Chapter 8 #3
“You know, you’re very bossy for someone who sat in parking lots for months.”
“Yeah, well, I’m making up for lost time.”
Harper laughed. She sat on that bench with her best friends, ice cream melting down her fingers, a permanent wave on her wrist, and Savannah folding itself into the evening around them.
She thought about Jordan and his workshop in Mount Pleasant, sawdust on his jeans. And she picked up her phone and texted him.
Yes to coffee. You pick the place.
The response came in under a minute.
Tomorrow. Cafe on Vanderhorst, 9:00. I’ll be the one who looks like he can’t believe his luck.
Harper read it twice.
She didn’t show it to Claire or Nina.
She just put her phone back in her pocket and sat there smiling. Claire and Nina looked at each other over Harper’s head and said nothing because they knew, and she knew they knew, and that was enough.
Claire arrived home at exactly 9:30.
The house was quiet. The den light was on, which meant Greg was in his chair, which meant her world was operating exactly as she had left it. Nothing changed here at her house. It was always the same, day in and day out.
She dropped her bag by the door and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Greg appeared in the doorway as he sometimes did, like he was checking on a sound he’d heard from another room.
“So, how was Savannah?” he asked. He was holding a beer and wearing the same khaki shorts he’d been wearing that morning, which was also the same pair he’d been wearing for the last three weekends.
Claire had stopped commenting on it because commenting required energy she no longer had to spend on Greg’s wardrobe.
“It was good. Really good, actually.”
“What’d you do down there?”
Claire took a breath. She could have lied. She could have said they just walked around, did some shopping, and ate lunch.
She could have made this a small, safe version of herself that Greg was comfortable with, the version that never surprised him, that he didn’t have to pay attention to because she never did anything worth paying attention to.
But instead, she sat down on the kitchen stool and pulled up her pant leg. Greg looked at the bandage on her ankle and then at her face.
“What’s that? Did you hurt yourself?”
“It’s a tattoo.”
Greg stared at her. She could see him processing, the gears slowly turning in his brain. Thinking through all the versions of Claire he knew.
Claire, who organized pantries. Claire, who baked pound cake. Claire, who had not surprised him in over two decades. She could see him trying to put the information into the shape of the woman he thought he’d married.
“Have you lost your ever-loving mind?” It was not said with anger. That was the thing about Greg. He never got angry.
He just got confused, which was almost worse because at least anger meant he was paying attention.
Confusion meant she had done something that just didn’t compute, something outside the parameters of what he had as Claire stored in his head.
Greg had been an accountant at the same firm for over twenty-five years. His life was simple. Numbers, spreadsheets, recliner, food. That was pretty much it. He didn’t love change, and Claire getting a tattoo was a major one.
His first response was not to update his understanding of her, but to question whether there was something wrong with her.
Six months ago, Claire would have backtracked. She would have laughed it off, explained it, or made it smaller. She would have said, “Oh, it’s just a little thing. Harper talked me into it. It’s nothing.”
She would have tried to make herself into a version Greg could understand, then filed the real version away in the same place she kept her old sketchbooks and dreams.
But she didn’t.
“No,” Claire said. “I haven’t lost my mind. I got a tattoo. It’s an ocean wave. It’s small, and I like it.”
Greg opened his mouth and then closed it, and then took a sip of beer.
“Well, okay then,” he said, and walked back to the den.
Claire sat alone in the kitchen and listened to his recliner engage, and the television come on.
She thought, “That’s it? Okay then. I just did the most reckless thing I’ve done in twenty-six years, and your response is, okay then?”
She pulled her pant leg down, looked at the kitchen, saw Mason jars, a napkin on the fridge, a gift card she still hadn’t used sitting in the junk drawer like a monument to everything her husband didn’t understand about her.
Claire went to the guest room. She opened the sketchbook she had started using after karaoke night.
She had four drawings in it now, rough and unpracticed. She turned to a blank page and drew a small, simple, and permanent wave.
Then she drew another and another and another. The page filled up with waves, each one slightly different.
She sat there drawing until midnight, alone in the guest room of the house she had shared with this man for two decades, almost three.
The only sound was the pencil on the paper and the television through the wall, and the quiet, ever-growing knowledge that something was going to have to change.