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Hannah
The day after the Cupcake Festival, while Levi went to hang out with Laurence, Hannah was supposed to be prepping for Delilah Davenport’s bachelorette party, but she wasn’t.
Instead, she was hiding in the same way she’d been hiding all her adult life, by doing room turnover and making every guest room at Carrigan’s absolutely, unassailably perfect. She pulled hospital corners so tight she could hear the sheets creak. Kringle was helping by walking through every room and yelling at the top of his lungs, presumably because he couldn’t find Levi.
Each week, they’d been watching him compete against some of the best chefs in the southern hemisphere. His parents put the show on the big TV in the lounge, and everyone gathered around to see if he’d been eliminated. It was down to the top five now, from sixteen original contenders, and he was still strongly in the running. The Chef Matthews on her TV was dynamic, snarkily hilarious, addictively watchable. She didn’t think it was because she was in love with him; he had a star quality that screamed that cooking on TV was his destiny. She understood why Food Network was desperate to get him in to film a pilot.
While they watched, he filled them in on backstage friendships, dramas, the people who’d hooked up, the bonds he’d formed. She watched his face light up while he watched people he obviously thought of as family. Every week, she’d watched him and wondered,How can he be happy here?Not only because he hated Carrigan’s, or because of his wanderlust, but because he was obviously made for a life he couldn’t have if he stayed. She’d already let him go once, tried to get him to leave for good so he could be free, and he’d come back telling her he wasn’t interested in freedom.
But watching him on TV made her more scared than ever that no matter how much he said she was his future, she could never be future enough.
He wanted her to choose him, but how could she if it kept him from this?
Miriam swept into the room she was working on, her hair flying in front of her. As a person with an objectively absurd amount of hair on top of her head, Hannah appreciated that her cousin was committed to having more hair than her head seemed able to support. She wondered if it was somehow Cass’s influence that they both felt compelled to have some part of their appearance that no one could ignore.
She winced, thinking about how Cass had always said every woman should have a signature. A scent, a lipstick, a type of hat. One thing that would make people remember them even when they weren’t there. She’d taken that as an unquestionable truth, as she’d taken so many things Cass said, and here she was, with iconic (and annoying) hair and smelling like roses, only to remember that not everything Cass said was trustworthy. How many decisions had been guided by their flawed belief in Cass’s wisdom?
All of them had made choices because of their faith in her. It made Hannah want to reevaluate, not just her hair and her perfume, but her whole life.
“I’ve looked in twelve rooms for you! How are you so fast at turnover?” Miriam panted. “Noelle said you’d fix my scheduling problem.”
Hannah waited while she caught her breath, then threw her a corner of a comforter. “What’s the scheduling issue?”
Miriam put the blanket on, poorly. “My Upcycling for Beginners class is scheduled to start at five on Thursdays but if your local wine thing is starting right before dinner, we won’t have room in the dining room for people from my class who want to stay to eat. Also, apparently some people want to do both instead of driving up here for only an hour.”
Overbooked classes was a good problem to have, and guest logistics was something she could fix in her sleep.
They tossed around some ideas while Miriam tried to help her finish turning over the room. In truth, she slowed Hannah down, but it was still kind of nice to have the company. Part of why she’d been so broken when Levi left was that Miriam was gone, too, and with them, everyone who had truly known her all her life. She’d lost both the people who understood exactly who she was, and then she’d lost Cass.
But now Miriam was back and, awkward as it sometimes was trying to reintegrate into each other’s lives after a decade, her presence made Hannah feel less off-kilter. Less like she had to somehow stuff Levi into the gaping wound of her soul in a desperate attempt to staunch the bleeding.
“So…Blue,” Miriam said into the silence of a new empty room. “I assume you’re thinking about Blue, anyway, because you kind of trailed off and are staring into the corner.”
Hannah sighed. It always came back to Blue. “What about him?”
“You’re going on dates or something? How isthatworking out?”
Hannah laughed helplessly. “I don’t know, he called a Shenanigan…He’s so dead set on the idea of proving he’s different now and that we could be different.”
“Well,” Miriam said slowly, “he does kind of seem like he’s grown up a lot. I mean, I don’t know how you were together before, but I don’t see this destructive supernova Noelle seems to see. Actually I’m not sure Noelle even sees it anymore, she’s just kind of a mother hen.”
“Can I ask you something?” Hannah said. “Not to put you in the middle, but…you’re the least biased of everyone here, and you know us the best.”
“Oh, now I’m a neutral party, and not Team Levi?” Miriam ribbed her.
Hannah rolled her eyes. “I apologize for implying you love him more.”
“It’s fine, Blue can make anyone their worst self. Or their best. It’s a special skill, really. What’s the question?”
“Whatdowe look like to you, from where you’re standing?”
Miriam tilted her head back, her hands in her hoodie pocket, rocking back and forth on the heels of her Chucks.
“Both of you are always in motion, always buzzing and spinning and planning and working. And when you’re together, you’re still. Like the magnetism between you interrupts your constant movement, forcing you to be in the moment. It’s probably really uncomfortable. I myself avoid being present in my body whenever and however possible. But it might be crucial to your happiness.”
Hannah shook her head because wasn’t that how they’d gone wrong before? “I don’t want him, or anyone, to be crucial to my happiness. I want to be complete, by myself. Just Hannah.”
“I don’t know if that’s how we work, Nan,” Miriam said. “I mean, I get it. I empathize. But we’re an interconnected web of existence sort of people. It takes a village to raise a Rosenstein girl.”
