t be mean anymore,” her sister argued. “Don’t you think it’s worth trying to see if you’ve grown?”

From outside the door, Dustin said, “It sounds like she was already a total bitch to Tara. Why would Tara want to give her another chance?”

Holly hung her head. “Dustin’s right.” Those were the worst words she could ever utter, and saying them made her feel like she’d actually, genuinely hit rock bottom.

Her dad waved this away. “Dustin’s never right. You should talk to her.”

“If she calls me first,” Holly said.

All the eyes in the room looked at her with disapproval.

As Valentine’s came, she started to feel comfortable in a way that made her itchy. And she realized it wasn’t the fault of her parents, or Davenport, or even Dustin. It was something inside her that was built for constant change. She’d thought she’d accepted that about herself long ago, but she’d kept trying to find someone or something to blame for it. No blame was needed, though, because it wasn’t a flaw.

What she did need to work on was keeping friendships as her life changed. Because she’d been using her restlessness as an excuse to not get close to people, and she couldn’t keep doing it.

She also realized that the idea of spending years getting comfortable with Tara didn’t make her feel itchy at all, which was a truly depressing realization to have at this point in the situation. Or just in time for Valentine’s Day. Especially when Tara hadn’t called. And she was still too chicken to call Tara.

Her mom, God bless her, had decorated the trailer in red and pink heart bunting and hung a seasonal wreath on the door. When she was younger, she’d thought it was pathetic that her parents lived in a double-wide, but now she was proud of them. They’d looked at their options and done the best they could by their kids. They’d bought the trailer, the nicest one they could with their income, and rented a lot in a safe, quiet neighborhood park. Everyone there had known each other for decades; everyone watched out for each other.

When the kids she’d grown up running around with heard she was back, they’d brought their kids around to meet her. It was nice, and it felt like home—more than Charleston ever had. No one looked askance at the black ink covering her legs, or let their gaze linger on the holes where her dimple piercings used to be.

In fact, she went back to the kid who’d pierced them in high school, who had his own shop now, and got them put back in. Tara had said Holly wasn’t afraid to be herself, but she’d been putting on a show for too long. She’d told herself that the act was to make herself safer at work, to get her more tips, to keep part of her to herself. And any of those would have been good reasons, if they were true. But, like the face Miriam put on for the Bloomers or the Perfect Debutante facade Tara wore for her parents, it was there to stop anyone from being close to her, to keep anyone at all from the real her. Including maybe herself.

She was ready to take her walls down and learn how to be close to people, but she still needed to do it somewhere that wasn’t Iowa, and that wasn’t going to change.

At first, when she left her parents and retrieved her car and all her shit, she thought about going to stay with Barb and offering to cook for her. But that would always be a temporary gig, and Tara’s words were ringing in her ears. She was still waitressing because she was afraid to take a chance on what she wanted, in case she failed. Like she was refusing to take a chance on love because she’d failed at marriage, once, when she was twenty-two.

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