Chapter 8 #2
The wave was dark against her clean skin, exactly the small, beautiful thing she would normally never allow herself to have.
She thought about her mother seeing it or her colleagues. She thought about Jordan, who had once told her she was the most closed-off person he’d ever loved.
Now, she thought, here, there’s a crack in the wall, small but real.
“Are you happy?” Wren asked.
“Yes,” Harper said, surprising herself in the process.
The women walked through Savannah afterward, their ankles and wrists bandaged and tender. They felt like they’d gotten away with something. Of course, Savannah had that effect on people. The city felt like a co-conspirator with its hidden gardens and slow pace.
They bought ice cream from a shop on Broughton Street, sat on a bench in Monterey Square, and watched the tourists take photographs of an oak tree from fifteen different angles.
“You know, I just realized,” Claire said, licking her cone, “that I’m a fifty-year-old woman sitting on a park bench in Savannah eating ice cream with a fresh tattoo on my ankle. If you had told me this about six months ago, I would have asked you to call a mental health professional.”
“Six months ago, you were reorganizing your pantry for fun,” Harper said.
“Well, the pantry was very disorganized.”
“The pantry was alphabetical, Claire. Then, you organized it by food group.”
“Alphabetical was an intermediate step in the process. Food group was supposed to be the final form all along.”
Nina was quiet, turning her wrist and looking at the bandage. She hadn’t said a whole lot since leaving the parlor.
“So, what are you going to tell Elena?” Claire asked her.
“Nothing. She’ll just see it, and she’ll have her opinions, and I’ll let her have them.”
“Elena’s opinions could fill an entire stadium.”
“Elena’s opinions could fill a stadium, a parking lot, and the surrounding neighborhoods.
” Nina paused. “She’ll like that I put the initials, but she’ll pretend that she doesn’t.
She’ll say that marking your skin is not how we honor people in her family, and then she’ll go home, cry about it in private, and the next time I see her, she’ll pretend none of it happened. ”
“That’s a very specific prediction,” Harper said, licking her ice cream cone.
“Listen, I’ve known this woman for years. She’s nothing if not consistent.”
The sun was starting to drop toward the rooftops, turning the sky a shade of peach that Savannah did better than anywhere else. A horse-drawn carriage clopped past, driven by a man wearing a top hat, who looked like he was genuinely enjoying his job.
The moss swayed in the trees, and the air smelled like jasmine and somehow old brick, if old brick had a smell. There was the faint, salty smell of the river a few blocks away.
Harper looked at her wrist. The bandage was white against her too-pale skin, and beneath it lay something she could never take back. She was surprised to find this feeling didn’t produce anxiety, but something more along the lines of peace.
She had marked herself. She had chosen something permanent in a life that she’d built entirely on keeping her options open.
“I need to tell you both something,” Harper said.
Claire and Nina looked at her, their ice cream starting to melt, Savannah glowing around them. They waited for Harper to say whatever it was she was about to say.
“I called Jordan back,” she said. “Two weeks ago, actually, after the polar plunge.”
Claire’s ice cream stopped halfway to her mouth.
“You did?”
“Yeah, I called him from my car in the parking garage at work. I sat there for twenty minutes first, which I know is ironic because we’ve been working on Nina’s habit of sitting in parking lots, but apparently it’s contagious.”
“Well, what did he say?” Nina asked.
Harper looked at the square. A couple was walking through it, holding hands, and a child chased a pigeon. It was funny how so many people had their own lives going at the same time, and they were all so different.
“He said, I was hoping you’d call, and then he asked how I was, and I said I was fine.
And he said, Harper, how are you, really?
You know, nobody ever asks me that. Nobody in my entire life asks me that except you two and maybe this man who builds rocking chairs and still remembers how I take my coffee after four years. ”
“How do you take your coffee?” Claire asked, as though that was the important detail of this conversation.
“Black with one sugar, which is wrong according to everyone, but Jordan never tried to change it.” She paused for a moment. “We talked for forty-five minutes in my car in that parking garage. My assistant texted me three times, and I never answered.”
“Wait, you didn’t answer James?” Nina said, her eyes wide. “Oh, that is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
Harper almost smiled, almost. “Anyway, he asked if he could take me to coffee, not dinner, coffee. Because he remembered I don’t like first dates. He said this really wasn’t a first date, it was a reintroduction.”
“A reintroduction,” Claire repeated. “Nice.”
“That’s a good word,” Nina said, shrugging her shoulders.
“No, it’s a terrifying word. Reintroduction means we’re starting over. And starting over means I have to let him see the version of me that exists now, not the version he remembers. And the version that exists now is this fifty-year-old woman who eats toast over her sink and just got a tattoo.”
“Did you say yes?” Nina asked.
“To coffee?”
“To the reintroduction?”
“Oh, I said I’d think about it.”
“Harper!”
“What? I’m a deliberate person. I like to deliberate.”
“You’re a scared person, and you stall. I swear, I’ve never seen anyone go so out of their way to prevent happiness.”
Harper looked at Nina. The directness was new, or maybe old. It was Nina from before when David died, the Nina who would call things out without apology.
“You’re right,” Harper said. “I am stalling.”
“Call him,” Claire said. “Say yes.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You just let a stranger put a permanent mark on your body. You can have coffee with a man who makes rocking chairs.”
Harper looked at her wrist again, thinking about the wave beneath the bandage, the small permanent mark she had made because she was trying to learn that not everything in life could be controlled.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call him tonight.”
“Tonight,” Nina confirmed. “Not tomorrow, not after you’ve had time to overthink it again and convince yourself it’s a bad idea. Tonight.”