Chapter 15
The therapist’s name was Dr. Lydia Warren, and she had that particular gift of saying very little but making you say everything.
Her office was in a small building in Beaufort, on the second floor, with a window that looked out over the live oaks lining the sidewalk.
The room was painted a soft, calming blue, calming or depressing, depending on Claire’s mood.
There was a couch with two chairs and a box of tissues on the end table, a clock on the wall that ticked quietly, counting down the fifty minutes Claire and Greg spent here every Thursday at four o’clock.
They sat at opposite ends of the couch, like strangers on a bus. They were on session six, and it was not going well. It was not going badly; it was just going the way the therapist had warned it would go, slowly, painfully, with lots of silence.
Greg handled the silence better than Claire expected.
He sat on his end of the couch, hands on his knees, and answered all the doctor’s questions with careful deliberation.
This was the first time in his adult life he had been asked to examine the inner workings of his mind, and he seemed to find the process unfamiliar, but he didn’t deflect.
He didn’t make jokes. He just sat there and tried.
On Greg, trying looked like a man learning a language he should have learned twenty years earlier, slowly sounding out all the words and getting some of them wrong, but he still showed up every week.
Claire had learned that their marriage hadn’t gotten into this mess without her making some mistakes along the way, too. And it was hard to change ingrained patterns, but she was trying.
Today, Dr. Warren asked each of them to describe what they wanted the marriage to look like a year from now.
Greg had gone first. He’d stared at the carpet for a long time, and Claire had watched the side of his face, trying to process in his brain something he’d never been asked to do before.
“I want to eat dinner together,” he’d finally said, “at the table, not with me in the den and her in the kitchen, but together. And I want to know what she’s thinking about while we eat.”
Dr. Warren looked at Claire. “And you?”
Claire had looked at Greg, at his hands on his knees, at the gray around his temples and the lines around his eyes.
He was wearing a College of Charleston T-shirt, the same one he’d worn to her birthday dinner almost a year ago, which she now realized was just probably his favorite shirt, and she’d never even asked him about it.
“I want to be surprised,” she had said. “I want him to surprise me, not with a gift, just with a question I don’t expect or a thought he hasn’t shared. I want to sit across from my husband and discover something about him that I didn’t know.”
Dr. Warren let the silence sit. The clock ticked in the background.
“You know what’s funny?” Greg said, still looking at the carpet.
“I’ve been watching the Braves since 1995.
Almost thirty years, same team, same replay, same highlight reels.
I just realized I’ve been doing the same thing with our marriage, watching the replay, just running the same plays, never looking up to see if the game has changed. ”
Claire had stared at him. In twenty-six years, Greg had never once used a sports metaphor to describe their relationship. It wasn’t poetry, but it was Greg, and Greg was trying to articulate his inner life through baseball, which was actually the most romantic thing he’d done in many years.
“The game has changed,” Claire said.
“Yeah,” Greg said, smiling slightly. “I’m starting to see that.”
Then they had driven home separately, as they always did after therapy. Claire needed those twenty minutes in the car alone to process what had happened. She thought Greg probably did, too.
When she got home, Greg was in the kitchen, not in the den. He was standing at the stove, looking confused. The air smelled like burning garlic or something that he might have been attempting to stir-fry.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked.
“Cooking,” Greg said. He was holding a spatula, but had a look on his face as if he had only held one, maybe three times in his life.
“The garlic is burning.”
“I know. How do I make it stop burning?”
“Well, the first thing would be to turn the heat down.”
He turned the heat down, but the garlic kept smoking.
Greg stared at the pan, then looked at Claire, then back at the pan.
And then his face did something she hadn’t seen in decades, decades.
He looked actually sheepish, but endearingly so, like a man who had just discovered that cooking was harder than it looked and was very embarrassed to be discovering it at 52 years old.
“I watched a video,” he said, “on my phone. It said stir-fry was easy.”
“Who said stir-fry was easy?”
“I don’t know, a man on YouTube who had a very convincing voice.”
Claire looked at the stove. The garlic was basically charcoal. The chicken was completely raw, and the vegetables were sitting on the counter in a bag, still uncut. The rice cooker wasn’t plugged in. It was, by every measurable standard, a complete disaster.
She started laughing. It wasn’t the polite laugh that she’d perfected over years of parent-teacher conferences or the careful laugh she used when Greg said something that wasn’t funny but needed to be acknowledged.
It was a real laugh from her belly, the kind that made her bend over and made her eyes water, because here was her husband, who hadn’t cooked a meal in their twenty-six-year marriage, standing at the stove with burnt garlic and a YouTube education and a baffled expression of a man who had decided at least to try.
“Hey, I’m trying here!”
She waved her hand as she bent over, laughing. “I know. I’m so sorry! I just can’t stop laughing…”
He watched her laugh, and then he started laughing, too.
The kitchen smelled terrible, the stir-fry was ruined, and neither of them seemed to care because they were in the kitchen laughing together for the first time in longer than either of them could remember.
“Pizza?” Claire said, wiping her eyes.
“Pizza,” Greg agreed.
They ordered pizza and ate it at the kitchen table, not in the den, and Greg asked her about the painting class she had coming up.
Claire told him, and he had listened. He didn’t check his phone.
He didn’t look toward the den. He sat across from her, ate pizza, and listened to his wife talk about watercolors.
It wasn’t perfect or easy, but it was the best dinner they’d had in years.
Harper brought Jordan to Beaufort on a Saturday afternoon.
Claire had been preparing for this the way she prepared for everything, very thoroughly.
She’d cleaned the house, made Greg promise to wear a shirt that actually had buttons, and baked a pound cake, because pound cake was her answer to every occasion. There was no reason to stop now.
Nina drove from Edisto with a bottle of wine and Elena’s empanadas, which Elena had insisted on contributing, because Elena was incapable of allowing a social gathering to occur without her food being present.
Jordan arrived driving Harper’s vehicle, which was a big deal because Harper never let anyone else drive, and she had apparently decided that she could ride shotgun as long as Jordan was the person driving the car.
He unfolded himself from the car because he was tall.
He had broad shoulders, brown hair with some gray at the temples.
His face was handsome. He wore jeans and a blue button-down, with his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, and the kind of tan that came from working outside.
He shook Claire’s hand on the porch. His grip was warm and firm, and he looked her in the eye, which was a plus for Claire.
“Claire, I’ve heard so much about you that I feel like I should apologize for how long it took me to get here.”
“Well, that’s all Harper’s fault,” Claire said.
“It is entirely Harper’s fault,” he agreed, a quirk of a smile on his face as Harper stood behind him rolling her eyes.
Greg emerged from the house, as promised, wearing a buttoned shirt, and shook Jordan’s hand.
“You build furniture?” he said.
Within fifteen minutes, they were on the back porch talking about wood grain. Claire watched Greg lean forward in his chair with the kind of interest she hadn’t seen from him in years outside of a Braves game. She thought to herself, there you are. I forgot you could do that.
Then Nina arrived, and the evening started to take shape. The porch, the wine, and the empanadas that disappeared in twelve minutes because Elena’s empanadas were addictive.
Jordan fit into their group like a missing piece fits into a puzzle.
He was easy. He laughed at the right moments and listened at the right moments.
He told a story about the time Harper locked her keys in the car outside his workshop and then refused to call AAA because she was convinced she could break into her own vehicle using a YouTube tutorial.
Turned out she could not, and Jordan had to cut a spare key from the one she had given him two years earlier.
“You kept my key?” Harper said. She was genuinely surprised.
“I kept everything,” Jordan said.
Harper looked at him. Claire saw it happen. It was the moment Harper let something go. Not everything, of course, not all at once, but a little piece of her wall came down visibly right there in front of everyone.
Harper leaned into Jordan’s shoulder, and Nina caught Claire’s eye across the porch. The look between them lasted only a split second, but contained thirty years of friendship, and the joy of watching someone you love finally stop running from happiness.