It felt seismic.
Being here, with Hannah and Noelle, claiming a big messy future, was giving her the strength to have this conversation she’d intended to avoid until she died. Their entire lives had been built on a fiction and now they were looking each other in the eye and admitting the emperor had no clothes.
“Do you think we can ever have a relationship?” her mom asked, breaking into her thoughts.
Miriam thought about telling a polite fiction but decided that’s not what they were doing here.
“Not while you’re still married,” she said, honestly.
Ziva nodded.
Miriam wanted to process the end of her engagement and the future she’d envisioned in Charleston as well as the conversation she’d just had with her mother, but Carrigan’s kept distracting her. They were in the thick of the Christmas Festival now. It seemed like most of New York had shown up to get their trees. Miriam had trouble believing their business had declined by half, although Hannah assured her it was true.
There was so much to prep needed to make the guest rooms ready that Miriam wondered what they would have done if she weren’t there. In between it all, she and Hannah tried to fit in brainstorming sessions about Carrigan’s All Year, often during walk and talks or while changing linens. Who would they contact about hosting drag balls? Which area rabbis needed to know they were available for b’nai mitzvah parties? Should they take a break in August or offer day camps for kids who needed some wilderness time before school started?
She met with Elijah and Jason, who were the beating heart of Advent’s social scene (such as it was), about what events people would show up to. She fielded crisis calls from her Old Ladies with one hand while updating cost analyses with the other. She was nonstop from dawn to midnight, and in between, she should have been sleeping.
But when she lay in bed at night, all she saw was Noelle.
In stolen moments, Miriam tried to make art. Her Instagram was full of pine trees, instead of the anything she actually sold to make money. She tried setting up at a back desk in the library but ended up reading. She tried making a space in an unused storage room in Noelle’s work shed, but Noelle kept appearing there, sexy and annoying. Her ass was very distracting.
Miriam finally landed in the barn, setting up a worktable next to the reindeer pens, with a lot of half-finished concept drawings spread out on top. She told herself it would be different if she had all her pieces from Charleston. Then she could finish work she’d already planned. Those items were in limbo, because they’d been stored behind Tara’s house while Miriam worked on the warehouse renovations. Tara wouldn’t let professional art movers onto her property to pack anything for shipping. Miriam couldn’t hold that little pettiness against her.
So, Miriam told herself, she was also in limbo—but she knew it was an excuse. The inn had no shortage of weird, junky antiques, and neither did the surrounding towns. She was just missing her spark.
A few weeks into the Christmas Festival, Hanukkah arrived. Miriam liked Hanukkah, in spite of its minor religious significance, because she liked the candles in dark windows and the joyful eating of fried food. She had so many memories of celebrating at Carrigan’s. Even when the holiday didn’t overlap with Christmas break, Cass would make them all eat latkes and tell the story of the oil. It was an antidote to the Christmas cheer that threatened to overwhelm them. Cass had collected menorahs from all over the world, saying she wanted a menorah from anywhere the diaspora had touched.
“We may go all out for Christmas for the tourists,” she’d explained, “but when it is just our home, we will light up the sky for the Maccabees.” Cass never did anything small.
The first night of this first year without her, they set out the menorahs in the windows, and every member of the family lit one. “Miri and Hannah,” Ziva said, “you must say the blessings. It’s what Cass would have wanted.”
Miriam rolled her eyes at her mom’s pretend benevolence, but she didn’t refuse. They covered their heads and entwined their fingers. “On three,” Hannah whispered, squeezing Miriam’s hand three times. “Baruch ata Adonai…”
Dinner after was chaos.
The Greens came, and Noelle gifted the twins their carved ducks, to their delight and their fathers’ horror.
“If you really loved us,” Elijah told her, “you would not have doomed us to weeks of quacking.”
Noelle didn’t look at all repentant. “I’ll come babysit and they can quack at me.”
“Mr. Matthews,” Jason laughed as he picked up one of the twins from under the table and swung them around, “do you want me to get these little monsters out from under your legs?”
“Don’t you dare!” Mr. Matthews said. “It reminds me of when Esther and Joshua were little. We don’t have enough little people running amok around here, these days.”
“Oh,” Elijah interrupted, “we would be happy to drop ours off any time. You can let them run around the back acreage until they get tired out, and we’ll come back for them.”
“Please do that!” Mrs. Matthews exclaimed, her hands at her heart. “Only one of my children has blessed me with grandchildren, and he’s in the city.”
Jason was short and stocky with the face of a model, with cheekbones that could cut someone. He had midnight dark skin, shining locs, a dimple, and he seemed made of pure charisma.
“Elijah,” Miriam whispered, “your husband is the most beautiful human I’ve ever seen in real life.”
“I know,” he whispered back.
She caught Noelle smiling at this exchange.
“What?” she asked, poking Noelle in the ribs with an elbow. “You have that smug little smirk again.”