“Of course,” he says. “It was probably unfair of me to show up like this, but wild horses, you know.”
“We’ll ride them someday,” she says. It’s a song that’s so much their song she hasn’t been able to listen to it in thirty-five years; whenever it comes on the car radio, she changes the station.
Hollis turns to see Tatum and Kyle kissing goodbye, and she feels seventeen again.
Jack gets in the car. “Come on, Mom and Dad!” he calls out the window.
At that moment, Dru-Ann steps out of the guest cottage and thinks, What fresh hell is this?
Jack waves. “Hey there, Dru-Ann, it’s Jack Finigan.”
There’s a name from the past, Dru-Ann thinks. She squints at the bald dude and, wow, she gets sucked right back in time.
Jack Finigan shows up halfway through their first semester at UNC in his father’s pickup (which, it turns out, he’s driven seven hundred and fifty miles without permission). He knocks on the door of Hollis and Dru-Ann’s dorm room in Old East holding a bouquet of red roses that he must have grabbed out of a plastic bucket at the Kroger on Shannon Drive because the stems are still dripping. Hollis is at her American lit seminar and will be gone for two hours. The kid’s face crumples at this news. Honestly, he looks like he’s going to cry, and Dru-Ann can’t stand to see anyone cry. She’s happy for a distraction from her macroeconomics reading, so she takes Jack on a tour of the campus; she shows him Old West, Wilson Library, the Dean Dome (of course), the bell tower, and the Old Well.
“This used to be an actual well that students back in olden days would dip a ladle in and drink from,” Dru-Ann tells him. Now it’s a water fountain, and during freshman orientation there was a line a mile long. Supposedly, drinking from the fountain as a freshman meant you would have a 4.0 GPA, and most people, including Hollis, just could not help themselves.
Jack gives the Old Well one second of his attention. He couldn’t care less, and can Dru-Ann blame him? He’s there only to see Hollis. Hollis has a collage of photos on the wall over her bed, and Jack appears in nearly all of them, but Hollis told Dru-Ann that they broke up right before she left.
Broke up, Dru-Ann thinks—and yet this poor kid drove thirteen hours, stopping only to relieve himself and buy those sad-ass flowers.
When Hollis gets back from class and sees Jack, she gasps and hugs him and seems overcome… but not entirely happy. The two of them go for dinner at Hector’s, and as they’re walking back to the dorm, Hollis breaks Jack’s heart (again). But Hollis is the one who stays up all night crying, and she keeps the roses on her desk until they wither, then presses the damn things in her copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
After winter break, the collage comes down and is replaced by Monet’s water lilies. But for the next three and a half years, every time Hollis gets drunk, who pops up in the conversation? Jack Finigan. He’s not exactly the one who got away, but he’s something. Dru-Ann will tolerate five minutes, sometimes ten, of Jack-talk, but that’s her limit. The best thing about Hollis falling in love with the cute surgery resident in Boston, Matthew Madden, is that Dru-Ann no longer has to hear about Jack.
Except now, here he is.
Dru-Ann strides over to Hollis, Tatum, and her husband (they’re the kind of couple who share an e-mail account, Dru-Ann can tell) and says, “The boys have to go. Now.”
“You’re not in charge this time, Dru-Ann,” Tatum says.
It’s nice to see you again too, Dru-Ann thinks. “Hello, Tatum,” she says, though she knows enough not to try to hug the woman. Dru-Ann hasn’t seen Tatum since Hollis’s wedding. Back then, Tatum low-key-hated Dru-Ann, and from the sound of things, maybe she still does. She and the rest of the world now have that in common.
Tatum responds with a side-eye, but the good news is that the hubby gets in the car and backs out of the driveway, and at the same time, Brooke pokes her head out the front door and says, “What did I miss?”
“Nothing,” Dru-Ann says. “Let’s get this party started.”
15. Airport Drinking
Gigi always feels liberated strolling through airports in her civilian clothes, and for this trip she’s traded her work luggage—tight, stacked black bags—for her personal luggage.
This trip is personal.
She flies first class from Hartsfield to Logan, cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, not a single bump. The left chair, Bruce, and the right chair, Craig, are known to be the smoothest fliers in the company; rumor has it that Bruce grows very annoyed when his coffee spills. They arrive eighteen minutes early. When this happens, it can be challenging to find a gate, but A7 is magically free and Gigi is the first one off the plane. It’s almost too easy.
She makes her way to Terminal C, where she checks in for her Cape Air flight aboard a nine-seater Cessna (it’s essentially, she thinks, a toy plane). She’s booked on the 3:25, which lands at 4:15. She still has an hour to kill so she goes to Legal Sea Foods, orders a lobster roll and a bloody mary, and asks herself for the three thousandth time what she’s doing.
She’s going to meet her dead lover’s wife.
With the first sip of her bloody, Gigi is transported back to the horrible evening of December 15.
Against Gigi’s better judgment, she goes to the Hungry with Hollis website. After her conversation with Matthew that morning, she vowed never to visit the website again, but with the weekend in front of her now unexpectedly free, she stares at the Kitchen Lights map. There are bright spots across the U.S. and Canada—and even in Australia, Brazil, Guam. Gigi imagines people standing in front of their cutting boards with half a stick of butter, an onion, a pile of button mushrooms, their kitchens bright and warm.
Gigi zooms in on the Boston area looking for Hollis’s house. Hollis is, no doubt, preparing for the annual Shaw–Madden holiday party. Gigi has heard all about it.
There’s a dense concentration of lights on in and around Boston, and as Gigi is zooming in, trying to figure out which light, if any, belongs to Hollis, a message appears on the Corkboard. It’s from Hollis herself.
To the Hungry with Hollis community:
My husband, Matthew, passed away this morning unexpectedly. I need to ask for privacy as I grapple with this devastating tragedy. I’ll be stepping away from the website for a while, as I’m sure you’ll all understand. I hope to return at some point, though right now, I can’t imagine when.
Hold your loved ones close.
With gratitude, Hollis
Gigi’s mouth drops open. She screams. She snatches up her phone, calls Matthew, and is shuttled straight to voice mail. This is wrong, she thinks. Matthew has not “passed away”; Gigi spoke to him that very morning. She calls his cell phone again. Again, voice mail—but this makes sense. After their conversation, he must have blocked her. But he’s not dead—how can he be dead? Gigi rereads the post on Hollis’s website, thinking there must be a mistake, Hungry with Hollis has been hacked. Passed away this morning unexpectedly… grapple with this devastating… The condolences are starting to roll in. Is this real, then? Gigi scoops up Mabel and squeezes her too tight; Mabel shrieks and leaps to the ground. Gigi googles Matthew’s name but all that comes up is the link for Mass General, for Harvard Medical School, for the paper he delivered in San Francisco that past November. Gigi had met him there; they’d gone to the symphony together, then ordered room service at their suite at the Four Seasons. The next day they rented a convertible and drove to Napa. The autumn colors were breathtaking, the lunch at Bouchon sublime.
Gigi paces her house, thinking, What do I do? Who do I call? The only people in the world who know about Gigi’s affair are Tim and Santi. Should she run down the street and tell them? No, not yet, she’ll wait until she knows for sure. When will that be? Nobody in Matthew’s life is going to call her. No one knows she exists. And also, who is she kidding—Hollis wouldn’t lie to two million people about her husband passing away. Matthew is dead. But how? What happened?
She lies on her sofa and drifts in and out of sleep until the sun comes up. For a moment, Gigi isn’t sure why she’s not in her bed. Then it lands with a sickening thud: Hollis’s message. In the morning light, the idea of Matthew passing away unexpectedly is newly heinous and also newly inconceivable. Gigi doesn’t believe it. But when she goes to her computer, she sees the obituaries. Killed in a one-car crash on the morning of December 15.
No, Gigi thinks.
Then she recalls the start of their conversation: Matthew had told her it was snowing.
He crashed. He’s dead.
After listing all Dr. Madden’s honors and accolades, the papers report that he is survived by a wife and daughter.