“Thank you! Exactly.” This was a fight they’d had a hundred times, but now they smiled at each other about it, all the resentment gone. Miriam realized suddenly how many of their fights had really been them trying to say that they fit wrong. “But I’m trying to give myself an opportunity to practice being a little messy, so I don’t get my whole world so twisted around when things don’t go exactly as I planned them.”
“Wow, that’s huge emotional work for you,” Miriam said, impressed. “I’m proud of you.” She raised the mug of coffee that Holly had set down without their having to ask, and Tara tapped it with her own. “Cheers.”
“You, on the other hand, have been working without stopping, even for caffeine, for ten hours. Are you okay?” Tara asked. “I’ve never seen you go without a cup of coffee for more than three hours.”
“I’m both amazing and barely holding it together,” Miriam said. “When I was up at Carrigan’s, there was emergency after emergency, we were juggling the busy season, and I was navigating my mother.”
Now she had breathing room, and she had never been good at allowing herself to live inside of breathing room. But she’d meant what she said to Noelle about liking her new feelings. They were going to take a while to break in, but it was a good kind of discomfort, the growing kind. Miriam was grateful she was being given the chance to practice slowing down.
“You were falling in love,” Tara said. “It was exciting and distracting.” She winked, to show that she wasn’t still upset.
“I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “Yeah. I was. I didn’t mean to be.”
“I know that, sugar, or I wouldn’t be buying you strawberry cake,” Tara pointed out. She stirred an extra Splenda into her coffee, and then another, meticulously tearing the packages, tapping them three times against the side of the cup, and placing them exactly parallel with the edge of table.
“But now,” Tara continued, having sipped her coffee to find it suitable, “you’re here, and everything seems real, and final. It’s a lot of endings in a very short time. You’re feeling itchy and sentimental.”
This might be, Miriam reflected, the most honest conversation they’d ever had about their feelings.
“I lost Cass, and you, and Charleston. Cole is AWOL for who knows how long. It’s just so much.” The words burst forth from Miriam unexpectedly, and she managed not to stamp her foot at the end, but it was a close thing.
“You hate when things end,” Tara paraphrasedBreakfast at Tiffany’s.
“Oh my gosh, that song! It was playing in the bar the night we met. We both liked it, and we ended up talking all night. Shit, we met over a breakup song. What did we think was going to happen?” Miriam laughed.
“Well, you did lose Cass, that’s true,” Tara said, back to enumerating her arguments. Miriam found it comforting now. “I’m right here though. Heck, someday, we might be real close, if we let ourselves be. Cole, well, I’ve known Cole as long as I’ve known myself, and I would bet my retirement stocks he’s going to be knocking on one of our doors before the summer is out.”
“You think so?” Miriam asked hopefully.
“Oh, he’ll be here. Sleeping on my couch and eating my food, even though he has a perfectly good apartment,” Tara assured her. “Charleston isn’t going anywhere, except maybe into the ocean when the sea level rises. And, you also gained a whole damned Christmas tree farm.”
“This is a weirdly good pep talk,” Miriam said. She took a deep breath and felt the darkness of panic receding back into its corners, like the Nothing inThe NeverEnding Story, driven back into its cave.
“I’m a really good ex-girlfriend,” Tara said. “Now. Cake.”
When they left Emma’s, she stopped by the space that would have been Blum Again Vintage & Curios and peered through the windows. Seeing it empty was not as much a knife to the gut as Miriam had been expecting. It was hard, and it hurt, but it hurt because it was real.
She let the visions of all the things this space could have been wash over her: all the people who would have walked in off the street, all the Bloomers who would have made a pilgrimage here, all the friends from around the country she could have welcomed into her space, finally, and offered a cup of tea. She would have most of that at Carrigan’s now, even if it would have a different flavor. More eggnog, less grits. She let all those visions float out into the Atlantic, setting them free.
And on Friday, when everything was on a truck and shipped off to New York, she made her last stop. She was going to services one last time at Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim. When she first moved to Charleston, she wasn’t sure if she’d find a spiritual home, but the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the United States had opened its arms to her. Charleston might always be here (pending global warming) but she would never be a part of it, in this particular way, ever again.
That night, Miriam was kicking off her Chucks when her phone buzzed. She had two text notifications.
True Blue:Are you going to call me? A very large, alarmingly beautiful blond man just showed up on my filming set to yell at me.
How did Cole…Never mind, she didn’t want to know. The second text read:
Santa Baby:I miss you.
She pressed the video call button and braced for the physical jolt she got every time Noelle’s face came on screen. Noelle was pushing the swoop of her undercut off her forehead like James freaking Dean when she answered, and Miriam bit her bottom lip to keep from screaming.
“What? What’s happening? Why are you looking at me like I’m espresso?” Noelle looked behind her, like she was expecting to see something else Miriam would be salivating over.
“I miss touching you.” She knew she was whining, but she figured it was better to be honest about what a schmoopy mess she was.
“Tell me about your day,” Noelle said.
“I went to an Al-Anon meeting! It was good but weird.”