Chapter 10 #2
The problem was that her own husband would have said, “Oh, that’s nice,” and then changed the subject.
But Richard, a total stranger, had leaned in.
That was the gap in her life. It was the whole thing. She didn’t want an affair. She didn’t want to have a crush on someone. She wasn’t someone who was going to take the avenue of betrayal.
She just now had the devastating clarity of realizing that a stranger in a sport coat with those cool elbow patches had shown more interest in her inner life in four minutes than Greg had shown in the last four years.
Harper was having a very different kind of night.
Claire could see her from across the room, about three tables away, sitting with her rigid posture, as if she were being questioned by the FBI under a bright light.
Most of her dates lasted the whole four minutes only because the bell hadn’t rung yet.
She was polite. She was efficient, as always. She was treating each conversation like an interview, which was exactly what she’d said it felt like and exactly how Harper handled it.
This is how she handled anything she couldn’t control: by controlling it so thoroughly that no actual connection could ever sneak through.
On her sixth or seventh rotation, something changed.
Claire noticed it because she was pretending to listen to this man named Gary, who was talking about his timeshare in Hilton Head, but she was actually watching Harper out of the corner of her eye.
She had no interest in Gary’s timeshare.
Harper was laughing. It wasn’t the performative laugh that she normally used. It was a real laugh. She threw her head back slightly. Claire had heard it maybe a dozen times in the past year.
The man across from her was in his mid-fifties, wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He had a stillness about him. He was talking, and Harper was actually listening.
She wasn’t even checking her phone, which was one of the most astonishing things Claire had seen all evening.
The bell rang.
The man stood up and said something that made Harper smile, and then moved to the next table.
Harper watched him go. She picked up her wine glass, took a long drink, and then Claire could read the expression on her face because she’d been reading Harper’s expressions for thirty years.
She had just been surprised by something she hadn’t expected. And she was probably trying to make a case in her brain of why she should totally ignore it.
Later, in the bathroom between the rounds, Claire cornered her.
“Who was that?”
“Who was who?”
“The man with the glasses, the one who was making you laugh and kind of throw your head back.”
“His name is Peter. He teaches history at the Citadel. And he was very pleasant.”
“Again, you threw your head back.”
“I did not throw my head back.”
“Harper, I was watching you. You threw your head back. And you laughed. You almost gave yourself whiplash. You don’t do that for someone who’s just pleasant.”
Harper reapplied her very red lipstick. “He was funny. He told a joke about the Citadel’s admission process that was actually pretty clever. And I appreciate the construction of good humor. That’s all.”
“Are you going to check his name on the card to indicate interest, as Bev said?”
“I’m seeing Jordan.”
“You’ve had coffee with Jordan two times. That’s not seeing someone.”
“Well, it’s the beginning of seeing someone. It’s like the preamble of seeing. I’m in the opening chapters of seeing.”
“What about Peter?”
She capped her lipstick. “Peter is irrelevant. Peter is a little speed-dating story I’ll tell at parties. He’s a man I spoke to for four minutes in a wine bar, and I will never speak to him again.”
She said it with such finality that Claire had to let it go because pushing Harper was like trying to push a boulder uphill with a teaspoon.
But still, she filed it away.
Not because she thought Harper should pursue Peter necessarily, but because Peter proved something Harper actually needed to see.
That she was capable of laughing with a stranger, of being surprised, of letting her guard down for a whole four minutes.
If she could do that with Peter, then she could do it with Jordan. The muscle still worked. She just needed to strengthen it.
Nina’s night was the quietest of the three.
Claire didn’t find out until afterward, in the parking lot, when they all stood by Claire’s car in the warm May air and debriefed. They debriefed the way they always did, thoroughly and honestly, with the wine still warm in their systems and plenty of humor.
“I met someone,” Nina said, leaning against the car.
She said it like it was important, but without any buildup, as if she had just told them a tornado was heading their way.
Claire and Harper stood there, frozen.
“His name is Sam,” Nina said. “He’s a landscape architect who lives on James Island.
He lost his wife to breast cancer two years ago.
” She was looking at the ground, at her shoes, actually, at anything but their faces.
“He was very kind, didn’t try too hard, asked me all about Edisto, and I told him about the marsh.
He told me about the garden he designed for the hospice center where his wife was.
We just talked. It wasn’t a romantic thing.
It wasn’t anything, really, I guess. But when the bell rang, I didn’t want him to leave the table.
That hasn’t happened to me since David.”
The parking lot was quiet. A car passed. Somewhere in the bar, they were playing music that leaked through the walls.
“That’s great, Nina,” Claire said.
“Is it? Because I feel super guilty. Like, I feel as though I just betrayed David by enjoying a four-minute conversation with a man who designs gardens.”
“You didn’t betray anyone,” Harper said. “David wouldn’t consider a conversation a betrayal. He would consider it a new beginning for you.”
“I know that in my head. I really do. My head is very reasonable about all this. I have a very reasonable head, but my heart is less cooperative.”
“So did you check his name on the card?” Claire asked.
Nina was quiet for a moment.
“Yes.”
Claire reached over and squeezed her arm.
Harper made a squeal that sounded like delight, which she quickly converted into a cough.
“Let’s not make it a thing,” Nina said, pleadingly.
“We would never,” Harper responded.
“Oh, it’s already a thing,” Claire said.
“It is not a thing. It’s just a card with a little name written on it, and I checked the little box at a speed dating event, of all things, for a man I spoke to for about four minutes. That is the whole thing, and it is definitely not a thing.”
“It’s a little bit of a thing,” Harper said, holding up her thumb and forefinger.
Nina looked at them, the two women leaning against the car, grinning at her. She shook her head and smiled. It was an embarrassed, hopeful, scared smile.
“If he calls, I’ll have coffee with him, but that’s it. Coffee, in a public place during daylight hours. Plus, maybe he didn’t write my name down. That’s entirely possible.”
“Those are reasonable terms, but you are acting like he’s an axe murderer,” Harper said. “Anyway, I approve.”
“I wasn’t asking for approval.”
“Well, you have it anyway.”
They got into the car. Claire drove with the windows down and the salt air coming off the harbor. They crossed over the bridge in Charleston, lights spreading out behind them.
Nina was quiet in the backseat, and Harper was quiet in the front.
Claire drove through the dark toward Beaufort, thinking about Richard and his sport coat and his elbow patches and his forward-leaning. She would’ve never thought someone leaning forward was so important to her.
And then she thought about Greg and his recliner. His backward leaning. His “have fun.” She thought about the gap between those two responses and what it meant about the life she built.
She got home at midnight. The house was dark. Greg was snoring. The porch light was off again. He didn’t even leave it on to make sure she got in okay.
Claire stood in the kitchen. She stared at the napkin on the fridge. She looked at the junk drawer where the gift card still sat.
She looked at the dark hallway leading to their bedroom, where her husband would definitely be sleeping on his side, facing the wall.
She went to the guest room and opened her sketchbook. She drew a woman sitting across the table from a stranger.
He was leaning forward.
She didn’t draw the stranger’s face. She only drew her own.