“Hello?”
“Hi, is this Millicent?”
“Yes, hi. Who’s this?”
“My name’s Tammy Hines. I’m Elsie Brown’s great-niece. I got your number from Rhoda at The Palms at Southernmost. She said you were hoping to talk to me. Are you still in town?”
“Yes! Yes. Hi. Yes.”
“Oh, great. Good. I actually think I have some letters to give you. Assuming you are the... uh... parrot was it?”
“Pigeon,” I correct.
“Yes. Right. Aunt Elsie did say pigeon. Sorry, my brain is fried. Anyway, I just finished with a client, but I should be free in about, um...” There’s a pause. “Twenty minutes. Oh, where are you staying?”
“Um... we’re in New Town at the—”
“Oh, good. Close to my office then. There’s a Starbucks at Seventh and North Roosevelt. Can we meet up around six there? Or would you rather wait till tomorrow?”
“No, six tonight is perfect,” I say. Hollis and I will need to eat quickly when he gets back, but there’s no way I’m waiting longerthan I need to. Letters! I have Elsie’s letters to Mrs. Nash in a bundle, tucked next to the wooden box that holds her ashes. So these letters are presumably Mrs. Nash’s letters to Elsie. The idea of seeing Mrs. Nash’s beautiful, swooping handwriting again makes tears well in my eyes. No time for that, though—Tammy is saying something.
“Sorry, what was that?” I ask.
“Do you have a pen and paper? This is my office line, so let me give you my cell number in case something comes up.”
“Oh, okay. One sec.” I flip Hollis’s note to the blank side. Paper, check. “Pen, pen, pen,” I mumble to myself. My eyes search for the cheap plastic pen usually found alongside the hotel-branded notepad, but it isn’t there. “Sorry,” I say. “Looking for a pen.” There must be one somewhere, because Hollis used it to write this note and—bingo. It’s not the hotel pen (who knows where that went), but Hollis’s clicky black one, which I found tucked into his notebook like a bookmark. I’m careful to use my pinky finger as a placeholder while I scribble down Tammy’s phone number and the intersection of the Starbucks.
“See you at six,” she says after we confirm I have the correct details.
“Yeah. Thanks so much. See you soon.”
I flip open Hollis’s notebook to replace the pen. My heart does this little excited wiggle, kind of like a corgi butt, at seeing the page filled with his hastily written words. But as my eyes stop seeing it as a whole and narrow in on the actual letters, the spaces, my heart free-falls through my chest cavity and lodges somewhere stomach-adjacent.
Because Mrs. Nash’s name is on this page. Her sons, her husband, herdog—their names are here too. Why are they in Hollis’snotebook? I read the passage in a hurry, at the same speed he probably wrote it. And then again, slowly this time, hoping it says something different.
Washington, District of Columbia
October 1953
It had taken over an hour, but both children were finally in bed and quiet, if not asleep. And quiet was really all Rose could ask for after a day like today. First, Richie had woken up complaining of a sour stomach. Then Walter, jealous that his mother’s attention was focused on his older brother, claimed to be suffering from the same ailment, which he proceeded to demonstrate by rolling around on the floor, clutching his gut and howling so effectively that the family dog, a male mutt the boys had inexplicably insisted on naming Lady, joined in. Then Dick had come into the room—apparently undeterred by the already-unfolding chaos—to ask Rose if she had seen his favorite tie...
23
•••••
Pages and pages. If I weren’t so bewildered by the discovery that Hollis has been writing about me, about us, and about Mrs. Nash and Elsie, I might be impressed by it. There must be thousands of words in this notebook, all written in the last four days. They’re framed as vignettes, I guess, and they leap through time and space, past to present and back again.
I read the first sentence of each one, hoping somehow the reality of what I’m reading will change. But no matter how much I flip through, it’s more of the same. Some of the dialogue in the Mrs. Nash and Elsie parts is based on what I’ve told him or pulled from the letters in my backpack; he must have read through them at some point while I was asleep or in the shower (which feels like its own separate violation). Some of it, though, is his best guess at how the conversation would have gone. I’m not sure if I’m more upset that he put words in Mrs. Nash’s mouth and thoughts intoher head, or that someone who didn’t know her at all managed to capture some of her spirit when it feels increasingly elusive to me with each passing day.
And then there are the parts about me. About us.
It feels like Josh and the Instagram account all over again. This notebook is filled with our private moments packaged for public consumption, and it hurts so much more than a bunch of photos on the internet because, unlike Josh, Hollis has apparently been using me from the very beginning. At least with Josh it started out real. But with Hollis...
I flip back to the first pages.
We’re just north of Richmond when I realize Millicent isn’t crazy. She’s just a romantic.
It’s easy to mistake one for the other, especially when the tiny redhead in your passenger seat has a box full of her elderly friend’s ashes tucked into her backpack. But the more Millicent talks, the more I pick up on the subtle differences. Crazy moves erratically, a drunken bee moving through the air. Romantics like Millicent, though, move with purpose toward their goal, following an endless trail of hope. Optimistic breadcrumbs that promise to end with a happily ever after. And Millicent’s breadcrumbs, she’s informed me, lead to Key West.
