Hollis stares at her daughter. “I just want to—”
“Be rid of him? Yes, that much is obvious. You must need more room in the closet for your signature blouses. And—what, you were just going to do this without me?”
“I thought it might be too difficult for you,” Hollis says. “I was trying to protect you.”
Caroline picks up the Hootie T-shirt. “You’re giving this away? Dad loved this T-shirt.”
Hollis opens her mouth to defend herself but before she can speak, Caroline goes on a rampage, accusing Hollis of not loving Matthew enough, not grieving him correctly: “You weren’t even related to him! You’ll find another husband but I will never, ever have another father.”
“I know you’re hurting, darling,” Hollis says, but according to Caroline, Hollis does not know. She doesn’t know anything. Caroline paces the master bedroom like a wild animal in a cage, saying hideous things—everything short of I wish it had been you instead—but underneath the livid facade, Hollis can see glimpses of a little girl whose world has been broken. Hollis sits on the bed, thinking, I will wait her rage out. I am the adult, the mother, it’s my job to take this punishment. Matthew and Caroline were close; they had a special bond. Matthew was Caroline’s favorite parent.
Hollis says, “I’m sorry, darling. It’s difficult for me to sleep in a room full of Dad’s things… to look at this shirt and know he’s never going to wear it again.” She holds Caroline’s gaze. “I’m doing the best I can not to fall completely to pieces.”
She expects these words will make Caroline collapse in her arms and apologize—but Hollis is so very wrong. Caroline storms from the room with the parting shot “It’s always all about you!” She books herself on the Acela back to New York City three days earlier than planned, leaving Hollis stunned and alone.
The Wellesley police send Hollis an e-mail with the official accident report attached, but Hollis can’t bear to read it. She doesn’t want the details of how fast Matthew was driving or where on Dover Street he lost control or how many times the car spun before it flipped over. (The car did flip over, she knows; the young officer told her this. That’s the only detail she has retained other than the deer, mama and baby, that Matthew swerved to avoid and yet ended up killing anyway.) Hollis yearns to delete the e-mail, then delete it permanently from the deleted-files folder—Matthew is gone, the details don’t matter—but instead, she moves it to a folder labeled MM, where she’s keeping all of the correspondence related to Matthew’s death.
She no longer cooks; she barely eats. Her doctor, Karen Lindstrom, offers to prescribe some Ativan for daytime anxiety, Ambien for sleep. But Hollis doesn’t relish the idea of pills; every once in a while, she’ll pour herself a glass of Sancerre, but this leads her right to places she wants to avoid: the smell of Matthew’s shaving lotion; You’ve changed. And we’ve changed; the knock on the door.
Friends and neighbors check in. What can they do? “Nothing” is the answer—but they offer her advice anyway: yoga, self-guided meditation, grief counseling, essential oils, travel, an ashram, a psychic, knitting.
Knitting? Hollis thinks.
Hollis puts her new cookware line on hold, ditto her plans for a cookbook, her show. What does any of it matter now?
She wonders how her father coped when her mother died so suddenly. She supposes he focused on taking care of Hollis, going to work; in all the years Hollis knew him, he was stoic and steadfast. He didn’t have the luxury of falling apart.
Hollis reaches out to Caroline every few days, but her calls are summarily declined and her texts always garner the same response: OK. Or worse: K. It’s just enough to let Hollis know Caroline’s alive and breathing. Hollis consults Grown and Flown, her favorite website for parenting older children, as she tries to figure out what to do. Should she take the train down to New York and confront Caroline? Should she stop calling and texting? (This feels so cruel—the girl just lost her father.) Should she stop paying Caroline’s credit card? (That would get her attention.) Hollis knows that children are narcissistic, and she understands that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until age twenty-five. Caroline can’t be blamed; she’s still growing. But Hollis wants to cry out: You’re hurting me. This will be easier to get through if we bond together!
Hollis has been trained not to Like or comment on any of Caroline’s Instagram posts, though Hollis checks her daughter’s account several times a day. There’s been only one new post since Matthew died—Caroline wishing her best friend, Cygnet, a happy birthday in Stories. Hollis clicks through it several times, because Caroline has posted pictures of herself and Cygnet as little girls growing up in Wellesley: the two of them in a tent in the backyard, their young faces illuminated by flashlights; the two of them holding the pancake pops that Caroline requested for her tenth birthday. Hollis presses her finger to her phone screen so the picture stays put. I want to go back, she thinks. Back to the days of sleepovers and fancy birthday breakfasts.
Hollis feels like she’s lost not only her husband, but her daughter as well.
The only time Hollis finds even a modicum of relief from her mourning is when she’s texting with a woman who’d reached out to her on her website several months ago—someone Hollis has never met but did not exactly pick out at random either. The direct message from Gigi Ling, Atlanta, Georgia, caught Hollis’s eye. Gigi was the one who told Hollis about the hidden spots along the Buford Highway that serve the best dim sum, bulgogi, and tacos in the entire South. She also recommended Laurie Colwin’s books Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, which Hollis just adores. (How had she not known about them? Hollis immediately reviewed them on the website and provided a link to buy through Bookshop.org.)
Yes, Gigi Ling is Hollis’s favorite person in the Hungry with Hollis community, though she supposes she shouldn’t have favorites. (A ridiculous notion—everyone has favorites; it’s part of being human.)
A week after Matthew died, Gigi sent her a DM with one simple sentence: I’m here to listen. Hollis had grabbed those words like a life preserver; she realized she’d been waiting to hear from Gigi since she’d posted the news.
From that moment on, they have texted several times a week; Hollis would be happy to text her every day but she doesn’t want to be a burden. Gigi normally checks in on Tuesdays, Fridays, the occasional Sunday evening: Tell me about your day. How goes it? I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. Initially it feels odd texting with a complete stranger, but, Hollis reasons, people do it all the time on dating apps—Tinder, Bumble, Hinge. Soon it feels more liberating than odd. The stakes are low. It’s almost easier to confide in a stranger.
Hollis starts sharing details that are very personal. Things between Matthew and me were… unsettled when he died.
Unsettled how? Gigi texts back.
Hollis describes the ways that she and Matthew had grown distant. Part of it was the usual empty-nest stuff, she says. Caroline wasn’t home to keep them united as a family. Part of it was the world discovering Hollis’s website.
Gigi texts, He must have been threatened by your sudden success.
Had Matthew been threatened? Hollis wonders. Threatened isn’t the right word—they were, after all, talking about the revered Dr. Madden—but for some reason, Matthew hadn’t fully embraced or supported Hollis’s good fortune. He had been… bemused by it. And, at times, annoyed. He and Caroline made fun of the unbridled adoration of her blog’s fans. Had Matthew ever said he was proud of what she’d done with the website? He had not.
Over the next few months, Hollis and Gigi’s intimacy deepens to the point where, one day in mid-June, Hollis feels safe telling Gigi about the morning Matthew died—the conference in Leipzig, Dr. Schrader’s Parkinson’s, the holiday party.