Chapter 9
The idea was Asheville, North Carolina. It was Harper’s pick. It was month six, the halfway point of the pact. Not a single event like karaoke or the plunge or the tattoos, but something a little bigger.
Two days on the road, away from everything, away from Greg’s recliner and Harper’s corner office and Nina’s quiet little house on Edisto.
Two days of being nobody’s wife, nobody’s boss, and nobody’s grieving widow. Just three women in a car with a playlist and no particular obligations.
It didn’t seem like a scary thing to do, at least to other people. But to Harper, leaving work without taking her computer was a big deal. She had never been one who relaxed easily, and this trip was a challenge for her.
Then there was Nina, who hadn’t been away from home overnight since David died.
She had told herself this was because of Lucia, because a sixteen-year-old shouldn’t be left alone, which, of course, was a reasonable concern, but it completely ignored the fact that Elena lived ten minutes away and had been volunteering to take Lucia for a weekend since the funeral happened.
The real reason Nina hadn’t gone anywhere was actually pretty simple and probably harder to admit. Leaving the house meant leaving the last place David had lived.
His boots by the door, his grungy old robe hanging on the hook, the dent in his side of the mattress that she still didn’t have the heart to flip over.
Going away felt like leaving him behind, even though she knew in the logical part of her brain that grief hadn’t managed to suffocate, that David was not in those boots or the robe or the mattress. He was gone, and those things were simply just things.
But his things were all she had left, and letting go of them for even two days felt like stepping off a ledge.
She packed her bags anyway.
She actually packed, unpacked, and repacked it a couple more times because the first time she packed it, she did it like she was leaving for a month.
And the second time, she packed like she was going to the grocery store. Finally, on the third try, she packed like a normal human going on a two-day road trip.
Lucia watched her from the doorway of her bedroom with her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised.
“You’re packing a sweater for Asheville in April,” Lucia said.
“Well, the mountains can be cool at nighttime.”
“It’s going to be seventy degrees.”
“I like to be prepared.”
“Okay, you packed four pairs of socks for two days. That’s not being prepared. That’s being anxious.”
Nina looked at the socks. She put two pairs back. “Fine. Happy?”
“Delighted.” Lucia uncrossed her arms. “Mom, you’re going to have fun. You remember fun, right? That’s the thing that happens when you’re not watching HGTV and pretending you’re fine.”
“But I like HGTV.”
“Nobody likes HGTV that much. You just watch it so the house isn’t so quiet.”
Nina’s hands froze on the zipper. Sometimes Lucia said things like this, things that were precisely and surgically accurate. Nina wondered when her daughter had become the most perceptive person she knew.
Sixteen years old, and she could see through every wall Nina built.
“I’ll be fine at Abuela’s,” Lucia said. “She’s making tamales, and we’re going to watch telenovelas. I will be completely supervised and definitely overfed. Go.”
“I love you,” Nina said.
“I know. Bring me something weird from a gas station.”
Claire picked her up at eight o’clock.
Harper was already in the passenger seat with her sunglasses on, expensive coffee in hand, looking like a woman in a car commercial, except they were in Claire’s twelve-year-old Honda Pilot with a dent in the passenger door and a backseat that smelled of art supplies Claire had started accumulating over the past three months.
There were colored pencils in the center console, a sketchbook under the driver’s seat, and evidence of this woman who was quietly and carefully allowing herself to want things again.
Nina climbed into the backseat, and they pulled out of her crushed shell driveway. The marsh fell away behind them as they crossed the bridge off Edisto.
The drive to Asheville was five hours, give or take, depending on how many times Claire stopped at a gas station for coffee or how many times Harper demanded they skip the scenic route in favor of the interstate.
They compromised, interstate to Columbia, then Highway 26 through the foothills, where the landscape shifted from the flat Lowcountry to rolling Piedmont to the blue ridges of the mountains.
The air changed from the salt and pluff mud to pine and earth. Of course, their conversations in the car were the best part. Not the arrival or the destination, but the hours in between where the three of them were sealed in a small space with nowhere to go and nothing to do but talk.
They’d always been very good at this.
Even in college, long drives to the beach or road trips to football games, or that three-hour crawl from Charleston to Atlanta for Harper’s first job interview.
Those car conversations had shaped them and were where real things got said. Admissions they would make to each other and then deny if it was ever brought up again.
“I have a confession,” Claire said, somewhere past Columbia.
“You’re secretly a morning person?” Harper said.
“I’m already a morning person.”
“Nobody should enjoy mornings as much as you do.”
“Anyway, my confession,” Claire said, rolling her eyes, “is that I’ve been sleeping in the guest room.”
The car went quiet.
“Since when?” Nina asked.
“Since the tattoo, so a little over three weeks.”
“Does Greg realize this?” Harper asked.
“Uh, yes, Greg knows I’m sleeping in the guest room. I am missing from our bed, after all. He just hasn’t asked why.” Claire’s hands were steady on the wheel. “He hasn’t asked. Three weeks, and he hasn’t even asked me why I moved out of our bedroom.”
Nina leaned forward from the backseat. She could see the set of Claire’s jaw and the small line between her brows.
She thought about David, who would have followed her into the guest room within five minutes, wearing a confused expression and asking dozens of questions, because David noticed everything and cared about everything.
He would not have shared a house with a woman he loved without knowing why she’d moved into a different room.
But David was David, and Greg was most definitely Greg. Comparing the two wasn’t fair, but Nina thought about it anyway. She suspected Claire had thought it, too.
“What do you want to happen?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know. That’s my honest answer. I keep waiting to know, and I just don’t. I don’t want to leave right now. I don’t want things to stay this way either. I don’t know what’s in between those two things. I just know we can’t keep living like this.”
“Counseling,” Harper said, not as a suggestion, more like a label. “I mean, that’s what’s in between.”
“Greg won’t go to counseling. I’ve brought it up twice over the last few years. He says we’re fine.”
“You’re sleeping in separate rooms.”
“He’ll say it’s because I’m going through a phase or something equally ridiculous. I don’t know. Maybe I am going through a phase.”
Harper made a sound close to the one she made in board meetings when someone said something so wrong it didn’t even deserve a response.
“It’s not a phase,” Claire said quietly, being honest with them and herself. “I am the most awake I’ve been in over twenty years. That’s not a phase. That’s a wake-up call.”
The pines thickened before them. The mountains appeared in the distance, blue and layered, getting closer.
“You don’t have to decide anything right now,” Nina said. “You just have to keep being honest with yourself and with us, even with Greg if he’ll listen.”
“And what if he won’t?”
“Well, then you’ll know something from that, too. Life is about data. Facts. You make decisions when you have enough of both. You’ll know when you know,” Harper said in her most business-like voice.
Claire nodded.
She didn’t say anything else for a few miles, and Nina let the silence hold them as the mountains got closer.
They stopped for lunch at a little diner outside Hendersonville that looked like it hadn’t changed one bit since 1974.
Wood paneling, vinyl booths that had seen better days, a jukebox in the corner that worked, playing a Dolly Parton song at a volume that suggested the owner believed Dolly deserved to be heard by the entire building and possibly the county.
The menu was laminated and included a section titled “Juanita’s Favorites,” which they assumed referred to the owner and turned out to refer to the cook, a woman in her 70s who came out of the kitchen to personally deliver their fried chicken and ask where they were from.
“The Lowcountry,” Claire said.
“All three of you?” Juanita looked them over.
“College friends,” Nina said. “We’ve known each other for thirty years.”
“Thirty years?” Juanita shook her head. “You know what keeps friendship alive that long?”
“What?” Harper asked.
“Minding your business when you need to and not minding it when you shouldn’t.” She put down a basket of biscuits that hadn’t been asked for. “You’re on a trip?”
“Yeah, road trip,” Claire said. “Asheville.”
“What for?”
The three of them looked at each other. The answer was complicated.
A napkin, a pact, twelve adventures, a dead husband, a dying marriage, a man who built rocking chairs, a fifty-year-old woman who had just started drawing again after twenty-seven years.
The answer was an entire book in and of itself.
“We made a deal to do one scary thing a month for a year,” Nina said. “This month is a road trip.”
Juanita looked at them. She let out a big belly laugh that filled the whole diner.
“Honey, that’s the best thing I’ve heard all week. I’m seventy-three and still try to do one scary thing a month. Last month, I went on a date with a man from my church. First date in eleven years.”
“Well, how was it?” Harper asked.