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Hollis opens her mouth to defend herself but before she can speak, Caroline goes on a rampage, accusing Hollis of not loving Matthew enough, not grieving him correctly: “You weren’t even related to him! You’ll find another husband but I will never, ever have another father.”
“I know you’re hurting, darling,” Hollis says, but according to Caroline, Hollis doesnotknow. She doesn’t know anything. Caroline paces the master bedroom like a wild animal in a cage, saying hideous things—everything short ofI wish it had been you instead—but underneath the livid facade, Hollis can see glimpses of a little girl whose world has been broken. Hollis sits on the bed, thinking,I will wait her rage out. I am the adult, the mother, it’s my job to take this punishment.Matthew and Caroline were close; they had a special bond. Matthew was Caroline’s favorite parent.
Hollis says, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s difficult for me to sleep in a room full of Dad’s things… to look at this shirt and know he’s never going to wear it again.” She holds Caroline’s gaze. “I’m doing the best I can not to fall completely to pieces.”
She expects these words will make Caroline collapse in her arms and apologize—but Hollis is so very wrong. Caroline storms from the room with the parting shot “It’s alwaysall about you!” She books herself on the Acela back to New York City three days earlier than planned, leaving Hollis stunned and alone.
The Wellesley police send Hollis an e-mail with the official accident report attached, but Hollis can’t bear to read it. She doesn’t want the details of how fast Matthew was driving or where on Dover Street he lost control or how many times the car spun before it flipped over. (The car did flip over, she knows; the young officer told her this. That’s the only detail she has retained other than the deer, mama and baby, that Matthew swerved to avoid and yet ended up killing anyway.) Hollis yearns to delete the e-mail, then delete it permanently from the deleted-files folder—Matthew is gone, the details don’t matter—but instead, she moves it to a folder labeledMM, where she’s keeping all of the correspondence related to Matthew’s death.
She no longer cooks; she barely eats. Her doctor, Karen Lindstrom, offers to prescribe some Ativan for daytime anxiety, Ambien for sleep. But Hollis doesn’t relish the idea of pills; every once in a while, she’ll pour herself a glass of Sancerre, but this leads her right to places she wants to avoid: the smell of Matthew’s shaving lotion;You’ve changed. And we’ve changed;the knock on the door.
Friends and neighbors check in. What can they do? “Nothing” is the answer—but they offer her advice anyway: yoga, self-guided meditation, grief counseling, essential oils, travel, an ashram, a psychic, knitting.
Knitting?Hollis thinks.
Hollis puts her new cookware line on hold, ditto her plans for a cookbook, her show. What does any of it matter now?
She wonders how her father coped when her mother died so suddenly. She supposes he focused on taking care of Hollis, going to work; in all the years Hollis knew him, he was stoic and steadfast. He didn’t have the luxury of falling apart.
Hollis reaches out to Caroline every few days, but her calls are summarily declined and her texts always garner the same response:OK. Or worse:K. It’s just enough to let Hollis know Caroline’s alive and breathing. Hollis consults Grown and Flown, her favorite website for parenting older children, as she tries to figure out what to do. Should she take the train down to New York and confront Caroline? Should she stop calling and texting? (This feels so cruel—the girl just lost her father.) Should she stop paying Caroline’s credit card? (That would get her attention.) Hollis knows that children are narcissistic, and she understands that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until age twenty-five. Caroline can’t be blamed; she’s still growing. But Hollis wants to cry out:You’re hurting me. This will be easier to get through if we bond together!
Hollis has been trained not to Like or comment on any of Caroline’s Instagram posts, though Hollis checks her daughter’s account several times a day. There’s been only one new post since Matthew died—Caroline wishing her best friend, Cygnet, a happy birthday in Stories. Hollis clicks through it several times, because Caroline has posted pictures of herself and Cygnet as little girls growing up in Wellesley: the two of them in a tent in the backyard, their young faces illuminated by flashlights; the two of them holding the pancake pops that Caroline requested for her tenth birthday. Hollis presses her finger to her phone screen so the picture stays put.I want to go back,she thinks. Back to the days of sleepovers and fancy birthday breakfasts.
Hollis feels like she’s lost not only her husband, but her daughter as well.
The only time Hollis finds even a modicum of relief from her mourning is when she’s texting with a woman who’d reached out to her on her website several months ago—someone Hollis has never met but did not exactly pick out at random either. The direct message fromGigi Ling, Atlanta, Georgia,caught Hollis’s eye. Gigi was the one who told Hollis about the hidden spots along the Buford Highway that serve the best dim sum, bulgogi, and tacos in the entire South. She also recommended Laurie Colwin’s booksHome CookingandMore Home Cooking,which Hollis just adores. (How had she not known about them? Hollis immediately reviewed them on the website and provided a link to buy through Bookshop.org.)
Yes, Gigi Ling is Hollis’s favorite person in the Hungry with Hollis community, though she supposes she shouldn’t have favorites. (A ridiculous notion—everyone has favorites; it’s part of being human.)
A week after Matthew died, Gigi sent her a DM with one simple sentence:I’m here to listen.Hollis had grabbed those words like a life preserver; she realized she’d been waiting to hear from Gigi since she’d posted the news.
From that moment on, they have texted several times a week; Hollis would be happy to text her every day but she doesn’t want to be a burden. Gigi normally checks in on Tuesdays, Fridays, the occasional Sunday evening:Tell me about your day. How goes it? I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.Initially it feels odd texting with a complete stranger, but, Hollis reasons, people do it all the time on dating apps—Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. Soon it feels more liberating than odd. The stakes are low. It’s almost easier to confide in a stranger.
Hollis starts sharing details that are very personal.Things between Matthew and me were… unsettled when he died.
Unsettled how?Gigi texts back.
Hollis describes the ways that she and Matthew had grown distant. Part of it was the usual empty-nest stuff, she says. Caroline wasn’t home to keep them united as a family. Part of it was the world discovering Hollis’s website.
Gigi texts,He must have been threatened by your sudden success.
Had Matthew been threatened? Hollis wonders.Threatenedisn’t the right word—they were, after all, talking about the revered Dr. Madden—but for some reason, Matthew hadn’t fully embraced or supported Hollis’s good fortune. He had been…bemusedby it. And, at times, annoyed. He and Caroline made fun of the unbridled adoration of her blog’s fans. Had Matthew ever said he was proud of what she’d done with the website? He had not.
Over the next few months, Hollis and Gigi’s intimacy deepens to the point where, one day in mid-June, Hollis feels safe telling Gigi about the morning Matthew died—the conference in Leipzig, Dr. Schrader’s Parkinson’s, the holiday party.
I confronted him about my unhappiness as he was walking out the door,Hollis writes.I made his missing our holiday party into a bigger deal than it needed to be. He responded by saying that I’d changed, that we’d changed. I didn’t think this at the time, but I do now, and it haunts me: He was going to leave me. I called him to apologize but he didn’t answer. I left a message and then sent a text saying I loved him. I have no idea if he listened to the message or read the text. I want to believe that he did, but how can I be sure? What I do know is that I made him late. He was speeding on Dover Street because he had a flight to catch. I feel guilty. I feel… responsible.
When she hits Send, she immediately feels unburdened. But she also feels implicated. She has set the thought loose in the universe: She contributed in some small way—or maybe a big way—to Matthew’s death. She’s grateful—oh so grateful—that she didn’t tell Gigi that, only moments before the police knocked on her door, she’d been creeping around Jack Finigan’s Facebook page. She will never tell Gigi this. She will never tell anyone this.
She waits for Gigi to respond to her text with something likeDon’t be silly, Hollis, it isn’t your fault. It was an accident. The road was slick; it was snowing; the deer appeared out of nowhere.But Gigi doesn’t say this, nor does she send the predictable reassurances:I’m sure he listened to your voice mail, played your text over the car’s sound system.For one day, then two, there’s no response, not even three dots in a bubble indicating that Gigi is carefully selecting her words.
Hollis is stung. She crafts half a dozen texts asking what’s wrong, is Gigi okay, has this admission horrified Gigi, does Gigi feel like she’s in too deep? But in the end, Hollis sends nothing. Probably Gigi is just busy. She has a life, after all—though what, really, does Hollis know about her? She’s ten years younger than Hollis, forty-three; she’s single with no children; she has a cat named Mabel; she lives in the Buckhead section of Atlanta; she’s a pilot with Delta Air Lines; she’s not on social media; she heard about Hungry with Hollis from some of her flight attendants, who said it would be worth her time—and it has been, Gigi said. Those are the things Gigi has told Hollis. The things Hollis has gathered are that Gigi reads a lot; she cooks at home and also appreciates fine restaurants; she’s educated, cultured, discerning. But all of their text conversations have been focused on Hollis. No wonder Gigi is ghosting her; she’s probably weary of the one-way friendship.
A week passes without any word from Gigi. Hollis actually goes onto the Hungry with Hollis website to see if there are any Kitchen Lights on in Atlanta. Yes, there are many, but it’s impossible to tell if any of the lights belong to Gigi. Next Hollis checks to see if Gigi has unsubscribed from the blog’s newsletter—but her e-mail is still there, thank God. She probably just has a busy flight schedule or she dropped her phone in the pool or she’s in a new relationship or her cat Mabel died or her father, who lives in Singapore, fell ill. (Gigi mentioned that her mother died when she was young, something else they have in common.)
Hollis tells herself it doesn’t matter, that if it’s meant to be, she’ll come back, or whatever that saying is.
But with Gigi’s absence, Hollis’s mental state deteriorates—and it doesn’t help when she gets a text from Caroline saying:By the way, I’m NOT coming to Nantucket for the summer. I got the internship with Isaac Opoku so I’ll be staying in New York. I’m subletting on East 82nd, it’s $1,800 a month. Thx.
