“I don’t think Miriam is keeping score of who’s better at saying I’m sorry.”
Noelle harrumphed. Hannah rolled her eyes but left her alone with her woodworking. She was going to build a space so perfect for Miriam that Miriam would always want to run toward home, instead of feeling driven away.
Chapter 28
Miriam
Tara opened the door to their—her—Single House and rolled her eyes, hard.
“Do you not have a functioning telephone, Miriam Blum?” she asked, a hand on her hip. “This is the kind of visit about which you forewarn a girl, so she can at least get a blowout.”
Tara’s hair was eerily perfect, as always.
“I came to get my stuff?” Miriam said, apologetically. This house was very beautiful, she noticed, now that she wasn’t trying to live in it. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be home if I warned you, or if you would clear out, and I was hoping to talk to you.”
“That’s the kind of sneaky move I would pull. Shady but smart. I’ll allow it. Your clothes and whatnot are all ready to go, but I haven’t touched your art stuff because I didn’t want to break anything and face an army of angry Bloomers.” She gestured toward the garage at the back of the house.
As Miriam passed through, she noticed a very familiar shadow box over the mantelpiece.
“Tara Chadwick, is that a Blum Again piece? On your wall?” She didn’t think Tara could still surprise her, after all this time. “You hate my art.”
“I never hated it, I just didn’t always understand it,” Tara clarified.
“How did you even get this?” Miriam asked, “Wasn’t it part of the auction?”
“I bid on it,” Tara said, defensively. “I liked it, and you needed the money.”
“I would have given it to you,” Miriam told her. “It pulls the room together. Makes it look homier.”
Tara smoothed down her shirt primly. “I can afford to invest in up-and-coming artists once in a while. Go deal with your shit. I’ll talk to you later.”
Miriam smiled at her and disappeared into the back of the house.
Several hours later, Tara stuck her head in the workroom, where Miriam was carefully packing pieces for shipment to New York. “You look like you could use a cup of coffee and some fresh air. Do you want to walk down to the cafe? I’ll give you that talk you ambushed me for.”
Miriam looked down at herself. She was wearing a white tank top soaked with sweat under a pair of ripped-up, faded overalls, and a pair of Birkenstocks that predated college. Her hair was tied up, Rosie the Riveter style, in an ancient, stained handkerchief. “Do you really want to be seen, or smelled, in public with me?”
“Come on, you’ll make me look great in comparison.”
They walked down to the cafe on the corner in silence. The city around them buzzed with that dusk energy of businesspeople getting off work and looking for happy hour. Miriam realized she was going to miss feeling it in the background of her life. She let the heavy, damp air fill her lungs and tried to remember the smell of summer on the water. It was a city thick with stories, and she hadn’t heard all the ones she’d thought she was going to have time to hear.
They’d taken this route a thousand times, even though they had an espresso machine at the house. Emma’s was their neutral ground, where they went when they needed to hash something out that required French fries. The place was open all night, served a killer selection of cake, and poured decent, cheap coffee.
The staff all knew them by name and did a double take when they walked in together. Tara must have told them they were broken up. “I’m just packing up my stuff,” Miriam called out to their favorite night waitress, Holly.
She turned to Tara. “Hey! Maybe now you can ask Holly out. Huh? Huh? You know you think she’s cute.”
“Holly is a million miles out of my league.” There was a sigh in Tara’s words that Miriam was certain she’d never heard directed at her. She was also certain that was exactly how she herself sounded when she talked about Noelle.
“I’m a little offended,” Miriam said. “It’s true, though, she is.”
They settled in a booth facing each other. The vinyl creaked under Miriam comfortably, and she stored this away as another memory she was going to miss: the incandescent bulbs in sea green glass fixtures swinging from the ceiling, the old mural, lovingly preserved, of a doe leaping over a field of flowers, the perfect tater tots.
“Are you okay? Your eyeliner wings are crooked,” she said to Tara, startled out of her reverie by this alarming incongruity.
“I left them that way on purpose when I messed them up.” Tara winced. “I’m working on this whole living-with-small-imperfections thing. I mean, I don’t leave wet towels on the floor or anything—”
“Of course not; it would ruin the hardwood,” Miriam mocked, gently.