“Lately, you’ve been making anything but me a priority,” she said. “Work, travel, and now Dr. Schrader.”
“The man was my mentor, Hollis. Berlin is a two-hour drive from Leipzig. It would be egregious not to visit him, considering the circumstances.”
Instead of conceding this point, Hollis launched into her graver concerns. She had felt them drifting apart ever since Caroline left for college. Hollis had always dreamed of a marriage just like Matthew’s parents had—they were romantic and devoted to each other to the very end.
But when, Hollis wondered, was the last time their marriage had felt romantic? It would be romantic if Matthew canceled this trip, but that wasn’t going to happen. She could tell simply by the set of his shoulders, his jaw; he was eager to get out the door.
“Sometimes it feels like we’re nothing more than roommates,” Hollis said. She was tempted to mention how long it had been since they’d had sex, but that was as much her fault as his. During the day, she was busy, busy, busy and she fell into bed exhausted every night.
Matthew did his doctor’s trick of appearing to listen but not, which was how Hollis knew he wasn’t engaged; he was just waiting for her to be done, which was equal parts infuriating and disheartening. Matthew cleared his throat and checked his watch. Hollis wiped away her gathering tears as he pulled on his trench coat and his leather driving gloves. Matthew crouched down to rub Henny’s face, then gave Hollis a fierce squeeze—she felt something, at least, in his touch.
Just before he left, he turned around. “You’ve changed,” he said, then sighed. “And we’ve changed.” He stepped out into the snow, closing the door behind him.
Now the words ring in Hollis’s ears. You’ve changed. And we’ve changed. She would like to say she has no idea what he means—but she fears she does. Since Hollis’s website took off and the opportunities to exploit her new popularity arose, she’s become a different person, one who has a hard time experiencing a moment without wanting to document it for her newsletter subscribers. She is always, now, on a screen—her phone, her laptop, or both. She has changed, and by extension, she supposes, they’ve changed. But surely Matthew understands that, after twenty years of being a wife and mother, Hollis is excited about building something of her own?
She picks up the phone and calls him, ready to apologize for being a bull in an emotional china shop, but she’s shuttled to Matthew’s voice mail. She calls right back—again, voice mail. She waits for the beep, then says, “My love for you hasn’t changed.”
In case Matthew doesn’t listen to his voice mail (does anyone listen to voice mail anymore?), she sends a text: I love you, Dr. M. You’re important to me. We are important to me.
She waits a few moments, but there’s no response. It seems suddenly urgent that she convey this message to him, that he hear her say the words I love you. You are important. She tries calling again, and again, she gets voice mail.
Fine, she thinks. He needs time to simmer down. She’ll try him again once she’s sure he’s settled in the Lufthansa lounge. But the phrase And we’ve changed concerns her. What was he trying to say?
She feels herself growing melodramatic, which is very unlike her. Everything will be fine. Matthew will miss their party, yes, but he’ll be home in plenty of time for their family Christmas. Dr. Schrader has Parkinson’s. Of course Matthew should visit him.
Hollis sits down at her laptop and decides to make a dinner reservation for two at Mistral on New Year’s Eve. She and Matthew will Uber into the city so they can drink as much champagne as they want; Hollis will buy a new dress, something black and flirty. Next, Hollis intends to check her website—her followers are waiting for the cheddar-tartlet recipe—but instead, she logs onto Facebook. After a few pointless seconds of trying to resist her worst impulses, she ends up at the profile page of Jack Finigan, her high-school boyfriend. There are no new posts; Jack posts only two or three times a year. The last time was in the fall: a photo of Jack standing at the edge of a lake somewhere in Western Massachusetts, holding up a trout. He hasn’t posted any pictures of Mindy, his longtime girlfriend, since the summer before last. Hollis has done the predictable thing and tried to look at Mindy’s profile, but Mindy has privacy settings in place so all Hollis can see is her background photo, which is a quilt, presumably one she made herself. Hollis knows she’s stalking, but it’s innocent; she would never reach out to him. She wonders if Jack—or Mindy—has heard about the Hungry with Hollis blog.
The knock at the front door startles Hollis; she feels caught. She clicks out of Facebook and hurries down the hall. Blue and red lights reflect off the snow in her front yard.
“Mrs. Madden?” the police officer says. He’s young, maybe only a few years older than Caroline, and Hollis can’t imagine what he’s doing there. It’s so early; she’s still in her pajamas. She nearly corrects him: Her last name is Shaw, not Madden. But in that instant, she realizes he must be here because of Matthew—something about Matthew?
“Yes?” she says.
The precise words are lost but somehow Hollis understands that there was an accident, something involving deer, a mama and baby, the officer says. Matthew’s car spun out of control and flipped over on Dover Street.
Dover Street? Hollis thinks. They drive it all the time, every day; they’ve been doing that for years, decades. And yes, there are always deer running across Dover, especially during hunting season.
“Is he hurt?” Hollis says, her voice still sort of normal-sounding despite the panic that enfolds her. She peeks around the officer’s shoulder to his cruiser. Is Matthew in the back? Was he… taken to the hospital? Then she meets the officer’s eyes. “Is he okay?”
“He’s dead, ma’am,” the officer says.
Suddenly Hollis is on the floor, screaming, wailing; she doesn’t care that a stranger is watching. Henny comes jingling in and starts licking Hollis’s face. Hollis hears the strains of a song playing in the kitchen—“Ding Dong, Merrily on High”—and she covers her ears. The officer asks if there’s anyone she would like him to call.
“My husband! Call my husband!” she screams. In that moment, this still seems like a possibility. Matthew is a doctor, a fixer; he’ll make this better. He’s the only one who can.
Instead of a holiday party, there’s a funeral. They bury Matthew next to his parents in the cemetery at St. Andrew’s. Afterward, Hollis faces a house filled with people—their Wellesley neighbors, doctors and nurses from the hospital, the women from Hollis’s barre class, and her longtime mom-friends, including Brooke Kirtley, who ordered platters of sandwiches from the Linden Store and who stays late to clean up. The only person Hollis cares about is her daughter, Caroline, but things with her are strained. Caroline is poised—at the service she reads “Nothing Gold Can Stay” without faltering—and polite to Hollis in public, but in private, Caroline pushes her mother away. She steps on Hollis’s words to correct her memories; she questions Hollis’s decision to hold a reception at their house afterward. “Dad is dead and you’re throwing a party.”
“It’s a reception, not a party,” Hollis says. “It’s what people do.” She knows this is, heartbreakingly, Caroline’s first funeral.
“It’s what you do,” Caroline says bitterly. “I heard you asking Brooke to get ten pounds of ice. My father is dead and all you care about is ice!”
Hollis is sure things will get better as soon as everyone leaves, once she and Caroline are alone and they can really talk. She envisions the two of them spending entire days hunkered down in the family room, Henny stretched out at their feet, looking through photo albums, crying together, maybe even laughing.
But things only get worse. Caroline barricades herself in her room; she goes out at night with her friend Cygnet and comes home loudly, sloppily drunk, staggering past Hollis, who sits at the kitchen table, listlessly paging through old issues of Bon Appétit and Food and Wine as a distraction. She can’t possibly go to bed until Caroline is home safe, and she wouldn’t sleep anyway.
“Did you have fun, darling?” Hollis asks on one such night.
“Fun?” Caroline sneers. “No, I did not have fun, Mother.” And she stomps upstairs with Henrietta following faithfully behind.
On one of the first days of the new year—after Hollis has cleared the half-eaten casseroles out of the fridge, after she has taken down the Christmas decorations and packed them away in boxes—Hollis sorts through Matthew’s things: his bespoke suits, his eyeglasses, his pile of pristine concert T-shirts (Hootie and the Blowfish, Social Distortion, Dave Matthews).
She’s interrupted in this task by Caroline, who demands to know why Hollis feels the need to purge her father’s belongings.