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“No,” Miriam said, sucking in a deep breath, “but I don’t need to make your grief about my own childhood trauma. I do have a therapist, after all.”
She held out her hand, and he pulled her up. She wrapped her arms around his waist, her head resting under his as they hugged for a long time.
“For what it’s worth,” Miri finally said, “you’re one of my favorite people in the universe and one of the people I most admire and respect. You’ve always been exactly enough for me.”
“It’s worth a hell of a lot,” he assured her, kissing her hair, as the sun came up and bathed them both in brand-new light.
Hannah, Age 20
The instant she turned in her last final, Hannah was on a plane home to Carrigan’s from Amherst. She got to the airport so early that she managed to get on standby for the earlier flight into JFK, so she was there three hours before anyone expected her. When she got off the plane, she thought about dropping in on Blue, since she technically didn’t have to be anywhere yet, but she shook off the impulse. He was in the middle of his finals week, at the end of his junior year in culinary school, and every time she talked to him, he sounded so busy with friends, and work, and being intoxicated by Manhattan.
He was bound by the electricity of the city, its frenetic energy that matched his own. He was always full of stories of things that happened at four a.m. Why would he want boring, needy Hannah to show up from a home he had all but disowned and interrupt his life?
She knew he hated when he had to explain to people what his relationship was to Carrigan’s and the Rosensteins, and food people always wanted to ask her about it. What was it like, being a part of a hundred-year baking legacy, a household name brand, at least in Jewish households? It always raised Blue’s hackles, because he felt the Rosensteins had never let him in as part of the family. It was only sort of true; some of her extended family was snobby and weird about who counted as family and who didn’t, but it wasn’t about Blue. It was just that families are weird, and hers was really big so it had a lot of opportunities for weirdness.
She didn’t want to risk seeing him pretend to be excited she was there, so instead of going by his apartment, she headed to the train station. Besides, Carrigan’s was calling to her, and every minute that she was away hurt.
When she walked in the front door, no one was there to greet her, because it was a summer Tuesday, and no one thought she would be there for hours. She got to stand alone in the foyer and drink in her home. The curving staircase, the great room with the soaring ceilings and three times as many antiques as ought to be able to fit in the space. The sound of Mrs. Matthews’s voice coming from the kitchen competed with the hum of a far-off vacuum cleaner and the filtered-down music from whatever one of the twins was watching in the entertainment area on the landing. She breathed deeply and got goose bumps.
All the tension she carried when she was elsewhere left her body. All of the constant low-grade whir of fear that never left—the fear that somehow, when she was finally free to come home, home wouldn’t be here anymore. She never felt comfortable, completely, when she wasn’t on the one hundred sixty acres of Carrigan’s property, even when she was happy. Even when she was having fun.
She was always worried she’d dreamedCarrigan’s, and she would wake up and it would never have been there.
“Hannah-Nan-Banan-NanNan-Mo-Hannah!” Miriam’s voice came, jubilant, from the kitchen. “You are EARLY!”
Miriam’s curls came bounding, bouncing with their own life.
“Doesn’t Northwestern get out in mid-June?” Hannah asked. She wasn’t sorry to see her cousin, but she’d been looking forward to some Carrigan’s time to herself.
“Yes, technically that’s true,” Miriam said, doing jazz hands with fingers covered in paint, “but I had a self-created long weekend and I knew you were coming home. I missed you. Tell me everything! Is hospitality management everything you dreamed?”
“We talked on the phone last week and emailed yesterday, Miri. There’s nothing new to say,” Hannah pointed out, but Miriam waved her off and dragged her to the kitchen, where they settled in on the old circular booth and Mrs. Matthews gave them cookies.
“I like it a lot,” Hannah told her cousin. “It turns out living in hotels around the world for most of my childhood has given me a lot of Opinions about how they should be run.”
“You?! Opinionated about how things should be run? I’m shocked. This is my shocked face,” Miriam teased.
“This summer, Cass is going on some kind of river cruise down the Danube and I get to practice being in charge while she’s gone. I’m getting credit for it as an internship, which is kind of cheating, but I’m not going to argue.” She tried sounding chill about it.
“Are you sure you want to come back here? I mean, I love Carrigan’s, too, but…is Cass pressuring you? My dad is desperate for me to come work in the family business, but I’m taking a couple of years off and moving to New York, trying to figure out if business is really for me.”
Business was absolutely not for Miriam, and they all knew it, but none of them knew how she was going to get herself out of that expectation on her father’s part. He was very scary.
“No, Cass actually wants me to work other places first. She’s definitely not pulling a Richard.”
“Okay, but doyouknow you don’t have to be here for Carrigan’s to function?”
“Uh, logically? Yes.” She knew it wasn’t a rational fear, that Carrigan’s would float away into another dimension if she wasn’t there to anchor it. The fear had started being noticeable as soon as she’d left for college, although maybe it had started when she was a kid and that’s why she’d been constantly trying to get back. She would lie awake in her dorm bed imagining Cass was sick, or Mr. Matthews had taken a fall, or the reindeer got out—anything that could go wrong, and she knew in her bones if she were there, it would have been prevented. She’d even tried to talk to a counselor at her college’s student health center about it, but they hadn’t helped much. “I can’t shake the anxiety that I have to be at Carrigan’s, keeping it safe, making sure it keeps going.”
Hannah knew she was a little tightly wound for a twenty-year-old. Or, probably for anyone. This didn’t bother her. She liked to be organized, to have a plan, to know what was going to happen next. She liked having agency in her life, and not being surprised. She didn’t need to have taken Psych 101 (although she’d aced it) to understand that her childhood of adventure had made her a little controlling about knowing what was coming next in her life.
That was fine.We all grew the anxieties of the soil in which we were planted.These were simply hers.
“Okay, well, you know I’ll always be here if you need me. And Blue, too. We’re your crew forever,” Miriam said, squeezing her hand. “And now you’re here for the whole summer!”
She was here for the summer, and soon she would be done with school. She would never have to leave again if she didn’t want to. Then, the only thing in her life to ever knock her off-kilter would be Blue Matthews. But he was going to graduate from culinary school, travel the world, and only come back to see his parents.
She would have a chance to get over him, to finally be okay with the fact that he was never going to love her in the way she loved him. She was going to find her equilibrium around Levi Blue Matthews if it killed her. That was the last step in her plan to have a surprise-free life.
