“You did that too.”
“When’s the last time you did that? Kept going when something was hard instead of just trying to make it look easy?” Nina asked.
Nobody answered because the answer was it had been a long time, and everybody knew it.
Claire’s phone buzzed.
Greg.
She looked at the screen for a moment, his name staring up at her. She thought about the kitchen, the onions, and your little club, and I just miss you.
She thought about the way he’d walked back to the den, like the conversation was over when it really hadn’t even begun.
She put her phone in her pocket without answering. Harper noticed it. Nina noticed it too, but neither said anything.
“So who picks month five?” Claire asked, because changing the subject was another skill that she had perfected over the years.
“Harper,” Nina said. “We’re back on track now.” Truth be told, they weren’t holding tight to the rotation. They would do what was right for each of them to get what they needed from the whole experience.
Harper smiled. She had already decided something. “I have an idea.”
“Oh gosh, that smile terrifies me,” Claire said.
“Good, because that’s rule number one. We’re supposed to be a little terrified.”
They sat on the bench for a while longer, the three of them, as Charleston moved around them in its beautiful, unhurried way.
Claire’s phone buzzed again in her pocket. She let it ring.
On the drive home, alone in her car on the road to Beaufort, she looked at the marsh off in the distance and pulled into a gas station parking lot to open her sketchbook.
The one she’d taken off the shelf after karaoke night and the one that she’d been carrying in her bag for weeks without telling anyone, like her own little secret, just a small rebellion tucked between her wallet and car keys.
She drew the climbing wall, not from the bottom looking up the way that it had terrified her at first, but from the top looking down.
It was a perspective that she’d earned.
It wasn’t good. The proportions were way off, and the shading looked clumsy.
It looked like something a talented child might produce, but not like a woman who had once spent entire nights in the College of Charleston art building because she just couldn’t stop painting.
But she didn’t care.
She tore out the page, put it on the passenger seat, and drove home with the windows down and the radio blaring, the marsh air filling her car.
She didn’t check her phone until she pulled into the driveway. Greg had texted twice.
When will you be home?
Then an hour later:
Picking up pizza. What do you want on yours?
She texted back:
I don’t care.
Then she folded the drawing, put it in the glove box, and it stayed there hidden and safe, a small piece of who she was becoming tucked inside the car that drove her back and forth between the life she had and the life she was starting to want.
