Now, she thought, here, there’s a crack in the wall, small but real.
“Are you happy?” Wren asked.
“Yes,” Harper said, surprising herself in the process.
The women walked through Savannah afterward, their ankles and wrists bandaged and tender. They felt like they’d gotten away with something. Of course, Savannah had that effect on people. The city felt like a co-conspirator with its hidden gardens and slow pace.
They bought ice cream from a shop on Broughton Street, sat on a bench in Monterey Square, and watched the tourists take photographs of an oak tree from fifteen different angles.
“You know, I just realized,” Claire said, licking her cone, “that I’m a fifty-year-old woman sitting on a park bench in Savannah eating ice cream with a fresh tattoo on my ankle. If you had told me this about six months ago, I would have asked you to call a mental health professional.”
“Six months ago, you were reorganizing your pantry for fun,” Harper said.
“Well, the pantry was very disorganized.”
“The pantry was alphabetical, Claire. Then, you organized it by food group.”
“Alphabetical was an intermediate step in the process. Food group was supposed to be the final form all along.”
Nina was quiet, turning her wrist and looking at the bandage. She hadn’t said a whole lot since leaving the parlor.
“So, what are you going to tell Elena?” Claire asked her.
“Nothing. She’ll just see it, and she’ll have her opinions, and I’ll let her have them.”
“Elena’s opinions could fill an entire stadium.”
“Elena’s opinions could fill a stadium, a parking lot, and the surrounding neighborhoods.” Nina paused. “She’ll like that I put the initials, but she’ll pretend that she doesn’t. She’ll say that marking your skin is not how we honor people in her family, and then she’ll go home, cry about it in private, and the next time I see her, she’ll pretend none of it happened.”
“That’s a very specific prediction,” Harper said, licking her ice cream cone.
“Listen, I’ve known this woman for years. She’s nothing if not consistent.”
The sun was starting to drop toward the rooftops, turning the sky a shade of peach that Savannah did better than anywhere else. A horse-drawn carriage clopped past, driven by a man wearing a top hat, who looked like he was genuinely enjoying his job.
The moss swayed in the trees, and the air smelled like jasmine and somehow old brick, if old brick had a smell. There was the faint, salty smell of the river a few blocks away.
Harper looked at her wrist. The bandage was white against her too-pale skin, and beneath it lay something she could never take back. She was surprised to find this feeling didn’t produce anxiety, but something more along the lines of peace.
She had marked herself. She had chosen something permanent in a life that she’d built entirely on keeping her options open.
“I need to tell you both something,” Harper said.
Claire and Nina looked at her, their ice cream starting to melt, Savannah glowing around them. They waited for Harper to say whatever it was she was about to say.
“I called Jordan back,” she said. “Two weeks ago, actually, after the polar plunge.”
Claire’s ice cream stopped halfway to her mouth.
“You did?”
“Yeah, I called him from my car in the parking garage at work. I sat there for twenty minutes first, which I know is ironic because we’ve been working on Nina’s habit of sitting in parking lots, but apparently it’s contagious.”
“Well, what did he say?” Nina asked.
Harper looked at the square. A couple was walking through it, holding hands, and a child chased a pigeon. It was funny how so many people had their own lives going at the same time, and they were all so different.
“He said, I was hoping you’d call, and then he asked how I was, and I said I was fine. And he said, Harper, how are you, really? You know, nobody ever asks me that. Nobody in my entire life asks me that except you two and maybe this man who builds rocking chairs and still remembers how I take my coffee after four years.”
