Chapter 9 #2
“Terrible. That man talked about his prostate for forty-five minutes, but I got through it. The next one will be better, or maybe it won’t, but at least I’m in the game.” She tapped the table twice. “Y’all eat. Biscuits are on the house. Anybody doing what you’re doing deserves free biscuits.”
She disappeared into the kitchen, and the three of them just sat at the vinyl booth eating fried chicken and biscuits that were, Nina had to admit, some of the best she’d ever had.
Dolly sang loudly from the jukebox about working nine to five, and the afternoon sun came through the window in a piercing beam.
“I want to be Juanita when I grow up,” Claire said.
“Oh, Juanita would eat Greg alive,” Harper said, laughing.
“Juanita would eat all of us alive.”
Asheville was everything the Lowcountry wasn’t.
Mountains instead of marshes, cool air instead of thick, choking heat, streets that went up instead of being flat in every direction.
The city sat in a valley, surrounded by big blue ridges, and it had the energy of a place that drew artists, musicians, and people who had decided at some point that the conventional path in life just wasn’t for them.
Nina loved it immediately.
They checked into a small hotel near the Grove Arcade, a room with two beds and a pullout couch, which Claire insisted she would take because she always took the worst option in any given situation. Harper pointed out this was both generous and slightly masochistic.
They walked and walked. That was the adventure, really.
Not any single thing, but the accumulated hours of walking through a city none of them knew, going into shops and galleries, sitting on benches outside the bookstore, eating chocolate, watching street musicians play for tips on the corner of Lexington and Broadway.
Harper bought a scarf she didn’t need from a woman selling handmade goods on the sidewalk. The woman had a hairless cat named Peppy and no teeth in her mouth.
Claire sketched in her notebook while they waited for a table at a restaurant Nina had found on her phone, a small place that had a patio overlooking the mountains.
Nina tried on a hat in a vintage shop and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw, for the first time in a long time, a woman who looked like she might be having a good day.
Dinner was on the patio. The mountains went purple as the sun dropped, and the air cooled enough that she needed that sweater Lucia had told her not to pack.
The food was good, the wine was better, and the conversation turned the way it always did when they were on their second glass, honest and unguarded.
“Harper update,” Claire said. “We need the Jordan report.”
“There is no Jordan report.”
“But you had coffee with him three weeks ago. There’s got to be a report.”
Harper rearranged her silverware. She did this when she was stalling.
“We’ve had coffee twice,” she said.
Claire set her wine glass down, and Nina stopped chewing.
“Twice?” Nina said.
“The first time was the whole reintroduction, and the second time was because I’d already gone to the trouble of finding a parking spot on Vanderhorst Street, and parking in Charleston is its own form of torture.”
“Well, what was it like?” Nina asked.
Harper was quiet for a moment. The candle flickered on the table between them.
“He looks the same,” she said. “Older, a little more gray, still has the sawdust thing going on, like he just walked out of his workshop five minutes before he showed up. He ordered black coffee and remembered I take mine with one sugar. He didn’t bring up the past, not once.
He just asked me what I’d been doing for four years and then listened like he cared. ”
“Because he does care,” Claire said. “That man has always adored you.”
“I know. That’s what scares me. I spent four years convincing myself I was better off alone. Then this man shows up with his sawdust and patience and his one sugar, and I have to reconsider everything.”
“You mean reconsider that you’re fine alone? Or that alone is the same as fine?”
Nobody rushed to fill the pause. The waiter came and went. The mountains disappeared into the dark.
“I told him about the pact,” Harper said. “He wanted to see the tattoo.”
“What did he say?”
“He looked at it for a long time, and then he said, ‘That’s cool.’ And he smiled, and it was the same smile I remembered. I had to leave because I was about to do something completely out of character.”
“Like what?” Claire asked.
“Like stay.”
Nina felt the weight of the words settle.
Stay.
Such a small word for such a terrifying act.
Harper, who left. Harper, who kept her options open. Harper, who had a beautiful apartment with no kitchen table, because a kitchen table implied someone else would sit with her there.
For Harper, staying was the bravest thing she could do.
“Well, then stay next time,” Nina said. Harper looked at her. “I mean it. The next time you’re sitting across from him, and you wanna leave because things are getting real, just don’t. Stay. See what happens.”
“What if what happens is that I fall for him all over again, and then it doesn’t work out, and I end up feeling worse than before?”
“Well, what if it does work?”
Harper didn’t answer.
Getting to the hotel room at midnight was the best part of the whole trip.