Chapter 1 #2
Harper looked at her for a second. Claire could almost see the gears turning behind her eyes. The same analytical mind that ran a $200 million division, deciding whether or not she was going to push further or let it go.
She let it go. For now.
“Where’s Greg?”
“Nineteen ninety-five.”
“The Braves?”
“The Braves.”
Harper poured herself a glass of water and then leaned against the counter, her arms crossed.
For just a moment, Claire imagined them when they were twenty years old again, standing in their dorm at the College of Charleston, eating ramen and planning lives that had not happened yet.
It made Claire’s chest ache.
They’d all had such big plans. Big dreams. They would live together in a fancy apartment in NYC. Or maybe they would rent a villa in Italy and meet Italian men whose sole jobs would be to feed them pasta and grapes.
Greg had never once fed her grapes.
“She’s coming, right?” Harper asked.
They both knew who she was.
“She said she was.”
“You know that’s not the same thing as actually showing up.”
“I know.”
They looked at each other, and the worry they shared about Nina Vargas passed between them, as it had for the last eighteen months now.
Nina showed up at 6:22, which was a little late for the old Nina but practically a miracle for the Nina who had existed since her beloved David died. They gave her grace. She’d been through one of the worst things a spouse could go through.
Claire heard the car in the driveway first. There was a long pause. She and Harper both noticed it. The pause.
Nina did that a lot now. She got to where she was going, then stayed in the car for a while, as if she had to gather the pieces of herself before she could walk into a room and pretend they were all in the right place.
As if she were a jigsaw puzzle scattered across the floor of her car, and it took her a while to pick up as many pieces as she could to be whole. There were always a few missing pieces.
Claire opened the front door and watched Nina come up the walkway. She was thinner than the last time Claire had seen her. It was not terribly alarming, but she did notice that her collarbones looked different from what they had been before.
She wore a soft gray cable-knit sweater. Claire immediately recognized it as one of David’s. He had bought it in Charleston on their tenth anniversary at that shop on Market Street that sold overpriced cashmere to tourists. David had always had good taste.
Nina wore it the way you wear a hug from someone who is no longer there to give one. It was obvious she was trying to physically wrap herself in the memory of her beloved husband.
She held a bottle of wine in one hand and a small potted succulent, wrapped in brown paper, in the other.
“Here, it’s a housewarming gift,” Nina said blankly, holding up the plant.
“I know you’ve lived here for decades, but I haven’t been over in a while, so.
” A small smile flickered across her face, like a fleeting ghost of a joke.
Nina used to be so funny, but in the kind of way a person doesn’t even realize they’re funny.
That was gone now. Claire hadn’t seen that side of her in almost two years now.
Claire wanted to wrap her in a blanket and not let her go for six months. Instead, she took the succulent.
“I love it. Come on in. Harper’s already halfway through the cheese board.”
“I am not!” Harper called from the kitchen. “All I’ve had are two crackers.”
“And a quarter pound of brie,” Claire said, pointing to the quickly emptying board.
“Well, brie doesn’t count. Brie is like a condiment.”
Nina’s mouth twitched, but it still was not quite a smile. It was the place where a smile would go if she had one to give. She stepped inside.
“It smells so good in here. I haven’t cooked a real meal in a couple of weeks. Poor Lucia has been living off frozen waffles.”
“Well, she’s sixteen,” Harper said, handing Nina a glass of wine. “That’s a balanced diet for her age.”
“Waffles?”
“Yep.”
They all moved into the dining room, and Claire watched Nina take in the table, the dusty rose napkins, the Mason jars of flowers, and the three place settings on the good china that only came out for Thanksgiving and birthdays, or the occasional Tuesday when Claire just needed to feel like her life had some kind of ceremony.
“This is beautiful, Claire,” Nina said. “You really did a great job putting this together.”
Greg appeared in the doorway. Claire felt the familiar tension he brought.
Him and his khakis and his College of Charleston T-shirt, with his earbuds draped around his neck.
They were not even the good earbuds. They were from an older time, but he said they worked better than the newer ones.
Greg was a man lost in the mid-nineties.
He stood in the doorway like a man who intended to be there only briefly. He wasn’t planning to hang around and celebrate with his wife and her two best friends. He had things to do, a wife to ignore.
“Ladies, happy birthday. Y’all need anything?”
“We’re fine, Greg,” Claire said, her jaw tightening.
“Holler if you do.”
He gave a little wave and then retreated back to 1995.
Claire felt Harper’s eyes on her like a laser beam, but she chose not to look.
They sat down, and Claire brought out the chicken, roasted vegetables, and the rolls she had made from her mother’s recipe. No one could beat those yeast rolls.
Harper opened the champagne, and Nina held her glass up.
“To fifty.”
They clinked and drank.
For a while, it was good. Just the three of them, the way it used to be.
Harper telling a story about a man in her office who sent a company-wide email meant for his girlfriend, and the forty-five minutes of chaos that followed.
Nina laughing at Harper’s impression of the man’s face when he realized what he had done.
Claire refilling glasses, passing the bread, and, for the first time in weeks, feeling like she existed.
They talked about Lucia, who was apparently going through a phase in which she communicated exclusively through eye rolls and sighs.
They talked about Harper’s assistant, James, who had started bringing his emotional support ferret to the office.
They talked about the bookstore on Bay Street that was closing and whether the new coffee shop on Edisto was any good.
They talked about the woman at Claire’s school who had shown up for the faculty meeting with her shirt inside out and had not noticed until lunch.
But they did not talk about Greg.
And they did not talk about David.
And they did not talk about the fact that Harper ate dinner alone most nights or that Nina’s house on Edisto was so quiet she had started leaving the television on just to hear another human voice.
Those things sat at the table with them, taking up space like uninvited guests.
It was Nina who finally said his name.
They were on the second bottle of wine. Claire had brought out the pound cake, and Nina had taken one bite before going very still.
“This tastes like Barton’s,” she said softly.
“Does it?” Claire kept her voice light and casual, as if she hadn’t spent hours making sure that cake was right.
“Claire, you called Susie to ask for the recipe?”
“She wouldn’t give it to me. Family secret or some such nonsense.”
“What did you do?”
“I might have spent three weekends recreating it from memory. I don’t know if I can pay my light bill this month because I spent all the money on flour.”