“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?”
