CHAPTER 1
Claire had changed the napkin color at least four times, and that number was probably a bit lower than the actual count. It was best not to count, or else she might think she was losing what little was left of her mind.
The first choice was coral, because it looked elegant in Pinterest photos, but it arrived looking like raw salmon. Definitely not a sophisticated salmon, more like a cafeteria salmon. The kind served on a Styrofoam plate with a little piece of parsley that had given up on life.
The kind you’d find at a hospital just before being admitted for food poisoning, a few hours after eating it.
The kind she would imagine someone would eat in prison. Wait? Did they get salmon in prison? Unlikely.
She had returned those napkins and then ordered sage green, a color she often loved. But Greg said it made the table look like a hospital. It was the most he had said to her in three days, so at least that was a win. His vocal cords had apparently not locked up after all.
Her third choice was ivory, but ivory napkins on a white tablecloth looked dirty, and Claire Morrison was not going to have a dirty table. She was turning fifty. This was an important time, and the table needed to rise to the occasion.
She finally settled on dusty rose. Nobody would notice or even comment on them, which pretty much summed up the last decade of her life. These were the kinds of things that mattered only to Claire. Sadly, the most important thing she would give herself on this monumental birthday was dusty rose napkins. Yay.
The house smelled of the mouth-watering rosemary chicken she had made and the lemon pound cake she had been baking since noon, because she knew Nina’s favorite bakery on Bay Street had closed eight months earlier.
Nobody made pound cake the way they did, except for Claire, who had called the bakery’s former owner to ask for the recipe. They told her it was a family secret, and she spent three weekends reverse-engineering it from memory and using a YouTube tutorial, but she did not need to tell anyone about that part.
She had not told Nina she was even baking the cake, just in case it didn’t turn out well. But Nina needed something to make her smile, and Claire hoped this would do it.
The guest bathroom had been cleaned twice because once simply wasn’t enough. The fancy soap shaped like a magnolia blossom sat in its little dish, smelling like someone’s rich grandmother. She wished she were the rich grandmother. Or a grandmother at all.
The truth was, even though she had two grown children, she hardly saw them these days. Her son Adam lived in Germany with his new wife, and her daughter Molly lived in California. They were chasing life, like she once did, but she wished they were closer and stayed in touch more.
Three bottles of wine sat on the kitchen counter because Claire was not sure whether this was a two- or a three-bottle night. With her friends, it was often a three-bottle night.
Turning fifty with your two best friends while your husband sat in the next room, acting as if you had personally offended him by simply continuing to exist on the planet, seemed like it could go either way.
Greg was sitting in the den.
Greg was always sitting in the den.
If Claire died tomorrow, the paramedics would find Greg sitting in the den, watching something on his laptop with his earbuds in, the recliner engaged, completely unaware that his wife had ceased to be alive in the next room. He might notice by dinnertime if there was no food on the table. Maybe.
He had wished her happy birthday that morning in the same way that he confirmed dentist appointments. He acknowledged it, noted it, and then moved on. One more thing checked off his list. Root canal, check! Wife turns fifty, check!
Twenty-six years of marriage, and the man had given her a gift card. And it wasn’t even a specific gift card, like the ones you’d give to someone you actually knew. Nope, it was one of those universal cards that you could use in any store, whether it was the dollar store or the department store.
It seemed choosing an actual retailer would require more thought about her than he was willing to invest in her fiftieth year on earth.
How exciting that she could now go to the grocery store and buy toilet paper with her brand-new, shiny gift card. Wasn’t she the luckiest woman in town?
She had smiled and thanked him, of course, and then put it in the junk drawer next to the scissors that no longer cut anything and the batteries that were probably dead.
She positioned the dahlia stem in the Mason jar that she had wrapped with twine because she saw it on Pinterest and thought it looked charming. It did look charming.
Everything Claire touched looked charming.
She had a gift for that, making things beautiful for others as she slowly disappeared. For Claire, life felt like a big hole in the floor, swallowing her up bit by bit while no one noticed. Or cared.
“You know,” Greg said from the doorway. She was so startled by his rare presence in the kitchen during baseball hours that it felt like she was looking at wildlife. “You could just take them out to dinner. Keep it simple.”
Claire put another dahlia stem into the Mason jar and counted to three in her mind. She had learned years earlier that the first thing she wanted to say to her husband was probably not the best.
The first thing in this case would have been: When was the last time you made anything simple for me? Don’t you like to make life harder for me?
Or maybe she would’ve said, Hey, gift card guy, why don’t you just shut your mouth and go away?
