Ernie smirked. “Y’all aren’t nearly as bad as the tourists. What can I bring you?”
Hannah took over. “We want two of the Fried Everything platters, Cass-style, to start with, please, while these hooligans settle down enough to figure out what they want to eat. And, a pitcher?” She looked around, shaking her head at them. “Does everyone but Noelle want beer?”
“Cole also doesn’t drink,” Miriam said. “Bring him anything with caffeine and sugar, he’ll be fine. Wait, what’s Cass-style?” She flipped over the menu, trying to find what she’d missed.
“Everything’s kosher,” Noelle said. “It’s on the secret menu.” Warmth washed over Miriam at the idea that this small-town dive bar had loved her aunt Cass so much, they had a secret kosher menu.
Noelle turned to Cole. “You don’t drink, either?”
Cole was busy building an elaborate structure out of sugar packets. Ernie was watching him like he was an overgrown child who should not be allowed out by himself.
“Nah,” Cole said. “Both my parents are alcoholics, seems like genetic Russian roulette tee-bee-aitch. I mean, never tell them I said that. They don’t think they’re alcoholics, just ‘well pickled.’ Anyway”—he did spirit fingers—“I make enough bad decisions without adding a lack of inhibitions. What about you?”
“I played the game of genetics and lost,” Noelle admitted. “I drank my whole lifetime share of beer before my twenty-first birthday, so now I let other people drink instead.”
Miriam was torn between loving Noelle and Cole bonding and dreading that she had to talk to Tara, pretty much immediately. She turned to Ernie, who was waiting for them to decide, and said, “A pitcher of hot cocoa, if you please.”
Ernie went to leave until Miriam called out, “Wait! This is very important. Is your lipstick transfer proof?” If she was staying here, she was going to start making friends, and this seemed like the place to start.
“It’ll still be on when I’m buried, probably,” Ernie said. “I’ll write all the details on the check.”
“You’re an angel,” Miriam told her seriously.
Ernie looked down at her beer-soaked Ramones shirt, torn-up skinny jeans, and decade-old Chucks and nodded. “I am.”
“Is that why things were tense with your parents? The alcoholism?” Tara asked Noelle, sounding genuinely interested, the ice in her tone thawed. When her hair brushed past Miriam, it smelled like star jasmine, cutting through the grease and hops and musk. The floral smell was comforting, but it didn’t make fireworks explode inside her the way Noelle’s citrus and Old Spice did.
“Pretty much,” Noelle said. “I quit drinking and they didn’t. They always kind of felt like I was abandoning them.” She took all the menus and stacked them precisely on top of each other, lining up all the corners.
Ernie came back with a massive platter of fried foods. Miriam coordinated with Hannah on their complicated childhood dance of mixing the side of ranch with hot sauce and testing it carefully for taste. That familiar ritual, done without thought, opened a door inside Miriam she’d forgotten even existed in the past decade.
You can be known, her heart whispered to her.You can be at home in your skin and stop running.
“Does anyone have functional, happy parents?” Cole asked, waving a fried pickle at the table. “I know Tara and I don’t!”
“I do!” Hannah said, snagging the pickle from him and eating it. “I mean, they dragged me all over the world as a child and now I have crippling panic attacks about the very idea of leaving Carrigan’s, but that has more to do with my anxiety than anything they did wrong. They were doing their best. How were they to know I’d develop a desperate need to control my surroundings?” She laughed hollowly, and then said, too brightly, “Let’s change the subject. Cole! What’s a movie you’ve watched so many times you could recite it start to finish, and none of your friends will watch it with you?”
They played the time-honored xennial game of getting to know each other through beloved nostalgic pop culture (Cole’s answer wasMy Cousin Vinny, Noelle’sDrop Dead Gorgeous).
They were still arguing about the relative merits of Madonna versus early Green Day when their meals came. Hannah and Noelle stood firm with Tara on the side of Green Day, while Miriam and Cole threatened to burst into “Like a Prayer.” Cole stole half of Miriam’s onion rings, Hannah stole half of Cole’s sandwich, and Tara and Noelle swapped pickles for tomatoes.
“How did you guys meet?” Hannah said, gesturing between Miriam and Tara. Tara nodded at Miriam, giving her the reins of the story.
“Cole and I met the first day of freshman orientation, in college,” Miriam said, “and were inseparable ever after. When I needed a place to stay after things exploded with my parents, I went to Cole’s place in Charleston. Tara was at Duke Law but kept coming home for family obligations. They have all the same friends, so we kept running into each other.”
She realized it was more a story about Cole than it was about her and Tara, which probably said something. But how did she explain that she and Tara had seen kindred spirits in each other, each needing a safe harbor in another person who would not press too hard on their open wounds?
While they waited for the check, Cole and Miriam went to find the bathroom, arguing along the way about the best Darcy, a fight they’d been having for years, when someone from behind the bar interrupted, “It’s obviouslyThe Lizzie Bennet Diaries.”
They both spun to find a short man with long, dark hair, an old-fashioned waxed moustache, and a button-down shirt covered in flying pigs, holding a bottle of whiskey and grinning at them—although mostly, Miriam noticed, at Cole.
Cole answered his smile and pointed. “Yes! Miriam,finallysomeone understands!” He moved to shake the man’s hand. “Nicholas Jedediah Fraser IV. Cole to my friends, which you obviously are.”
The man was dwarfed by Cole’s size but seemed totally unfazed by his exuberance. He shook Cole’s hand back, hard. “It is entirely my pleasure, Nicholas Jedediah. Sawyer Bright.” The upward tilt of his head, and the glint in his eye, told Miriam that he was flirting. Miriam wasn’t sure Cole had noticed. Cole’s base interaction with all of humanity looked like flirting to most people.
He winked theatrically at Sawyer and hit the bar with his palm. “To be continued,” he said to the bartender, before he swept away.
When Ernie brought them their bill, Tara, true to form, insisted on paying it.