Chapter 6
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It takes me almost twenty minutes to talk Hollis into letting me play more of my road-trip playlist, then I almost immediately fall asleep to the soothing, repetitive melody of Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat.” My eyes flutter open sometime later in response to a steady reduction in our speed.
Looks like we’re pulling into a rest-stop parking lot.
When we left José Napoleoni’s, it was still overcast, but now pink and orange streak the sky.
I arch my back in my seat to stretch out my spine. “Where are we?”
“Virginia,” Hollis says.
“Still?” I whine. “I was asleep for like six hours!”
“You were asleep for like one hour.”
“Ugh. When did Virginia get so big?”
“I don’t know. The eighteenth century? You’re the historian, you tell me.” Hollis shifts the car into park. “Are you getting out?”
I’m still a little drowsy, which makes the idea of movement seem like a major hassle.
But then my bladder reminds me that I had three Shirley Temples back at the restaurant, plus the one José kindly handed me in a to-go cup on our way out the door.
“Yeah.” I disconnect my phone from the aux, then grab my little leather backpack and swing it over my shoulder as I get out of the car.
“Just a pit stop, Mrs. Nash,” I say. “Then we’ll be back on our way to Elsie. ”
“I don’t know why I’m surprised you talk to her,” Hollis mutters as we walk toward the brick building’s glass double doors.
“I don’t know why you are either.”
You might assume she talks back; she doesn’t.
I hoped when she died that she might continue to exist inside my head, and she sort of does.
I can see her vividly, but she never speaks unless it’s a replay of a memory.
Because I am the one who would have to generate what she says now, and I know that any words I put into her mouth wouldn’t be hers.
Just mine in disguise. Somehow that’s more depressing than her not talking at all.
Hollis isn’t there when I return to the car, even though I took an embarrassingly long time trying to get the automatic toilet to stop flushing down the seat covers before I could even sit.
Maybe he decided mid-pee that all this isn’t worth it and started walking home.
Oh, but there he is, over by a copse of trees, staring at his phone again.
Probably giving Miami Woman an update. Which reminds me, I never told Dani I’m with Hollis.
As far as she knows, I’m still on my way to Charlotte with Mike.
And while she’s extremely chill about almost everything, she will 100 percent call the cops—or worse, my parents—if she doesn’t hear from me.
I pull out my phone and shoot off a quick text.
MILLIE: Change of plans. Now driving to Miami with Hollis Hollenbeck, who I sort of know through the dbag. 30ish, white, handsomely disheveled brown hair, 1 blue eye + 1 brown, about 6 ft, great forearms.
DANI: So you wanna bang him, huh?
My cousin truly has a gift for reading between the lines.
MILLIE: Even if I did, he’s on his way to a sex appointment.
DANI: Tell him your vagina has an earlier slot available.
Ha!
“What’s so funny?”
My head snaps up in response to Hollis’s voice. “Oh. Hey. Nothing.”
“Some advice for you: Never play poker unless you’re looking to lose all of your money,” he says. “You’re a terrible liar.”
I consider responding that I’m a great liar, but what a weird thing to insist. And also I’m honestly not.
Which is probably another reason I never succeeded as an actress after Penelope to the Past , now that I think about it; pretending to be someone else started to feel like nothing but socially acceptable lying by the end of my showbiz career.
“Your tell is that you blush. Here.” His finger pokes into the side of my cheek, right where I have a dimple when I smile—what my aunt Talia used to call my “million-dollar divot” when I started doing commercials at six.
“And here,” Hollis says. The finger moves to the very top of my breastbone, right under my throat.
That wet mouth–dry throat thing happens again, but I can’t swallow without him noticing.
Instead, I let out an awkward whining sound like a balloon deflating.
I probably should have just swallowed because whatever that was was waaaay weirder.
The bizarre noise brings Hollis’s attention to the fact he’s still touching me.
He shoves his right hand into his pocket, as if putting it in hand jail as a punishment for its transgression, and raises his free left one to show me his phone.
“Josh commented on our post. Thought you might be interested.”
“Oh, what’d he say? Let me see.” Hollis apparently has more clout than I realized.
There are a ton of likes and comments. I quickly scroll through, in awe of the vast number of them, losing Josh’s in the process.
“You some kind of social media big shot?” I ask, trying to get back to it while not reading any of the others in case they’re creepy.
“Uh, on Twitter maybe. I got a bunch of new followers there when I published a piece in The New Yorker a few weeks ago that got some traction. I only have like a hundred on Insta, though. I don’t know most of these people. They must’ve found the picture because of the hashtags.”
“Oh.” I scroll faster because that makes it even more likely some of the comments are stuff I’d rather not see.
Even trying not to read anything, I spot several mentions of the notorious yellow bikini, and I’m beginning to regret adding the #MillicentWattsCohen and #PenelopetothePast hashtags when I find what I’m looking for.
Josh’s stupid face stares back at me from the little picture next to his username.
He’s wearing the cream-colored fisherman sweater he bought after seeing Knives Out .
What are you doing? I asked when I came home from the National Archives and found him at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, strategically cutting into the wool to make holes like Chris Evans’s sweater had in the film.
Authenticity is very important to me , he said, not joking at all.
And now I have zero regrets about anything, including hastily sewing the holes back together with fluorescent-orange thread the day I moved out.
Josh_Yaeger
Is this supposed to be some kind of prank?
Oh, he’s mad. And it’s amazing. Getting under Josh’s skin is like a drug, and I forgot how addicted I am. “Can we post another one?” I ask, bouncing on the balls of my feet.
“Does it get me more sopaipillas?”
“Probably not.”
“Then no.”
“You’re no fun,” I say.
“That’s right, kid. Best remember it.” Hollis takes the phone from my hand and goes around the car to the driver’s side.
“Stop calling me ‘kid,’?” I grumble as I climb back into the passenger seat. “I’m almost thirty. And you’re what, thirty-two, thirty-three, tops?”
“Thirty-one. And forgive me if I sometimes forget that even though you’re short, naive, and have poor impulse control, you’re not actually eight years old.”
“Ha ha ha. Aren’t you a hoot.”
“Yep. A no-fun hoot. That’s what I am.” Hollis tucks his hands behind his head, giving me a fabulous view of his right tricep, and closes his eyes. And then he stays that way.
It’s tempting to stare at him for a while, just to torture myself I guess. But there’s really no time. “What are you doing?”
Without opening his eyes, he says, “Power nap. Didn’t sleep well last night and it’s catching up with me.”
“Why don’t you let me drive for a while so you can rest?”
“No one drives my car but me.”
“You have control issues.”
“No, I have very low insurance premiums. I’d like to keep it that way. Give me fifteen minutes and we’ll get moving again.”
“No,” I say.
Hollis opens his eyes to give me a death stare. “No?”
“Sorry. No. Unacceptable. We don’t have time to dilly-dally. Every minute counts, and we’ve wasted too many already.”
“Jesus. What’s the big hurry? Mrs. Nash isn’t going anywhere.”
“Elsie is dying!” The volume of my voice is too loud for the enclosed space, and it makes Hollis sit up straight in his seat.
Hugging my backpack to my chest, I take a deep breath.
“She’s at a nursing facility, in hospice.
They couldn’t give me details because I’m not family, but the receptionist I talked to when I called yesterday morning said she doesn’t have long at all.
That’s why I immediately booked a flight to head down there, even though traveling over Memorial Day weekend is a complete nightmare. ”
What Rhoda, the woman on the phone, actually said was, I’m not supposed to say anything. HIPAA, you know? But if you’re really determined to see her, the sooner the better. Should I tell her to expect you? Maybe having a visitor to look forward to will help her hang in there.
She doesn’t know me , I responded. But um, you can tell her... Oh. Tell her that Rose is sending her a pigeon. Hopefully she’ll remember what that means .
Her mind’s still sharp , Rhoda said. I’m sure she will .
Ugh, all the time we’ve already wasted. That extra half hour or so at the airport, all the crawling along in holiday weekend rush-hour traffic, the almost-hour we spent at José Napoleoni’s.
God, I stopped to put my hand in that bear’s mouth.
What was I thinking? How could I have so easily lost sight of how urgent it is that I get Mrs. Nash to Key West as soon as possible so Elsie can confirm that their love story has a happy ending?
Hollis. Hollis is how. I’ve been too distracted by the shiny bits of himself he keeps hidden for whatever reason.
They keep teasing me through the cracks in his facade, making me want to chisel away at him to see if he might secretly be all shine under there.
And also I’m distracted by his great arms, and his interesting eyes, and his mouth that is frowning at me again.
“So, sorry,” I say, “but fifteen minutes might be the difference between getting to Elsie in time or being too late. You aren’t sleeping unless you do it in the passenger seat.
And if you think I’m not serious, that you can close your eyes right now and ignore me, well, I seem to remember you reacting pretty strongly to the threat of tickling before.
” My fingers become clawlike in demonstration of my willingness to inflict maximum discomfort.
“Okay,” Hollis says to punctuate an exasperated sigh.
“Okay what?”
“You can drive for a while. But if anything happens to my car, Millicent, I swear—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, practically leaping out the door to come around to the driver’s side.
I adjust the seat and mirrors to accommodate my shorter stature, plug the aux cord back into my phone, and wiggle a little as I back out of the parking space to the smooth sounds of Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “So in to You.”
Hollis groans. “Do we really have to keep listening to this?”
“Yes. Deal with it,” I say.
And I guess he does, because he’s snoring softly by the time the song ends.