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“I honestly don’t know.” She sank onto her desk as she talked. “We got married on a whim, and only at the JP, so we thought, we won’t really be married until we have a rabbi, but we’ll have this little thing that’s only ours.”
Noelle made a disbelieving sound in her throat.
“Because when you live in a hotel with all your friends and family, everyone has an opinion on everything in your life, and no one ever lets you have a relationship between just two people,” she said pointedly. Turning to Miriam, she continued. “Then he left, and we were broken up, you know? It didn’t matter that legally we were married, except as a formality we were going to have to sever at some point. Honestly, I expected him to meet someone else and have me served with divorce papers from wherever he was in the world. I thought if you all knew, I wouldn’t be able to hold anything together at all.” She chewed on the bottom of her braid. “It doesn’t even make any sense.”
“Well,” said Miriam, “I am a professional at keeping gigantic secrets from everyone I love, as you know.”
This was true; she had disappeared for ten years and basically ghosted them all and refused to tell them why until the shit had very much hit the fan.
Miriam unfolded from her seat on the couch, sitting forward so she was looking at her cousin. “And it’s my experience that some secrets are so huge we can’t force them out of our throats until we’ve digested them some. They won’t fit. And there are some realities we’re not ready to face emotionally. We kept a lot of secrets from each other, you and I, for a lot of years. Maybe our family is bad at honesty? Like we weren’t raised with those skills at all? But it’s not actually helping any of us heal to be mad at each other for not doing things we were never taught to do.”
“I love you,” said Hannah, so relieved that Miriam was here.
“I love you, too, but gayer,” Noelle said to Miriam. To Hannah she said, “Look, you two, this is what you do. You get insular and weird and you build a little fort you won’t let anyone into. I’m worried this is one more thing tying you together. You’re terrible for each other.”
“One thing more or less tying us together isn’t going to make that much difference, honestly,” Hannah admitted. She didn’t argue about the fort thing, because that part was very true. She’d done it on purpose, even.
“Can I remind you,” Miriam pointed out to Noelle, “that you hated me when you met me? Maybe you’re not giving him enough of a chance.”
Hannah shook her head. There was no denying that they were absolutely destructive as hell. “Noelle’s right. Whether Levi is really as bad as she thinks or not, he and I together are awful. When the wedding is over, we’re done.”
Noelle scrubbed her face with her hands and shook her head. “I don’t believe you, Nan. Cass was right about him.”
“Cass was right about what?” Miriam asked.
“Didn’t you ever notice they didn’t get along? He hated Carrigan’s, and Cass didn’t like him much. I trust Cass’s judgment. I don’t trust him. And honestly, right now, I don’t trust you, either,” she said to Hannah. “You two do whatever dance you’re going to do, but don’t talk to me about it.”
She stomped out.
“She’ll get over it,” Miriam said. “You know her. Fast temper, fast cooldown.”
Hannah wasn’t so sure about that. Noelle had spent a long time perfecting her hatred of Levi, and she’d trusted Hannah not to keep secrets. Still, she couldn’t fix it now.
“Do you think she’s right?” Miriam asked. “That Cass didn’t like him?”
Hannah shook her head, denying it, even though something about the accusation tickled her subconscious. “I think we would have known that. We were his best friends. I’m his wife.”
“Yeah, because none of us ever kept any secrets from each other,” Miriam said.
“I’m going to deal with this later.”
Right now she had to call Delilah Davenport to tell her she was getting the wedding chef of her dreams.
Hannah, Age 15
She’d finally convinced her parents she should move to Carrigan’s to stay with Cass for high school. After a disastrous freshman year split between Nowhere, Iowa, and Bakersfield (which was a circle of hell), they were off to Nepal and she was off to the Adirondacks. All the Rosensteins would be there for Rosh Hashanah, Miriam would be there for Hanukkah, and before and after and in between there was Sukkot and Homecoming and Halloween and Spring Fling with Blue. Spreading out in front of her, as the road wound up the hill to the big wrought-iron gates, was day after day, weekend after weekend, of riding to school with Blue, getting into Shenanigans with Blue, fighting with Blue over nothing. They didn’t have to hoard their time together, refusing to fight because they only had a few days. They didn’t have to call each other in the middle of the night, leave voice mails that got cut off because they had so much to say. They could just be two wild kids who got each other the way no one else did, be Hannah-and-Blue. Best friends, forever, no matter what.
She walked in the front door and was immediately enveloped in Cass’s caftan and perfume, a swirl of peacock feathers and maybe a boa. She couldn’t tell, it was all color and movement and something tickling her nose. Cass held her face, turning it this way and that while her cascade of rings threw rainbows onto the walls.
“My Hannah girl, you are finally where you belong,” she said, clucking at her nephew, Hannah’s father, for having kept her away for so long.
“Her soul is drawn to Carrigan’s. We must follow our souls,” Cass had said when they’d called to ask if Hannah could move in. “I have been waiting for her. Her room is already prepared.”
The Matthewses came out to greet her, Joshua and Esther peeking their preteen faces around the kitchen door to get a glimpse of the cool, sophisticated, world-traveling teenager who was moving into their home. As if she hadn’t changed their diapers.
She was surrounded by chattering people, then someone took her bag out of her hand, and she turned to see who it was, and it was him. He was taller, thinner, and he’d grown his hair out long and had it in a low bun. He was holding a motorcycle helmet haphazardly in one hand. She knew from his letters that he’d bought a bike for himself from scraped-together tips, that he and Mr. Matthews were fixing it up together. Now the leather jacket he’d bought years ago wasn’t just for show. His eyeliner was smudged like he’d slept in it, his jeans were ripped to shreds, his motorcycle boots were covered in paint.
He looked like some kind of bad boy out of central casting.
