“I wish we’d have come. Instead we would go to one of dad’s associates’ houses.”
“Not fun?” Noelle guessed.
Miriam huffed out a cynical laugh. “At the party, no matter where he was in the room, Dad was watching. If we did anything he deemed unacceptable—even if we’d done it a thousand times before, even if he’d told us to do it—there would be hell to pay. Driving home afterward, I’d never know what I’d done wrong, but I always knew he was going to find something. And there were going to be consequences. Sometimes, it was only the silent treatment. Sometimes he pulled money from things he’d promised or canceled my afterschool activities or threw out my favorite stuffy while I was at school. Once, after I’d worn a bow on the wrong side of my head, he sold my horse. It was always inventive.
“It would have been great to know we were invited to the Rosensteins,” Miriam concluded, twisting her napkin. “I thought they didn’t want us. To be fair, I didn’t blame them for not wanting to invite Dad.”
“If your dad was at odds with the Rosensteins, why did he come to Carrigan’s? He must have hated Cass most of all,” Noelle asked. She’d wanted to understand Miriam’s childhood, and now she almost wished she knew less. The idea of this funny, creative, sensitive woman as a little girl in a house that tried to break her made Noelle want to cry into her gravy.
“Oh, he did. But he would never let us come up here alone, I think because he was afraid Cass would try to spirit us out of his control. We either came with him or didn’t come at all. That’s why I thought this place would be full of his ghost. It’s not, though. It seems like Cass managed to exorcise him.” Her face had fallen.
Noelle wished she could hug her. She’d known it was more complicated than Miriam choosing to throw away an idyllic life with Cass and the wonderful Rosensteins, but it was so much more than complicated. She’d been right that Miriam was running scared, and it seemed like she might have had good reason.
They all looked around at each other, the sadness a blanket.
“So,” Tara said over a forkful of chicken riggies, “Noelle, tell me about yourself.”
“Well,” Noelle drawled back, “I got my master’s in forestry—”
“From Yale,” Hannah interrupted, because she felt it was her sacred duty to brag on Noelle.
“Fine, fine, I went to Yale,” she said. “It was full of people I hated and guys named Todd. But it was a good program. I had fun. I intended to go into public land management, work for the Parks Service, maybe.”
She’d always wanted to work outdoors, and she’d thought a little cabin on the edge of the Grand Canyon might suit her, with just herself and her books. A meeting in Flagstaff when she got lonely. Unlike people, nature was never a disappointment.
“What happened?” Miriam asked, finally looking up from her plate. She had schooled her features back to neutral, although she was still hunched in on herself.
“My parents died suddenly,” Noelle said. “And we were on pretty shaky terms at the time. I kind of ran away from my life for a while. Spent six years wandering around the world, working on sustainable development farms, being inaccessible to anyone I had an emotional attachment to, basically.”
As she said this, she realized she’d done pretty much exactly what she’d accused Miriam of doing, and maybe to a greater degree than Miriam ever had. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, thinking maybe she’d been judging herself, instead of Miriam.
This dinner had too many emotional revelations. Thanksgiving was the worst.
“How did you end up at Carrigan’s?” Cole looked fascinated, probably because he was imagining himself with a manbun and a puka shell necklace, planting crops next to an adoring vegan girl. She had only ever seen Cole in boat shoes, so she wasn’t sure he was cut out for farming.
“A college friend got married here, and I came back to the States for the wedding,” Noelle explained. “I lost touch with the friend but kept Carrigan’s.”
“Basically, I kidnapped her and made her be my best friend,” Hannah said.
She’d been sucked out of her lonely life path by Hannah—without her she might still be refusing to form emotional attachments, like Miriam. Speaking of Miriam’s questionable emotional attachments…
“What’s your whole deal?” Noelle asked Tara, feeling prickly about how she wasn’t doing anything Noelle could see to soothe Miriam’s pain. It was petty, but Noelle wanted to see if she could get Tara’s ice queen facade to break. “You kind of live off antebellum power and money, right? What’s that like?”
Cole choked on his soda. Hannah put her hands over her mouth.
“It’s shitty, is how it is,” Tara said, meeting Noelle’s eyes. “I went into criminal defense law with an idea about overhauling the whole broken criminal justice system, and I can’t tell if I’m helping at all. I keep ties to my family because I worry that giving up access and leverage won’t help anyone, and it’s better to try to fix it from inside, which might be an excuse. I haven’t figured out what’s right, yet. I don’t spend my weekends assuaging my white guilt by doxxing white nationalists, like some people”—Tara looked pointedly at Cole, who was staring very intently at his plate—“but I try to take cues from the Black leaders in Charleston on how the hell to make it better instead of worse.”
Damn, that was a good answer.
Noelle speared a slice of turkey a little too hard. It almost made her like Tara, which bugged her. She should have gone to Elijah and Jason’s Friendsgiving and avoided this entire scene. She had to stop prejudging people and putting her foot in her mouth. At least now she’d gotten to see a glimpse of what Miriam might see in Tara, which made her less confused about how they’d ended up together. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed the worst.”
“No, it’s fine,” Tara said primly, setting her silverware down on her plate with practiced manners. “I know who my family is. I would have made that assumption, too.”
“What do you do, Cole?” Mrs. Matthews asked, obviously trying to turn the conversation. Cole stuffed a whole roll in his mouth, and then pointed at it to indicate that he couldn’t answer with his mouth full.
Hannah started talking about a new show she and Miriam were watching. They made it to pie without anyone digging further into their family trauma.
The next day was Black Friday, and they were busy with customers for twelve hours. Noelle saw Miriam hauling trees, with no sign of Tara, who they’d stuck at the cash register. She had no idea if Miriam had told Tara what was going on, or what her decision might be about staying.