Chapter 13
Harper had only five minutes of material prepared and was utterly terrified throughout. She wasn’t someone who became scared easily and couldn’t even recall the last time she felt the word ‘terrified’.
She was the person who gave presentations every quarter to a board of directors that controlled billions of dollars and whose idea of a warm greeting was a firm handshake.
She had pitched acquisitions in rooms where a single wrong number would mean someone’s career ended. She had negotiated contracts across time zones and languages she didn’t even speak, with the help of translators who looked more nervous than she did.
Harper Ellis didn’t get terrified. She just got prepared.
But here she was, sitting on her couch in Charleston at nine o’clock on a Thursday night, reading her notes for the fifth time, and her hands were shaking. Not because the material was bad, just because the material was actually true.
This was her pick for the ninth month: an open mic comedy night at a small club in Charleston called The Laff Stop.
It was spelled exactly that way, which Harper found offensive on a grammatical level, but she had chosen it because it hosted an open mic night every Friday that, according to the reviews, was welcoming and not too intimidating.
She picked stand-up because, after the grief retreat, she had told Claire and Nina that they needed a good laugh. Claire had said, “Then let’s just go see a comedy.” And Harper said, “ That’s not scary. Let’s go do comedy.”
The words had left her mouth before her brain had time to file a formal objection.
The thing about stand-up was that it required you to be honest about your life in front of a group of strangers and then make them laugh about it, laugh at you.
Harper was very good at making people laugh. She was sharp and quick-witted. Her timing was impeccable. And she had been the funniest person in every room she’d entered since she was about fourteen years old.
But being funny in a boardroom was very different than being funny up on stage.
Being funny on stage was like standing in front of a bunch of people without your clothes on.
And although Harper kept in shape and was proud of her body, she did not want to stand in front of a group of people without her clothes on.
In her boardrooms, humor was armor. On a stage, humor was the wound.
Her material was about being single, childless, a woman in finance, about eating toast over the sink, about her mother calling to report cousin Margaux’s reproductive achievements, about the fiddle leaf fig that her assistant kept alive because she just couldn’t be trusted with a houseplant.
It was also about what it meant that the longest relationship in her life was with a man named James, who watered her plants on Wednesdays.
It was funny. She knew it was funny because she’d read it to James, and he’d laughed so hard he’d spilled his coffee on the desk. Then he said, “Please don’t fire me for laughing at the part about your love life.”
Harper had said, “You laugh every day at my love life, James. That’s not new.”
But the funny wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the truth beneath the funny. The loneliness she turned into a punchline.
Her phone buzzed. It was Jordan.
Good luck tonight. You’re going to be great.
She had told him about the pact. She’d told him about all of it over three different dinners and four coffees and a walk along the Battery that lasted over two hours and ended with him holding her hand.
She had let him, which was the most significant physical contact Harper had had with another human since the polar plunge.
And the polar plunge had been with the Atlantic Ocean.
If I say I did terribly, you are obligated to lie and say I was great.
I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not starting tonight, but you won’t be terrible.
Harper stared at the text and thought about the word never.
Jordan had never lied to her. He had never told her she was easy to love because she wasn’t. And they both knew it.
But what he had said four years ago, the night that she ended it, standing in his workshop in Mount Pleasant with sawdust on the floor and a half-finished rocking chair between them, was, “You’re worth the difficulty, Harper. I just wish you would believe that.”
She was trying to believe that. She was trying so hard to believe that.
The Laff Stop was located in a basement on King Street, where the smell of popcorn and sweat hung in the air.
It was small. There were maybe eighty seats, and most of them were folding chairs that had seen better days.
They were arranged in front of a stage that was the size of a closet, with a single microphone and a spotlight.
The walls were exposed brick, covered in framed headshots of comedians who had apparently performed here on the way to somewhere else. This definitely wasn’t a destination club.
The bar in the back served beer and wine, and something called a Laff Attack that looked like a margarita mixed with several other drinks.
Claire was already there, sitting at a table in the front with a notebook. Because, of course, Claire would bring a notebook. Claire had written her material on index cards, organized them by topic, and practiced them in front of her bathroom mirror.
Harper loved her level of preparation. She brought it to every activity that was supposed to feel like something you didn’t prepare for.
Nina arrived looking better than she had in months, better than she had even since the pact started. There was a quality to her that was hard to name. Not happiness, but more like presence. Like she was back. Like she had gone somewhere that grief had taken her, and she was now back home, fully.
She was wearing color, a deep blue top that wasn’t David’s.
“There are eight people signed up before us,” Claire said, looking at her notebook. “We are numbers nine, ten, and eleven. Average set is five minutes, so that gives us about forty minutes to prepare.”
“Forty minutes to sit here in absolute horrifying terror,” Harper said.
“Well, that too.”
“So what’s your material about?” Nina asked Claire.
Claire looked at her index cards. “Parenting, marriage, being a third-grade teacher who organizes her pantry for fun.”
“You’re using the pantry?”
“Well, the pantry’s funny. I organized it alphabetically, then by food group, and my husband never noticed either time. I think that’s pretty good material.”
“What about you?” Harper asked Nina.
Nina was quiet for a moment. “I’m going to talk about David.”
They all went still.
“I’m going to tell the story about the pelicans,” Nina said.
“How he used to watch them fish and say they were proof you didn’t have to be graceful to be effective.
And then the story about the time he tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner by himself and set off every single smoke detector in the house.
And then the fire department came, and he offered them turkey. ”
“He did not,” Harper said.
“He absolutely did. And the fire chief even stayed for pie.”
Harper bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. Nina was sitting in a comedy club talking about her dead husband, and she was glowing. Things sure had changed in the last few months.
The eight comics before them ranged from painfully terrible to surprisingly good.
There was a college kid who did five minutes about his roommate’s sleep talking that was funnier than it had any right to be.
Then there was a woman in her thirties who talked about online dating with deadpan delivery. It kind of reminded Harper of herself.
A man in a Hawaiian shirt told dad jokes. The audience laughed, not at the jokes, but at his sheer force of belief in them. A woman bombed so terribly that the room went quiet and then, in an act of collective mercy, gave her a standing ovation, which made her cry, then made everyone else cry.
Then the host called Claire’s name.
Claire stood up. She smoothed out her blouse, picked up her index cards, and walked up to the stage like she was about to conduct a school assembly. That was the only public-speaking context she had, and Harper watched with a mixture of love and dread.
Claire tapped the microphone.
“Hi, I’m Claire. I’m a third-grade teacher, a wife, and a mother. I’m fifty years old. And the most rebellious thing I’ve ever done in the last twenty-six years is organize my pantry.”
There were a few polite laughs.
Claire looked down at her index cards. Then she put them on the stool and kept talking without them, which was so unlike Claire that Harper actually sat up straight in her chair.
“So my husband gave me a gift card for my fiftieth birthday, not to a store, one of those universal gift cards, you know, the kind that says, oh, I can’t be bothered to have a single thought about what you might enjoy.
It was thirty dollars, but I can go to any participating retailer.
Happy half a century of being alive, honey.
Go buy yourself something at Walgreens.”
The room laughed. It was a real laugh.
Claire’s eyes went wide for a second.
“I’ve been sleeping in the guest room for two months.
And you know what my husband said? Nothing.
He said absolutely nothing. In two months, this man has not even asked me a single question about why I moved out of our bedroom.
I could be building a spaceship in there.
I could be running an underground poker ring, and he would definitely not notice. ”
More laughter, louder this time.
Claire was finding her rhythm.
She talked about the napkin color crisis. She talked about counting to three before responding to her husband and how she had counted to three approximately 47,550 times in her marriage, which, at three seconds each, was roughly 39 hours of her life spent not saying what she actually thought.