“Greg won’t go to counseling. I’ve brought it up twice over the last few years. He says we’re fine.”
“You’re sleeping in separate rooms.”
“He’ll say it’s because I’m going through a phase or something equally ridiculous. I don’t know. Maybe I am going through a phase.”
Harper made a sound close to the one she made in board meetings when someone said something so wrong it didn’t even deserve a response.
“It’s not a phase,” Claire said quietly, being honest with them and herself. “I am the most awake I’ve been in over twenty years. That’s not a phase. That’s a wake-up call.”
The pines thickened before them. The mountains appeared in the distance, blue and layered, getting closer.
“You don’t have to decide anything right now,” Nina said. “You just have to keep being honest with yourself and with us, even with Greg if he’ll listen.”
“And what if he won’t?”
“Well, then you’ll know something from that, too. Life is about data. Facts. You make decisions when you have enough of both. You’ll know when you know,” Harper said in her most business-like voice.
Claire nodded.
She didn’t say anything else for a few miles, and Nina let the silence hold them as the mountains got closer.
They stopped for lunch at a little diner outside Hendersonville that looked like it hadn’t changed one bit since 1974.
Wood paneling, vinyl booths that had seen better days, a jukebox in the corner that worked, playing a Dolly Parton song at a volume that suggested the owner believed Dolly deserved to be heard by the entire building and possibly the county.
The menu was laminated and included a section titled “Juanita’s Favorites,” which they assumed referred to the owner and turned out to refer to the cook, a woman in her 70s who came out of the kitchen to personally deliver their fried chicken and ask where they were from.
“The Lowcountry,” Claire said.
“All three of you?” Juanita looked them over.
“College friends,” Nina said. “We’ve known each other for thirty years.”
“Thirty years?” Juanita shook her head. “You know what keeps friendship alive that long?”
“What?” Harper asked.
“Minding your business when you need to and not minding it when you shouldn’t.” She put down a basket of biscuits that hadn’t been asked for. “You’re on a trip?”
“Yeah, road trip,” Claire said. “Asheville.”
“What for?”
The three of them looked at each other. The answer was complicated.
A napkin, a pact, twelve adventures, a dead husband, a dying marriage, a man who built rocking chairs, a fifty-year-old woman who had just started drawing again after twenty-seven years.
The answer was an entire book in and of itself.
“We made a deal to do one scary thing a month for a year,” Nina said. “This month is a road trip.”
Juanita looked at them. She let out a big belly laugh that filled the whole diner.
“Honey, that’s the best thing I’ve heard all week. I’m seventy-three and still try to do one scary thing a month. Last month, I went on a date with a man from my church. First date in eleven years.”
“Well, how was it?” Harper asked.
“Terrible. That man talked about his prostate for forty-five minutes, but I got through it. The next one will be better, or maybe it won’t, but at least I’m in the game.” She tapped the table twice. “Y’all eat. Biscuits are on the house. Anybody doing what you’re doing deserves free biscuits.”
