The Midlife Birthday Club

Chapter 1

Claire had changed the napkin color at least four times, and that number was probably a bit lower than the actual count. It was best not to count, or else she might think she was losing what little was left of her mind.

The first choice was coral, because it looked elegant in Pinterest photos, but it arrived looking like raw salmon. Definitely not a sophisticated salmon, more like a cafeteria salmon. The kind served on a Styrofoam plate with a little piece of parsley that had given up on life.

The kind you’d find at a hospital just before being admitted for food poisoning, a few hours after eating it.

The kind she would imagine someone would eat in prison. Wait? Did they get salmon in prison? Unlikely.

She had returned those napkins and then ordered sage green, a color she often loved. But Greg said it made the table look like a hospital. It was the most he had said to her in three days, so at least that was a win. His vocal cords had apparently not locked up after all.

Her third choice was ivory, but ivory napkins on a white tablecloth looked dirty, and Claire Morrison was not going to have a dirty table. She was turning fifty. This was an important time, and the table needed to rise to the occasion.

She finally settled on dusty rose. Nobody would notice or even comment on them, which pretty much summed up the last decade of her life.

These were the kinds of things that mattered only to Claire.

Sadly, the most important thing she would give herself on this monumental birthday was dusty rose napkins. Yay.

The house smelled of the mouth-watering rosemary chicken she had made and the lemon pound cake she had been baking since noon, because she knew Nina’s favorite bakery on Bay Street had closed eight months earlier.

Nobody made pound cake the way they did, except for Claire, who had called the bakery’s former owner to ask for the recipe.

They told her it was a family secret, and she spent three weekends reverse-engineering it from memory and using a YouTube tutorial, but she did not need to tell anyone about that part.

She had not told Nina she was even baking the cake, just in case it didn’t turn out well. But Nina needed something to make her smile, and Claire hoped this would do it.

The guest bathroom had been cleaned twice because once simply wasn’t enough. The fancy soap shaped like a magnolia blossom sat in its little dish, smelling like someone’s rich grandmother. She wished she were the rich grandmother. Or a grandmother at all.

The truth was, even though she had two grown children, she hardly saw them these days. Her son Adam lived in Germany with his new wife, and her daughter Molly lived in California. They were chasing life, like she once did, but she wished they were closer and stayed in touch more.

Three bottles of wine sat on the kitchen counter because Claire was not sure whether this was a two- or a three-bottle night. With her friends, it was often a three-bottle night.

Turning fifty with your two best friends while your husband sat in the next room, acting as if you had personally offended him by simply continuing to exist on the planet, seemed like it could go either way.

Greg was sitting in the den.

Greg was always sitting in the den.

If Claire died tomorrow, the paramedics would find Greg sitting in the den, watching something on his laptop with his earbuds in, the recliner engaged, completely unaware that his wife had ceased to be alive in the next room. He might notice by dinnertime if there was no food on the table. Maybe.

He had wished her happy birthday that morning in the same way that he confirmed dentist appointments. He acknowledged it, noted it, and then moved on. One more thing checked off his list. Root canal, check! Wife turns fifty, check!

Twenty-six years of marriage, and the man had given her a gift card. And it wasn’t even a specific gift card, like the ones you’d give to someone you actually knew. Nope, it was one of those universal cards that you could use in any store, whether it was the dollar store or the department store.

It seemed choosing an actual retailer would require more thought about her than he was willing to invest in her fiftieth year on earth.

How exciting that she could now go to the grocery store and buy toilet paper with her brand-new, shiny gift card. Wasn’t she the luckiest woman in town?

She had smiled and thanked him, of course, and then put it in the junk drawer next to the scissors that no longer cut anything and the batteries that were probably dead.

She positioned the dahlia stem in the Mason jar that she had wrapped with twine because she saw it on Pinterest and thought it looked charming. It did look charming.

Everything Claire touched looked charming.

She had a gift for that, making things beautiful for others as she slowly disappeared. For Claire, life felt like a big hole in the floor, swallowing her up bit by bit while no one noticed. Or cared.

“You know,” Greg said from the doorway. She was so startled by his rare presence in the kitchen during baseball hours that it felt like she was looking at wildlife. “You could just take them out to dinner. Keep it simple.”

Claire put another dahlia stem into the Mason jar and counted to three in her mind. She had learned years earlier that the first thing she wanted to say to her husband was probably not the best.

The first thing in this case would have been: When was the last time you made anything simple for me? Don’t you like to make life harder for me?

Or maybe she would’ve said, Hey, gift card guy, why don’t you just shut your mouth and go away?

But what she said was, “I like doing this. It’s important to me.”

He shrugged, the universal gesture of a man who had made his suggestion and considered his job done.

“I’ll be in the den. The Braves are on at seven. They’re replaying the ’95 World Series again. It never gets old.”

He said it with more enthusiasm than he had shown at the party, at her birthday, or at Claire’s new dress, which was still hanging on the back of the bedroom door with the tags on it because she had not decided whether it made her look like she was trying too hard for a party she was having in her own house.

She listened to his footsteps go down the hall, followed by the loud, familiar thump as he fell into the recliner.

It was then followed by the opening bars of a pregame commentary, which sounded like the worst thing on earth to Claire.

Men just sitting there giving their opinions on other men hitting balls through the air… for hours on end. No thanks.

These were the sounds of her marriage, predictable as a metronome and twice as monotonous. How had it gotten this bad?

Of course, other marriages were way worse. This was something she told herself regularly. Greg could be a cheater. He wasn’t. Greg could be abusive. He wasn’t. He just didn’t seem to notice she was alive anymore.

Claire looked down at her hands. She had flour under her fingernails. She looked at her thin gold wedding band. She had not taken it off in twenty-six years. It just sat there, a remnant of the romance she once felt, a fleeting moment in time.

Who are you?

The thought arrived sharp and uninvited as it always did, like a car alarm going off at 3:00 in the morning.

But she shook it off because she had a party to finish. Claire Morrison did one thing very well - made others feel valued and seen. Boy, she wished someone would do that for her.

Harper arrived at 5:47, thirteen minutes early, because Harper Ellis had never been late for anything in her life. She had even been born early, and she honestly hadn’t been late a day since.

She came through the front door without knocking, as she usually did.

She had never knocked at Claire’s house, not once in all the years they’d known each other.

Claire had stopped locking the front door on days when she knew Harper was expected because Harper once stood on the porch for forty-five seconds and decided that was an unreasonable waiting time and then called to ask if Claire was dead.

Spoiler alert: Claire answered the phone, and she wasn’t dead.

She was wearing a silk blouse the color of emeralds, wide-legged black trousers, and heels that qualified as an architectural achievement. There was no way Claire could ever have worn those. She would have toppled over immediately.

Harper’s blond hair was blown out to a shine that suggested either a very fancy salon or forces beyond mortal understanding.

She held two bottles of champagne, a gift bag from a store Claire could not even afford to walk past, and the energy of a woman who had gone to back-to-back meetings since seven that morning and had just decided to be fabulous anyway.

That was Harper. Always fabulous, never a hair out of place. She was the epitome of “never let them see you sweat.”

“Claire Morrison, if you tell me that you baked a three-layer cake from scratch for your own birthday, I swear I will sit on your front porch and weep.”

“It’s just simple pound cake, and it’s for all of us.” Claire knew that was a lie. Nothing she ever did was simple.

“I brought cheese from that place on King Street. The one with the goat out front.”

“The goat’s name is Gerald.”

“Of course, you know the goat’s name.”

Harper set the champagne on the counter and pulled Claire into a hug. She smelled like Chanel.

She held on a moment too long, and Claire felt it. Harper never held on longer than necessary.

Then Harper pulled back and looked at her with those sharp green eyes. She never missed anything, not in their thirty years of friendship.

“You look beautiful. How are you? Don’t you dare say fine.”

Claire opened her mouth, then closed it. She smiled the smile she had perfected for parent-teacher conferences and dinner parties. Broad enough to look natural, but small enough not to look psychotic.

“I’m so glad you’re here.”