Chapter 4
Claire chose to pick Nina up first because Nina was simply a flight risk.
Not literally.
Nina had said she was coming to karaoke. She had texted the group chat that morning, “I’m in, I’m coming, so please stop asking me if I’m coming.”
But Claire knew Nina the way you know weather patterns after thirty years, and she could feel the hesitation under those words, the part of Nina that was already building a case for why she should just stay home.
A headache or Lucia needing her, a vague sense of not feeling up to it, which had been Nina’s default setting for eighteen months now.
It was convincing enough to fool anyone who did not love her.
Nina preferred to stay home lately, but she wasn’t getting out of this. That was part of the pact.
So Claire drove straight to Edisto first.
She pulled into Nina’s crushed shell driveway at 5:15 and found her sitting on the front porch, wearing jeans and a black top. Her hair was down for the first time in months.
She looked like a woman who got dressed with some purpose, rather than just grabbing whatever was in her closet or something David used to wear.
It was such a small thing, hair down instead of pulled back.
Claire noticed it the way she noticed the napkins and the flower arrangements and all the details other people walked past.
Nina got in the car. “Don’t you say a word about my hair.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“I was thinking that you looked nice. I didn’t know that was a crime.”
“I know it’s been a year and a half since I’ve gone anywhere that isn’t the grocery store or Elena’s house, so I figured I should make an effort.”
“Well, you look beautiful.”
“Stop it.”
“Okay.”
They drove toward Beaufort to pick up the road to Walterboro.
The late afternoon light was doing what it did in the Lowcountry, with gold pouring through the live oaks that lined the two-lane road. Spanish moss swayed in that lazy rhythm that made everything feel like it was happening at half speed.
Claire loved this drive.
She loved every part of this world, the way the landscape shifted from an island to a marsh to a mainland, yet it never lost its character. It was wild and green and warm.
Nina was quiet, just looking out the window, so Claire let her be.
One of the things she had learned about grief, or about Nina’s grief specifically, was that silence was not always an emptiness. Sometimes it was just Nina being in the world without needing words.
“Lucia made me promise to take a video,” Nina finally said.
“You mean of us singing?”
“Yeah. She said, and I’m quoting, ‘I need proof that you actually did something fun for once.’”
“That girl is something else.”
“Yeah, but she’s not wrong.”
Claire’s phone buzzed in the cup holder, a text from Harper.
I’m already here. I’ve got us a table. It’s way worse than I imagined. Much, much worse. This place has peanut shells on the floor.
Ten seconds later.
I’m ordering a drink, possibly several.
Nina read the text and laughed under her breath. “Of course she’s already there. Harper has not been late for anything in her entire life.”
“I remember one time she told us she was born two weeks early. She couldn’t even wait until her due date.”
“Hey, you remember when she showed up to your wedding rehearsal an hour early and ended up directing the florist?”
“I remember the florist cried,” Claire said, laughing.
“The arrangements were beautiful, though.”
“Yes, the arrangements were perfect. The florist quit the very next day.”
They were both laughing now, that easy laughter of people who had three decades of shared stories to pull from. They never ran out of material.
Claire felt the particular magic of their long friendship, the way it could take just the smallest memory and blow it up into something warm enough to hold.
Hank’s was pretty much as bad as Harper had promised.
It sat at the edge of Walterboro’s main drag, in a building that had probably housed four or five different businesses over the years and had never been committed to any of them.
The sign was hand-painted and missing an apostrophe. The parking lot was gravel. There was a neon Budweiser sign in the window and a chalkboard sign by the door that read “Karaoke Fridays.”
Inside, the place was dim and loud, and it smelled like beer and popcorn and that particular funk that a bar gets after forty years of spilled drinks on poorly cared-for wooden floors.
There were peanut shells everywhere, as Harper had warned them. Christmas lights hung from the ceiling year-round, which gave the whole room a slightly unhinged festive quality. A small stage was in the corner, complete with a microphone stand and two speakers.
The speakers looked like they had survived some sort of war, and a screen displayed the lyrics to Sweet Caroline in bright blue font while a man in a trucker hat sang with the passion of someone auditioning for a role he was definitely not going to get.
Harper was sitting at a high-top table near the back, drinking something with a lime in it. She was wearing silk because, of course, she was. She was Harper in a bar with peanut shells on the floor, and Claire just loved her for it.
“This place is one big health code violation,” Harper said instead of saying hello.
“It just has character,” Claire said.
“Character is what realtors say when a house has termites.”
Nina slid onto the stool next to her and looked around the room with wide eyes.
“This is absolutely incredible. I swear David would have loved this place.” She said it lightly and easily.
Claire and Harper both caught it, the way David’s name landed without the usual heavy gravity, and they looked at each other like, did you hear that? That was different. That was good.
A waitress appeared next to them. She was young, maybe twenty-five years old, with an impossibly high ponytail. “Y’all singing tonight?”
“We are,” Nina said before Claire or Harper could try to get out of it.
“Well, the sign-up sheet’s over there by the stage. Hank puts you in order. What can I get y’all to drink?”
Claire got a glass of white wine, which arrived in a glass that had clearly been designed for a totally different beverage. Harper was already on her second vodka soda. Nina ordered a beer, which surprised both of them because Nina had always been a wine person.
Maybe this was just a beer kind of night. Hank’s kind of demanded that.
“Okay,” Claire said, “we need a plan.”
“It’s karaoke, not a military operation,” Harper said.
“Well, everything benefits from having a plan. So do we each have to sing a solo? Are we doing a group number? Do we pick our own songs, or are we going to pick songs for each other?”
“If you pick my song, I swear I will walk out of this building right now and drive back to Charleston, and neither of you will ever see me again,” Harper said.
“Okay, group number it is,” Nina said. “One song together. That’s the pact. We do things together.”
“All right, what song?” Claire asked.
They stared at each other.
The bar was filling up around them.
The man in the trucker hat had finished Sweet Caroline with modest applause and was now replaced by two women in matching denim jackets that they had apparently bedazzled.
They were attempting Islands in the Stream with more enthusiasm than accuracy. The Christmas lights blinked, probably because they were faulty or maybe shocked at how off-key the women were.
Peanut shells crunched all around them, and Hank, who turned out to be a large man with an even larger beard, had a surprisingly gentle voice.
“Shania Twain,” Nina suddenly said.
Claire looked at her.
“Which one?”
“You know which one.”
Claire did know. They all knew.
It was a song they had played on repeat in their apartment, the three of them dancing around in their tiny galley kitchen with wooden spoons as microphones.
Of course, this was when they were in their early twenties and convinced they were invincible.
This was well before real life had taken hold of them and showed them who was boss.
“Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” Claire said.
“Absolutely not,” Harper said. “That song has a dance break, and I am not planning to stand up there and do a dance break.”
“Rule three,” Nina said. “No backing out.”
“I’m not backing out. I’m establishing boundaries. My old therapist said that was healthy.”
“Harper, we sang this song at every party for two years. We sang it at Claire’s bachelorette, remember? We sang it at my wedding reception after David drank too many mojitos and started doing the electric slide by himself.”
“That man was a national treasure,” Harper said, putting her hand on her chest.
“This is our song,” Nina said. “It has always been our song.”
Harper took a drink and then set the glass down.
She looked at Nina, then at Claire, and then at the stage with its war-torn speakers and blue-font lyric screen.
“Fine,” she said, “but if anyone from my office sees this, I’m going to blame both of you and claim that I was put under duress.”
Claire went to sign them up. She wrote their names on the sheet in her small, precise handwriting.
Claire, Harper, and Nina: “Man! I Feel Like a Woman”
Hank looked at the sheet, then looked at her and nodded. He understood that every person who got up there was committing an act of bravery, whether the singer knew it or not.
“You’re up in four,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, you’re going to need it.”
“Well, that was less encouraging than I had hoped.”
Hank smiled. “Everybody’s terrible. That’s the point.”
The four performances before them passed in a blur of nerves. Claire drank her wine way too fast, then ordered another.
Harper had switched to water because she was taking this seriously, which meant she was actually terrified, because Harper only got that disciplined when she was really scared.
Nina was peeling the label off her beer bottle in long, careful strips. This was a habit she’d had since college. It was a tiny slice of the old Nina coming back to life.