Hollis is at the head of the table with Gigi and Brooke on one side and Tatum and Dru-Ann on the other. She can’t believe Tatum and Dru-Ann are voluntarily sitting next to each other.
She raises her glass for a toast. “I just want you to know how much it means to me that you’re all here.” She feels her eyes misting up. “When I lost Matthew, I thought my world would collapse. But I have a strong foundation beneath me, and that is all of you.”
“Love you, sis,” Tatum says, and she clinks glasses with Hollis.
“You’re the best, Hollis!” Brooke says, a bit too loudly.
Gigi says, “I’m sure the other women know the story, Hollis, but I don’t. How did you and Matthew meet?”
“The old-fashioned way,” Hollis says. “At a bar.” She takes a sip of her wine. Can she tell the story? Earlier tonight, the answer might have been no; it was too painful to think about Matthew in that much detail. But right now, she feels okay. “This was in Boston in 1995.”
Hollis is twenty-five years old and her life is exactly as she’d hoped it would be. She rents a studio apartment with wood floors and an exposed brick wall on Cedar Lane Way on Beacon Hill. She fills the apartment with plants and decorates it with pillar candles, throw pillows, and white fairy lights. She gets takeout Thai food from the King and I, listens to her Natalie Merchant CD, and marvels at her own happiness.
She has a dream job: assistant food editor at Boston magazine, a position that comes with the use of the corporate credit card. In February of 1995, the real food editor comes down with mono and will be out of commission for three weeks. This gives Hollis a chance to pitch an article entitled “Are There Any Decent Restaurants on Beacon Hill?” Popular opinion in 1995 is “No, there aren’t,” but the editor in chief is willing to give Hollis a chance to prove everyone wrong.
Hollis goes to the Paramount for brunch (she waits in line for ninety minutes, but the caramel-banana French toast is worth it), to the Cheers pub where everybody knows her name (not really, nobody knows her and the places is filled with tourists, but she finds nice things to say about the potato skins and the chowder), and to the Sevens (it’s a storied dive bar with a better-than-it-needs-to-be French dip). She goes to Figs for pizza, the Marliave for Welsh rarebit, and the neighborhood darling, Toscano (which, Hollis believes, has the best steak in the city). She intentionally stays away from the culinary wasteland of Cambridge Street, but then her friend Regency, who lives in the apartment upstairs from her, tells Hollis she can’t write an article about Beacon Hill restaurants and not include Harvard Gardens.
Ugh, Hollis thinks. “Even the name of the place is a turnoff,” she says. “The restaurant has nothing to do with Harvard, and there are no gardens.”
“That may be so,” Regency says. “But meeting a cute doctor there is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.”
“It turned out Regency was right,” Hollis says now. “Because sitting at the bar that night was Matthew Madden.”
“Was it love at first sight?” Gigi asks.
“I bet it was!” Brooke says. She’s leaning forward, drinking her Lemon Krush way too quickly, but who cares? She’s sitting next to Gigi and across from Dru-Ann; she feels pretty in her dress and she wants to hear this story. She has no idea how Hollis and Matthew met.
“Not even close,” Hollis says. “He only noticed me because I had a notebook.”
Hollis walks into Harvard Gardens prepared to be underwhelmed but immediately finds that the restaurant has what would in later years be called a “good vibe.” The lighting is low, there’s a lot of chat and laughter, and the air smells enticingly of French fries and bacon. Hollis goes to the bar, where the only free seat is next to a rumpled-looking guy in glasses and blue scrubs. He’s reading a textbook and wolfing down a Reuben; Hollis watches a strand of sauerkraut fall onto the page of his book. When Hollis asks if the seat is free, the guy mumbles something that sounds affirmative.
“Are you a doctor?” Hollis asks.
He nods without even looking up, but Hollis isn’t offended; she watches E.R. and understands that residents work long hours without eating or sleeping and conduct their love lives in empty exam rooms.
“How’s the Reuben?” Hollis asks. She can tell just by the buttery grilled rye and the oozing melted Swiss that it’s exceptional. Hollis orders one even though the guy hasn’t deigned to answer her. She’s just an unpleasant buzzing in his ear.
Hollis also orders a glass of chardonnay (she has not yet discovered sauvignon blanc) and the onion soup and the strawberry arugula salad (she has to sample the menu, after all), and when her food arrives, she whips out her notebook and starts writing: Onion soup classically prepared with notes of bacon; salad is both sweet and peppery; Reuben well constructed, perfect meat-to-sauerkraut ratio, and the Russian dressing is made in-house. Surprise, surprise: There is good food on Cambridge Street. This bar meal at Harvard Gardens proves it!
An even bigger surprise is when the guy next to her slams his textbook closed, turns to her, and says, “What’s that you’re writing?”
“A restaurant review,” Hollis says. “I’m the food editor at Boston magazine.” She leaves out the word assistant because she sees this guy’s green eyes behind the lenses of his glasses and suddenly wants to seem impressive.
“That’s neat,” the guy says and Hollis giggles. Who in the year 1995 uses the word neat? “I’m Matthew Madden, a surgery resident across the street. Sorry if I was rude earlier, I just wanted to finish up reading on takotsubo cardiomyopathy, otherwise known as ‘broken-heart syndrome.’ I saw an unusual case in the cath lab earlier and I didn’t know what it was.”
“I’m Hollis Shaw,” she says. She and the green-eyed surgery resident at Mass General shake hands. Hollis thinks, It’s neat that he knows how the human heart works and can fix it if it breaks.
It’s possible there’s more conversation. She must mention that she lives a few blocks away; he must say that he still lives with his parents in Wellesley, which isn’t as pathetic as it sounds because he’s always at the hospital. She must say she grew up on Nantucket, and he must say that his family are summer-in-Maine people. But Hollis has lost most of this. What she does remember is that, after she pays the bill with her company card and after she tucks her notebook into her bag, Matthew says, “There’s a hospital fundraiser next Friday night. I’m expected to attend and bring a date. Are you free, by any chance?”
Hollis knows she should be surprised—they’ve been acquainted for maybe thirty minutes, and he’s asking her to a work function? Aren’t there a hundred hot nurses across the street?—but she doesn’t miss a beat. “I am free,” she says. “I’d love to go.”
“It’s black-tie,” he says. “At the Ritz. I’ll come pick you up at six thirty?”
Hollis smiles. “Sounds great!” she says, and when she gets home, she slips a note under Regency’s apartment door. You were right, the note says. It was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Sean, the server, delivers their food and everyone digs in. Dru-Ann says, “If you think I’m sharing this chicken, you’re wrong. Look at this beauty!”
Gigi helps herself to the blue crab fried rice. “So your first date was a black-tie work event. Was it happily ever after from there?” She feels a keen, almost manic, interest. Matthew never talked about his history with Hollis.
“Pretty much,” Hollis says, though this is a wild oversimplification. Phrases like love at first sight and happily ever after aren’t realistic. But Hollis has always been good at recognizing quality, in food, in service, in linens, in movies and books—and in people.
When Hollis sees Matthew Madden upright and groomed (his hair cut and combed, glasses polished) in his tuxedo (his own tuxedo, not a rental), she realizes that he is the rarest of finds. He’s not only a superstar surgery resident; he has also been raised a gentleman. He owns a tuxedo, he knows about wine (it’s Matthew who introduces Hollis to sauvignon blanc); he can handle elevated dinner conversation about topics as varied as the Sargent portraits at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the budgetary woes of the Big Dig, and Seiji Ozawa’s expert conducting of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.